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J0JI81 S. KiClHIHE, Ellin l> [Hcl 

^ ENCYCLOPEDIA Of THE 




JHEONLY THING WE HAVE 
£Oj FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 

V]REAT 
EPRESSION 



EDITORIAL BOARD 



EDITOR IN CHIEF 

Robert S. McElvaine 
Millsaps College 

ASSOCIATE EDITORS 

Tony Badger 
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University 

Roger Biles 
East Carolina University 

Patricia Sullivan 

University of South Carolina 

W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University 

Joe W. Trotter 
Carnegie Mellon University 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 

UREAT 
EPRESSION 




VOLUME 1: A-K 



ROBERT S. McELVAINE 

EDITOR IN CHIEF 



MACMILLAN 
REFERENCE 
USA™ 



THOMSON 

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GALE 



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Encyclopedia of The Great Depression 

Robert S. McElvaine, Editor in Chief 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA 

Encyclopedia of the Great Depression / Robert McElvaine, editor in chief, 
p. cm. 

Includes bibliographical references and index. 
ISBN 0-02-865686-5 (set : hardcover)— ISBN 0-02-865687-3 (v. 1)— 
ISBN 0-02-865688-1 (v. 2) 

1. United States— History— 1933-1945— Encyclopedias. 2. United 
States— History— 1919-1933— Encyclopedias. 3. United States- 
Economic Conditions — 1918-1945 — Encyclopedias. 4. Depressions- 
1929— United States— Encyclopedias. 5. New Deal, 1933-1939— 
Encyclopedias. I. McElvaine, Robert S., 1947- 

E806.E63 2004 
973.91'6'03— dc21 
2003010292 



This title is also available as an e-book. 
ISBN 0-02-865908-2 

Contact your Gale sales representative for ordering information. 



Printed in the United States of America 
109876 5432 1 



For Larry Levine, Bill Leuchtenburg, 

Arthur Schlesinger, and Studs Terkel. 

Sources of inspiration, 

students of the Great Depression, 

and friends. 



CONTENTS 



Preface ix 

List of Articles xiii 

List of Contributors xxix 

Outline of Contents xlv 

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 1 

Timeline 1079 

Index 1083 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA E E H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



PREFACE 



The Great Depression, the worldwide economic 
collapse that began in 1929 and ended only well 
after the outbreak of World War II a decade later, 
remains a topic of widespread fascination. There are 
several reasons for such continuing interest. Among 
them is the fact that the experience was seared into 
the lives, memories, and outlooks of an entire gen- 
eration, coloring its members' views of their subse- 
quent experiences. Another reason for the intense 
interest in the Depression is that it seemed to con- 
tradict the expectations of most Americans and 
their experiences of relative prosperity throughout 
most of the time since. Then there is the era's defi- 
ance of the modern trend toward individualism and 
the identification of personal well-being with 
material consumption. Those who object to the 
modern rush toward ever greater selfishness and 
self-indulgence are drawn to the alternate visions 
of co-operation and rejection of consumerism evi- 
dent in the Great Depression. 

There are also the facts that the modern presi- 
dency emerged, the role of the federal government 
as a major force in citizens' lives was established, 
the partial welfare state was begun, and the politi- 
cal realignment that remained dominant for much 
of the remainder of the century was forged during 
the Great Depression. 

Perhaps most of all, however, the Great 
Depression continues to be a matter of great inter- 



est because so many people remain uncertain about 
the economic prospects in their own times. Anyone 
who is at least vaguely aware that this massive eco- 
nomic collapse was preceded by a period of 
unprecedented prosperity in the 1920s is apt to ask 
the question: "If it happened once, can it happen 
again?" Whenever the unemployment rate raises 
sharply, as it did in the early 1980s, or the stock 
market plunges, as it did in 1987 and again, in a 
much more prolonged slide, between 2001 and 
2003, those of us who specialize in the era of the 
Great Depression are asked to comment in the 
popular media on whether another depression 
might be coming. The fear that "hard times" could 
return has never completely vanished, and this con- 
cern stimulates continuing interest in the events of 
the 1920s and 1930s. 

The Great Depression was the worst domestic 
crisis the United States faced in the twentieth cen- 
tury and the second worst, after the Civil War, in 
American history. However, it was by no means 
confined to the United States. Rather, the econom- 
ic collapse became a global phenomenon. The 
worldwide ramifications of the Depression consti- 
tute another major reason for contemporary inter- 
est in the era. It is widely believed that the worst 
horrors of the twentieth century — the rise to power 
of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi followers, World War II, 
and the Holocaust — would not have happened had 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



IX 



PREFACE 



the economic collapse not provided an opening for 
extremist views to gain credibility. 

As its role in the appeal of dictatorship and 
controlled economies indicates, the Great 
Depression severely tested both democratic politi- 
cal institutions and market-based economies. It 
was the principal achievement of President 
Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs in the 
United States to demonstrate that democratic insti- 
tutions and a slightly modified free market eco- 
nomic system were viable. Indeed, the Great 
Depression can be seen as providing a stage upon 
which Roosevelt and Hitler presented to the world 
sharply contrasting views of the proper way to 
organize and lead societies, polities, and 
economies. That contest was finally to be decided 
under arms in World War II, which in a real sense 
can be seen as the final act — the climax — of the 
Great Depression. 

The 542 articles in the two volumes that consti- 
tute The Encyclopedia of the Great Depression are 
intended to provide the widest audience, both the 
general public and students of history, with accessi- 
ble information and analysis, reflecting the latest 
scholarship, on an extensive variety of topics relat- 
ed to the Great Depression. 

Although the bulk of the articles in this ency- 
clopedia focus on the era of the Great Depression in 
the United States, a substantial number of entries 
address the worldwide dimensions of the econom- 
ic collapse and deal with specific events and figures 
from other parts of the world. 

The Great Depression was, of course, first and 
foremost an economic and, consequently, a social 
phenomenon. As such it brings up images that 
are — well, depressing. But anyone who sees the era 
of the Depression as only grim misses much of its 
flavor and significance. The decade of the 1930s 
was, to be sure, a time of economic hardship that 
was, with the exception of the South during the 
Civil War, unprecedented in American history. But it 
was much more. It was a period of political and 
social innovation. It was also a time of extraordinary 
cultural developments in the new medium of sound 
cinema as well as in art, literature, music, theater, 
and photography. Even a cursory look at the list of 
articles under the heading of "Culture" in the out- 
line of contents should give the reader a sense of 



how diverse, significant, and, in many cases, "un- 
depressing"the cultural aspects of the decade were. 

The Depression decade came to be dominated 
by the personality of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but it 
was also populated by a vast array of other memo- 
rable characters — women as well as men, minori- 
ties as well as whites, international figures as well 
as Americans — from the arts, labor, business, poli- 
tics, government, civil rights, diplomacy, the media, 
religion, academe, the law, social reform, agricul- 
ture, and sports. Biographies of more than two hun- 
dred of these individuals are to be found in the 
pages of this compendium. 

This encyclopedia constitutes the most com- 
prehensive resource available on one of the most 
important periods in our history and one that con- 
tinues to affect us today in ways subtle and not-so- 
subtle. A substantial number of articles in these two 
volumes are, in my opinion, the best short analyses 
of their subjects available in print. In many cases, 
the articles are written by the leading scholars on 
the subject. There is every reason to anticipate that 
this publication will remain the standard reference 
for the era of the Great Depression for many years 
to come. 

There are 542 articles in the Encyclopedia of the 
Great Depression arranged alphabetically for easy 
reference. The articles range in length from 300 to 
5,000 words. Entries are written by 270 scholars 
from around the world, active researchers in histo- 
ry, American studies, economics, social science, 
geography, political science, radio and television, 
literature, and music. Each signed article features 
several carefully chosen cross-references to related 
entries as well as a bibliography of print and inter- 
net resources. A topical outline appears in Volume I, 
just after the alphabetical article list. It groups arti- 
cles by broad categories, thereby offering teachers 
and readers alike an informed map of the field. A 
comprehensive index offers yet another entry point 
for the set, encouraging readers to explore the 
information contained in these two volumes. 

In addition to the fine work of the contributors, 
this project is the result of the great work of my 
associate editors, Roger Biles, Joe Trotter, Tony 
Badger, and Patricia Sullivan, and I thank them all. 
Several people at Macmillan Reference USA and 
the Gale Group have worked on this project over 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF E H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



PREFACE 



the course of its development and helped to assure 
its successful completion. I want to thank Erin 
Bealmear, Joe Clements, Judith Culligan, Jill Lectka, 
and Elly Dickason. 

My parents, Edward and Ruth McElvaine, lived 
through the Great Depression, and their stories first 
sparked my interest in the period and in history in 
general. That interest was carried forward and 
developed by a large number of instructors, schol- 
ars, and writers over the years, including Carl 
Youngman, Warren Susman, Lloyd Gardner, 
Charles Forcey, Richard Dalfiume, Melvyn 
Dubofsky James MacGregor Burns, Frank Freidel, 



Joan Wallach Scott, Susan Ware, Harvard Sitkoff, 
Lizabeth Cohen, Patrick Maney, the four associate 
editors of this encyclopedia, and the four friends 
and sources of inspiration to whom it is dedicated, 
Lawrence W. Levine, William E. Leuchtenburg, 
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Studs Terkel. 

My wonderful family, as always, deserves 
the greatest thanks. Anne is my everything. 
Kerri, Lauren, Allison, Brett, Scott, Evan, and Anna 
add even more to my life, causing it to overflow 
with joy. 

Robert S. McElvaine 
Clinton, Mississippi , August 2003 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST OF ARTICLES 



Abraham Lincoln Brigade 
Cary Nelson 

Adamic, Louis 
Daniel Geary 

Advertising in the Great Depression 
Daniel Pope 

Africa, Great Depression in 
Dietmar Rothermund 

African Americans, Impact of the Great Depression on 
Joe W. Trotter 

Agee, James 

Alan Spiegel 

Agricultural Adjustment Act 
David Hamilton 

Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) 
David Hamilton 

Agriculture 

D. Clayton Brown 

Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) 
Jeff Singleton 

Alabama Sharecroppers' Union 
Mary Jo Binker 

Allen, Frederick Lewis 
David W. Levy 



Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) 
Nancy Quam-Wickham 

American Exodus, An 
Kate Sampsell 

American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) 
Kimberly K. Porter 

American Federation of Labor (AFL) 
Frank A. Salamone 

American Guide Series 
Trent A. Watts 

American Labor Party 
John J. Simon 

American Liberty League 
Robert Burk 

American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) 
Harvard Sitkoff 

American Scene, The 
Stuart Kidd 

American Student Union 
Robert Cohen 

American Youth Congress 
Robert Cohen 

Ameringer, Oscar 
Linda Reese 

Ames, Jesse Daniel 
Sarah E. Gardner 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XIII 



LIST 



F 



T I C L E S 



Amos 'n' Andy 

Melvin Patrick Ely 

Anderson, Marian 
Mary L. Nash 

Anderson, Sherwood 
Kim Townsend 

Anticommunism 

M. J. Heale 

Anti-lynching Legislation 
Robert L. Zangrando 

Anti-Semitism 

Barbara S. Burstin 

Appalachia, Impact of the Great Depression on 
Jerry Bruce Thomas 

Architecture 

Sara A. Butler 

Armstrong, Louis 

William R. Bettler 

Arnold, Thurman 
William J. Barber 

Art 

Jonathan Harris 

Arthurdale, West Virginia 
Stuart Keith Patterson 

Asia, Great Depression in 
Dietmar Rothermund 

Asian Americans, Impact of the Great Depression on 
Kornel S. Chang 

Association Against the Prohibition Amendment 
(AAPA) 

Ellis W. Hawley 

Australia and Neio Zealand, Great Depression in 
Stuart Macintyre 



B 

Back-to-the-Land Movement 
Stuart Keith Patterson 

Bakke, E. Wight 
Alice O'Connor 



"Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd" 
Mary L. Nash 

Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937 
Paul E. Mertz 

Banking Panics (1930-1933) 

Elmus Wicker 

Baruch, Bernard 
Larry G. Gerber 

Bauer, Catherine 
John F. Bauman 

Berkeley, Busby 
Daniel J. Leab 

Berle, Adolf A., Jr. 
Stuart Kidd 

Bethune, Mary McLeod 
Harvard Sitkoff 

Biddle, Francis 

Christopher W. Schmidt 

Big Band Music 

Bradford W. Wright 

Bilbo, Theodore 

Chester M. Morgan 

Black, Hugo 

Mark Tushnet 

Black Cabinet 
John B. Kirby 

Black Legion 

John E. Miller 

Black Metropolis 

Vernon J. Williams, Jr. 

Black Thirty-Hour Bill 
Stuart Kidd 

Bonnie and Clyde (Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow) 
Laura Browder 

Bonus Army/Bonus March 
Roger Daniels 

Boondoggle 

June Hopkins 

Borah, William 

Leonard Schlup 

Boulder Dam 

Todd J. Pfannestiel 



XIV 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



ARTICLES 



Bonrke-White, Margaret 
Harvard Sitkoff 

Boy and Girl Tramps of America 
Errol Lincoln Uys 

Brain(s) Trust 

Michael V. Namorato 

Brandeis, Louis D. 
David W. Levy 

Breadlines 

Kim Richardson 

Bridges, Harry 

Robert Francis Saxe 

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" 
Philip Furia 

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) 
Beth Tompkins Bates 

Browder, Earl 

James G. Ryan 

Bunche, Ralph 

Jonathan Scott Holloway 

Businessmen 

Jason Scott Smith 

Byrd, Harry 

Larissa M. Smith 

Byrnes, James F. 

Henry C. Ferrell, Jr. 



Cagney, James 

Peter C. Holloran 

Cahill, Holger 
Stuart Kidd 

Caldwell, Erskine 
Joseph Entin 

Canada, Great Depression in 
John M. Bumsted 

Capone, Al 

Douglas Bukowski 



Capra, Frank 

Benjamin L. Alpers 

Cardozo, Benjamin N. 
Sean J. Savage 

Cartoons, Political 

William Arthur Atkins 

Caste and Class 

Alice O'Connor 

Causes of the Great Depression 
Robert S. McElvaine 

Cermak, Anton 

Douglas Bukowski 

Chandler, Raymond 
Austin Wilson 

Chaplin, Charlie 

Charles J. Maland 

Charity 

Michael Reisch 

Chavez, Dennis 

Caryn E. Neumann 

Children and Adolescents, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 

Kriste Lindenmeyer 

Cities and Suburbs 

Bonnie Fox Schwartz 
Joel Schwartz 

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) 
John A. Salmond 

Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 
Paul T. Murray 

Civil Works Administration (CWA) 
Jeff Singleton 

Class 

Kathy Mapes 

Cohen, Benjamin V. 

Michael V. Namorato 

Collective Bargaining 
Gregory Miller 

Collier, John 

Leonard Schlup 

Comics 

Bradford W. Wright 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



xv 



LIST 



F 



T I C L E S 



Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) 
Lawrence J. Nelson 

Communications Act of 1934 
Barry Dean Karl 

Communications and the Press 
Gregory W. Bush 

Communist Party 
Gwen Moore 

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 
Daniel Clark 

Conservation Movement 
Sara M. Gregg 

Conservative Coalition 
Robert Burk 

Consumerism 
Meg Jacobs 

Coolidge, Calvin 
Robert Ferrell 

Corcoran, Thomas G. 
Donald A. Ritchie 

Costigan, Edward 
Jonathan W. Bell 

Coughlin, Charles 

Lisa Krissoff Boehm 

Cowley, Malcolm 
Mark C. Smith 

Cradle Will Rock, The 

Martin Halpern 

Crime 

Kim Phillips-Fein 

Culture and the Crisis 
William J. Maxwell 

Cummings, Homer 
Barry Cushman 

Currie, Lauchlin 

Roger J. Sandilands 



Deficit Spending 
Iwan Morgan 

Democratic Party 
Sean J. Savage 

De Priest, Oscar 

Kevin Mumford 

Dewey, Thomas E. 

Susan Estabrook Kennedy 

Deioson, Mary (Molly) 
Laura J. Hilton 

Dictatorship 

J. Simon Rofe 

Dictatorship, Fear of in the United States 
Kim Phillips-Fein 

Disney, Walt 

J. B. Kaufman 

Documentary Film 
George C. Stoney 

Domestic Service 

Bernadette Pruitt 

Don't Buy Where You Can't Work Movement 
BillV. Mullen 

Dos Passos, John 
Daniel Geary 

Douglas, William O. 
Tinsley E.Yarbrough 

Dubinsky, David 
James R. Barrett 

Du Bois, W. E. B. 

David Levering Lewis 

Dust Bowl 

R. Douglas Hurt 



D 



Davis, Chester 

Lawrence J. Nelson 



Earhart, Amelia 
Susan Ware 

Eccles, Marriner 
Peter Fearon 



XVI 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



ARTICLES 



Economists 

William J. Barber 

Economy, American 
Peter Fearon 

Economy Act of 1933 
Iwan Morgan 

Education 

Daryl Webb 

Elderly, Impact of the Great Depression on the 
Ron Goeken 

Election of 1928 

Allan J. Lichtman 

Election of 1930 

Allan J. Lichtman 

Election of 1932 
Elliot A. Rosen 

Election of '1934 

Howard W. Allen 

Election of 1936 

Michael J. Webber 

Election of 1938 

David L. Porter 

Election of 1940 

John W. Jeffries 

Ellington, Duke 

Burton W. Peretti 

Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932 
Jeff Singleton 

Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 
Jeff Singleton 

End Poverty in California (EPIC) 
William J. Billingsley 

Ethiopian War 

Laura J. Hilton 

Europe, Great Depression in 
Patricia Clavin 

Evans, Walker 
Alan Spiegel 

Ezekiel, Mordecai 
David Hamilton 



Fair Labor Standards Act 
Larry G. Gerber 

Family and Home, Impact of the Great Depression on 
Dennis Bryson 

Farley, James A. 
Leonard Schlup 

Farm Credit Administration (FCA) 
Adrienne M. Petty 

Farmers' Holiday Association (FHA) 
Mark Love 

Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) 
Brian Q. Cannon 

Farm Foreclosures 

Adrienne M. Petty 

Farm Policy 

Kim Richardson 

Farm Security Administration (FSA) 
Stuart Kidd 

Fascism 

Martin Halpern 

Father Divine 
Jill Watts 

Faulkner, William 

Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. 

Fauset, Crystal Bird 
Eric Ledell Smith 

Federal Art Project (FAP) 
Jonathan Harris 

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 
Maurine H. Beasley 

Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) 
Brian Q. Cannon 

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 
James S. Olson 

Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) 
Peter Fearon 

Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 
Iwan Morgan 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XVII 



LIST 



F 



T I C L E S 



Federal Music Project (FMP) 
Frank A. Salamone 

Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) 
Eduardo F. Canedo 

Federal One 
Stuart Kidd 

Federal Reserve System 
Peter Fearon 

Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation 
(FSLIC) 

David Eisenbach 

Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation (FSCC) 
Sara M. Gregg 

Federal Theatre Project (FTP) 
Gregory W. Bush 

Federal Writers' Project (FWP) 
BillV. Mullen 

Fireside Chats 

David W. Levy 

Fish, Hamilton 

Justus D. Doenecke 

Flanagan, Hallie 

Caryn E. Neumann 

Flynn, Edward J. 

Caryn E. Neumann 

Folklorists 

Jerrold Hirsch 

Ford, Henry 

Michael French 

Ford, John 

Charles J. Maland 

Foreman, Clark 

Patricia Sullivan 

Foster, William Z. 
Gwen Moore 

Frank, Jerome 

Lawrence J. Nelson 

Frankfurter, Felix 

Tinsley E.Yarbrough 

Freaks 

Gary D. Rhodes 



Gabriel Over the White House 
Michael B. Stoff 

Gangster Films 
Luca Prono 

Garner, John Nance 
Nancy Beck Young 

Gastonia, North Carolina 
John A. Salmond 

Gays and Lesbians, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 
James Polchin 

Gellhorn, Martha 
Laura J. Hilton 

Gender Roles and Sexual Relations, Impact of the 
Great Depression on 

Robert S. McElvaine 

Gershwin, George and Ira 
Natoma N. Noble 

Glass, Carter 

Larissa M. Smith 

Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 
Michael French 

Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 
James S. Olson 

Gold Diggers of 1933 

Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw 

Golden Gate International Exposition (1939-1940) 
Blanche M. G. Linden 

Gold Standard 
Patricia Clavin 

Gone with the Wind 

Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw 

Goodman, Benny 
Burton W. Peretti 

Good Neighbor Policy 
Joseph Smith 

Government, United States Federal, Impact of the 
Great Depression on 
Paul B.Trescott 



XVI 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



ARTICLES 



Governments, State, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 

William Arthur Atkins 

Grand Coulee Project 
James Stripes 

Grapes of Wrath, The 
David W. Levy 

Grassroots Democracy 
G. Wayne Dowdy 

Green, William 
Craig Phelan 

Greenbelt Towns 

Cathy D. Knepper 

Guffey-Snyder Act of 1935 
John Kennedy Ohl 

Guffey-Vinson Act of 1937 
John Kennedy Ohl 

Guthrie, Woody 

Bradford W. Wright 



H 

Hague, Frank 

J. Christopher Schnell 

Hammett, Dashiell 
Sean McCann 

Hansen, Alvin 

Patrick D. Reagan 

"Happy Days Are Here Again' 
Philip Furia 

Hard-Boiled Detectives 
Sean McCann 

Harlan County 

Kim Phillips-Fein 

Harlem Riot (1935) 
Paul T. Murray 

Harrison, Byron "Pat" 
Martha H. Swain 

Hatch Act of 1939 
David L. Porter 



Hazoley-Smoot Tariff 
Michael French 

Health and Nutrition 
Gerald Markowitz 

Hearst, William Randolph 
David Nasaw 

Hellman, Lillian 

Michael T. Van Dyke 

Henderson, Leon 
Iwan Morgan 

Herndon, Angelo, Case 
Charles Martin 

Heroes 

Bradford W. Wright 

Hickok, Lorena 

Allida M. Black 

Highlander Folk School 
John M. Glen 

Hillman, Sidney 

Nancy Quam-Wickham 

Hine, Lewis 

Blanche M. G. Linden 

History, Interpretation, and Memory of the Great 
Depression 

Trent A. Watts 

Hitler, Adolf 

Patricia Clavin 

Holiday, Billie 
Mary L. Nash 

Hollyioood and the Film Industry 
Bradford W. Wright 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. 
Tinsley E.Yarbrough 

Homelessness 

Yael Schacher 

Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) 
A. Scott Henderson 

Hoover, Herbert 

Susan Estabrook Kennedy 

Hoover, J. Edgar 

Kenneth O'Reilly 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XIX 



LIST 



F 



T I C L E S 



Hoover, Lou Henry 

Susan Estabrook Kennedy 

Hopkins, Harry 
June Hopkins 

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 
M. J. Heale 

Housing 

Kristin Szylvian 

Houston, Charles 

Genna Rae McNeil 

Howard University 

Jonathan Scott Holloway 

Howe, Louis McHenry 
Alfred B. Rollins Jr. 

Hughes, Charles Evans 
Tinsley E.Yarbrough 

Hughes, Langston 

Arnold Rampersad 

Hull, Cor dell 

David B. Woolner 

Humor 

Joseph Boskin 

Hundred Days 
Tony Badger 

Hunger Marches 
Martin Halpern 

Hurston, Zora Neale 
Emily Bernard 



I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang 
Robert S. McElvaine 

Ickes, Harold 

Michael V. Namorato 

Income Distribution 
Kim Phillips-Fein 

Indian New Deal 

Donald L. Parman 



Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 
Donald L. Parman 

Individualism 

Benjamin K. Hunnicutt 

Industry, Effects of the Great Depression on 
Michael French 

Insull, Samuel 

Douglas Bukowski 

International Impact of the Great Depression 
Peter Fearon 

International Labor Defense (ILD) 
Gwen Moore 

International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union 
(ILGWU) 

John T. Cumbler 

International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) 
Bruce Nelson 

Isolationism 

Justus D. Doenecke 



J 



Jackson, Robert 
Mark Tushnet 

Jazz 

Douglas Henry Daniels 

Johnson, Hugh 

John Kennedy Ohl 

Johnson, Lyndon B. 
Nancy Beck Young 

Joint Committee for National Recovery (JCNR) 
Jonathan Scott Holloway 

Jones, Jesse 

James S. Olson 



K 

Kaiser, Henry 

Michael French 



xx 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



ARTICLES 



Kennedy, Joseph P. 
Jon Herbert 

Kerr, Florence 

Martha H. Swain 

Keynes, John Maynard 
Dean L. May 

Keynesian Economics 
Dean L. May 

Keyserling, Leon 
Meg Jacobs 

Kristallnacht 

Laura J. Hilton 



Labor's Non-Partisan League 
James S. Olson 

La Follette, Philip 
John E. Miller 

La Follette, Robert M., Jr. 
John E. Miller 

La Follette Civil Liberties Committee 
John E. Miller 

La Guardia, Fiorello H. 
Barbara Blumberg 

Laissez-Faire 

Iwan Morgan 

London, Alfred M. 
Michael J. Webber 

Land Use Planning 
Jess Gilbert 

Lange, Dorothea 
Linda Gordon 

Latin America, Great Depression in 

Joseph Smith 

Latino Americans, Impact of the Great Depression on 
Allison Brownell Tirres 

Law Enforcement 

William Arthur Atkins 



League for Independent Political Action 
John Sillito 

Legal Profession 
Mark Tushnet 

LeHand, Marguerite (Missy) 
Mary Jo Binker 

Lehman, Herbert 
Robert P. Ingalls 

Leisure 

William H.Young 

Lewis, John L. 
Craig Phelan 

Lindbergh, Charles 

Liesl Miller Orenic 

Literature 

Sean McCann 

Little Caesar 

Robert S. McElvaine 

Little Steel Strike 

Eduardo F. Canedo 

Lomax, Alan 

J. Marshall Bevil 

London Economic Conference of 1933 
Patricia Clavin 

Long, Huey P. 

Glen Jeansonne 

Louis, Joe 

David K. Wiggins 

Luce, Henry 

Maurine H. Beasley 

Lynchings 

Michael J. Pfeifer 



M 



Marcantonio, Vito 
John J. Simon 

Marx Brothers 

John Parris Springer 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XXI 



LIST 



F 



T I C L E S 



Marxism 

Paul Buhle 

Mason, Lucy Randolph 
Larissa M. Smith 

Maverick, Maury 

Nancy Beck Young 

McWilliams, Carey 
Daniel Geary 

Means, Gardiner C. 
Patrick D. Reagan 

Mellon, Andrew 

Susan Estabrook Kennedy 

Memorial Day Massacre 
Irwin M. Marcus 

Men, Impact of the Great Depression on 
Robert S. McElvaine 

Mencken, H. L. 

Charles A. Fecher 

Mexico, Great Depression in 
Marcos T. Aguila 

Micheaux, Oscar 
Thomas Cripps 

Middletown in Transition 
Paul T. Murray 

Midwest, Great Depression in the 
Ellis W. Hawley 

Migration 

Maurine H. Beasley 

Migratory Workers 
Kathy Mapes 

Military: United States Army 
Henry C. Ferrell, Jr. 

Military: United States Navy 
Henry C. Ferrell, Jr. 

Mills, Ogden 

William J. Barber 

Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party 
Richard M.Valelly 

Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada 
Denton L. Watson 



Mitchell, Arthur W. 

Christopher E. Manning 

Moley, Raymond 

Michael V. Namorato 

Monetary Policy 

William J. Barber 

Monopoly (Board Game) 
Philip E. Orbanes 

Morgan, J. P., Jr. 
James G. Lewis 

Morgenthau, Henry T., Jr. 
Dean L. May 

Moses, Robert 

Michael T. Van Dyke 

Moskoioitz, Belle 

Elisabeth Israels Perry 

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 
Daniel J. Leab 

Mumford, Lewis 
John F. Bauman 

Murphy, Frank 
Sidney Fine 

Murray, Philip 

Andrew A. Workman 

Museums, Art 

Blanche M. G. Linden 

Museums and Monuments, Historic 
Blanche M. G. Linden 

Music 

Natoma N. Noble 

Mussolini, Benito 
Patricia Clavin 

Muste, A. J. 

David W. Levy 



N 



National Association for the Advancement of Colored 
People (NAACP) 

Denton L. Watson 



XXI 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



ARTICLES 



National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) 
Jason Scott Smith 

National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax 
Patricia Sullivan 

National Farmers Union (NFU) 
Kathy Mapes 

National Housing Act of 1934 
Iwan Morgan 

National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) 
John Kennedy Ohl 

National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act) 
Larry G. Gerber 

National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) 
Vernon J. Williams, Jr. 

National Lawyers Guild 
Ann Fagan Ginger 

National Negro Congress 
Kenneth O'Reilly 

National Recovery Administration (NRA) 
John Kennedy Ohl 

National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) 
Patrick D. Reagan 

National Urban League 
Richard W. Thomas 

National Women's Party 
Blanche M. G. Linden 

National Youth Administration (NYA) 
John A. Salmond 

Native Americans, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 

Donald A. Grinde, Jr. 

Nazi-Soviet Pact 
James G. Ryan 

New Deal 

Tony Badger 

New Deal, Second 
John W. Jeffries 

New Deal, Third 
John W. Jeffries 

Neio Masses 

James Smethurst 



New York World's Fair (1939-1940) 
Isadora Anderson Helfgott 

Niebuhr, Reinhold 

Richard Wightman Fox 

Norris, George 

Richard Lowitt 

Norris-La Guardia Act 
Larry G. Gerber 

Northeast, Great Depression in the 
Bob Batchelor 



o 

Odum, Howard 
Mark C. Smith 

Okies 

William H. Mullins 

Old-Age Insurance 
Steven B. Burg 

Olson, Floyd B. 

Edward A. Goedeken 

Olympics, Berlin (1936) 
Steven A. Riess 

Organized Labor 

Eduardo F. Canedo 

Our Daily Bread 
Daniel J. Leab 

Owens, Jesse 

William J. Baker 



Patman, Wright 

Nancy Beck Young 

Peace Movement 
Martin Halpern 

Pecora, Ferdinand 
Donald A. Ritchie 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XXIII 



LIST 



F 



T I C L E S 



Pendergast, Tom 

Lawrence H. Larsen 

Pepper, Claude 

Tracy E. Danese 

Perkins, Frances 

Barbara Blumberg 

Philanthropy 

Judith Sealander 

Photography 

Blanche M. G. Linden 

Planning 

Patrick D. Reagan 

Poetry 

James Smethurst 

Political Realignment 
Sean J. Savage 

Popular Front 
BillV. Mullen 

Post Office Murals 
Stuart Kidd 

President's Committee on Social Trends 
Mark C. Smith 

President's Emergency Committee for Employment 
(PECE) 

Jeff Singleton 

President's Organization for Unemployment Relief 
(POUR) 

Jeff Singleton 

Production Code Administration (Hays Office) 
Daniel J. Leab 

Prohibition 

David E. Kyvig 

Prostitution 
Holly Allen 

Psychological Impact of the Great Depression 
Bob Batchelor 

Public Power 

Richard Lowitt 

Public Utilities Holding Company Act 
Donald A. Ritchie 



Public Works Administration (PWA) 
Jeanne Nienaber Clarke 



R 



Race and Ethnic Relations 
Vernon J. Williams, Jr. 

Radio 

Burton W. Peretti 

Randolph, A. Philip 
Paula F. Pfeffer 

Raper, Arthur 

Clifford M. Kuhn 

Raskob, John J. 
Douglas Craig 

Recession of 1937 
Dean L. May 

Reciprocal Trade Agreements 
David B. Woolner 

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) 
James S. Olson 

Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) 
John F. Bauman 

Religion 

Colleen McDannell 

"Remember My Forgotten Man" 
Robert S. McElvaine 

Reorganization Act of 1939 
Patrick D. Reagan 

Report on the Economic Conditions of the South 
Patricia Sullivan 

Republican Party 
Clyde P. Weed 

Resettlement Administration (RA) 
Paul E. Mertz 

Reuther, Walter 
Daniel Clark 

Richberg, Donald 

Andrew A. Workman 



XXIV 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



ARTICLES 



Rivera, Diego 

Larissa M. Smith 

Road to Plenty, The 
Stuart Kidd 

Robeson, Paul 

Harvard Sitkoff 

Robinson, Edward G. 
Daniel J. Leab 

Robinson, Joseph 

Cecil E. Weller, Jr. 

Rogers, Will 

Steven K. Gragert 

Roosevelt, Eleanor 

Blanche Wiesen Cook 

Roosevelt, Franklin D. 
Sean J. Savage 

Rothstein, Arthur 
Betsy Fahlman 

Route 66 

Steven Koczak 

Ruml, Beardsley 
Meg Jacobs 

Rumsey, Mary Harriman 
Mary Jo Binker 

Rural Electrification Administration (REA) 
D. Clayton Brown 

Rural Life 

D. Clayton Brown 

Ryan, Father John A. 
Bentley Anderson 



San Francisco General Strike (1934) 
Eduardo F. Canedo 



Sanger, Margaret 

Caryn E. Neumann 

Science and Technology 
Rick Szostak 



Scottsboro Case 

Robert Francis Saxe 

Securities Regulation 
Donald A. Ritchie 

Shahn, Ben 

David W. Levy 

Sharecroppers 
Paul E. Mertz 

Shelterbelt Project 

Mary W. M. Hargreaves 

Sinclair, Upton 

William J. Billingsley 

Sit-Doion Strikes 

Douglas J. Feeney 

Slave Narratives 
Jerrold Hirsch 

Smith, Alfred E. 

Allan J. Lichtman 

Smith, Gerald L. K. 
Glen Jeansonne 

Snow White and the Seven Dioarfs 
Robert S. McElvaine 

Socialist Party 
Paul Buhle 

Social Science 

Caryn E. Neumann 

Social Security Act 
Alice O'Connor 

Social Workers 

Felix L. Armfield 

Soil Conservation Service (SCS) 
Chris Rasmussen 

Soup Kitchens 

Gregory Baggett 

South, Great Depression in the 

Tony Badger 

Southern Agrarians 
Mark G. Malvasi 

Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) 
Christopher W. Schmidt 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XXV 



LIST 



F 



T I C L E S 



Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) 
Larissa M. Smith 

Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) 
Michael V. Namorato 

Spanish Civil War 
Cary Nelson 

Sports 

Steven A. Riess 

Stalin, Joseph 
Paul Le Blanc 

Steel Workers' Organizing Committee (SWOC) 
Bruce Nelson 

Steinbeck, John 
Austin Wilson 

Stimson, Henry 

David F. Schmitz 

Stock Market Crash (1929) 
Peter Fearon 

Strikes 

Eduardo F. Canedo 

Subsistence Homesteads Division 
Kathy Mapes 

Suicide 

Bogdan Balan 
Brian L. Mishara 

Superman 

Bradford W. Wright 

Supreme Court 

Barry Cushman 

Supreme Court "Packing" Controversy 
Barry Cushman 



Taxpayers Leagues 
David T. Beito 

Taylor Grazing Act 

Mary W. M. Hargreaves 

Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, New 
York (TERA) 

June Hopkins 

Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) 
John W. Jeffries 

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 
Steven M. Neuse 

Thomas, Norman 
Burton W. Peretti 

Thomas Amendment 
Gregory Baggett 

Thompson, Dorothy 
Laura J. Hilton 

Townsend Plan 
John E. Miller 

Transients 

Maurine H. Beasley 

Transportation 

William Arthur Atkins 

Tugwell, Rexford G. 

Michael V. Namorato 

Tully, Grace 

Christopher Brick 

Tuskegee Syphilis Project 
Susan M. Reverby 



U 



Talmadge, Eugene 

Caryn E. Neumann 

Tammany Hall 

Barbara Blumberg 

Taxation 

Mark H. Leff 



Unemployed Councils 
Jeff Singleton 

Unemployment, Levels of 
Kim Phillips-Fein 

Unemployment Insurance 
Jeff Singleton 

Union Party 

John E. Miller 



XXVI 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



ARTICLES 



United Automobile Workers (UAW) 
Nelson Lichtenstein 

United Farmers' League (UFL) 
Steven Koczak 

United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) 
Melvyn Dubofsky 

United States Housing Authority (USHA) 
Kristin Szylvian 



V 



Values, Effects of the Great Depression on 
Robert S. McElvaine 



Vann, Robert 

Bernadette Pruitt 



W 



Wagner, Robert F. 
John D. Buenker 

Wallace, Henry A. 

Richard S. Kirkendall 

Washington Commonwealth Federation (WCF) 
William Arthur Atkins 

Weaver, Robert Clifton 
John B. Kir by 

Welfare Capitalism 
Colin Gordon 

Welles, Orson 
Frank Brady 

West, Great Depression in the American 
William H. Mullins 

West, Mae 
Jill Watts 



West, Nathanael 
Ben Siegel 

Wheeler, Burton K. 
David L. Porter 

"Which Side Are You On?" 
Michael Honey 
Mark Allan Jackson 

White, Walter 

Kenneth R. Janken 

White, William Allen 
Sally F. Griffith 

Williams, Aubrey 
John A. Salmond 

Willkie, Wendell 

Herbert S. Parmet 

Wilson, Edmund 
James Boylan 

Wisconsin Progressive Party 
John E. Miller 

Wizard of Oz, The 

Robert S. McElvaine 

Women, Impact of the Great Depression on 
Lisa Krissoff Boehm 

Women's Emergency Brigade 
Martin Halpern 

Woodward, Ellen 

Martha H. Swain 

Workers Education Project 
Rachel Rubin 

Work Ethic 

Gregory Miller 

Works Progress Administration (WPA) 
J. Christopher Schnell 

World Court 

Michael Dunne 

World War II and the Ending of the Depression 
John W. Jeffries 

Wright, Richard 
Trent A. Watts 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XXVII 



LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 



MARCOS T. AGUILA 

Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco 
Mexico, Great Depression in 



Law Enforcement 

Transportation 

Washington Commonwealth Federation 



HOLLY ALLEN 

Middlebury College 
Prostitution 

HOWARD W. ALLEN 

Southern Illinois University, Carbondale 
Election of 1934 

BENJAMIN L. ALPERS 

University of Oklahoma 
Capra, Frank 

BENTLEY ANDERSON 

St. Louis University 

Ryan, Father John A. 

FELIX L. ARMFIELD 

Buffalo State College 
Social Workers 

WILLIAM ARTHUR ATKINS 

Atkins Research and Consulting 
Cartoons, Political 

Governments, State, Impact of the Great 
Depression 



TONY BADGER 

Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University 
Hundred Days 
New Deal 
South, Great Depression in the 

GREGORY BAGGETT 

Columbia University 
Soup Kitchens 
Thomas Amendment 

WILLIAM J. BAKER 

University of Maine, Orono 
Owens, Jesse 

BOGDAN BALAN 

CRISE, University of Quebec, Montreal 
Suicide 

WILLIAM J. BARBER 

Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. 
Arnold, Thurman 
Economists 
Mills, Ogden 
Monetary Policy 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XXIX 



LIST OF C N T R I 



U T R S 



JAMES R. BARRETT 

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 
Dubinsky, David 

BOB BATCHELOR 

Novato, Calif. 

Northeast, Great Depression in the 
Psychological Impact of the Great Depression 

BETH TOMPKINS BATES 

Wayne State University 

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) 

JOHN F. BAUMAN 

Muskie School, University of Southern Maine 
Bauer, Catherine 
Mumford, Lewis 

Regional Planning Association of America 
(RPAA) 

MAURINE H. BEASLEY 

University of Maryland, College Park 

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 

Luce, Henry 

Migration 

Transients 



WILLIAM J. BILLINGSLEY 

California State University, Fullerton 
End Poverty in California (EPIC) 
Sinclair, Upton 

MARY JO BINKER 

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, George 
Washington University 

Alabama Sharecroppers' Union 

LeHand, Marguerite (Missy) 

Rumsey, Mary Harriman 

ALLIDA M. BLACK 

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, George Washington 
University 

Hickok, Lorena 

BARBARA BLUMBERG 

Pace University 

La Guardia, Fiorello H. 
Perkins, Frances 
Tammany Hall 

LISA KRISSOFF BOEHM 

Worcester State College 
Coughlin, Charles 
Women, Impact of the Great Depression on 



DAVID T BEITO 

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa 
Taxpayers Leagues 



JOSEPH BOSKIN 

Boston University 
Humor 



JONATHAN W. BELL 

University of Reading 
Costigan, Edward 

EMILY BERNARD 

University of Vermont, Burlington 
Hurston, Zora Neale 

WILLIAM R. BETTLER 

Hanover College 

Armstrong, Louis 



JAMES BOYLAN 

University of Massachusetts, Amherst 
Wilson, Edmund 

FRANK BRADY 
St. John's University, New York 
Welles, Orson 

CHRISTOPHER BRICK 

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, George 
Washington University 
Tully, Grace 



J. MARSHALL BEVIL 

Houston 

Lomax, Alan 



ROBERT H. BRINKMEYER, JR. 

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville 
Faulkner, William 



XXX 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



F C N T 



U T R S 



LAURA BROWDER 

Virginia Commonwealth University 

Bonnie and Clyde (Bonnie Parker and Clyde 
Barrow) 



GREGORY W. BUSH 

University of Miami 

Communications and the Press 
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) 



D. CLAYTON BROWN 

Texas Christian University 
Agriculture 

Rural Electrification Administration (REA) 
Rural Life 

DENNIS BRYSON 

Bilkent University 

Family and Home, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 

JOHN D. BUENKER 

University of Wisconsin, Parkside 
Wagner, Robert F. 

PAUL BUHLE 

Brown University 
Marxism 
Socialist Party 



SARA A. BUTLER 

Roger Williams University 
Architecture 



EDUARDO F. CANEDO 

Columbia University 

Federal National Mortgage Association 

(FNMA) 
Little Steel Strike 
Organized Labor 

San Francisco General Strike (1934) 
Strikes 



BRIAN Q. CANNON 
ham Young University 
Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) 
Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) 



DOUGLAS BUKOWSKI 

Benvyn, III. 

Cap one, Al 
Cermak, Anton 
Insull, Samuel 

JOHN M. BUMSTED 

University of Manitoba 

Canada, Great Depression in 



KORNEL S. CHANG 

University of Chicago 

Asian Americans, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 



DANIEL CLARK 

Oakland University 

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 
Reuther, Walter 



STEVEN B. BURG 

Shippensburg University 
Old-Age Insurance 

ROBERT BURK 

Zanesville, Ohio 

American Liberty League 
Conservative Coalition 

BARBARA S. BURSTIN 

Carnegie Mellon University 
Anti-Semitism 



JEANNE NIENABER CLARKE 
University of Arizona 

Public Works Administration (PWA) 



PATRICIA CLAVIN 

Jesus College, University ofOxf 
Europe, Great Depression in 
Gold Standard 
Hitler, Adolf 

London Economic Conference of 1933 
Mussolini, Benito 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XXXI 



LIST OF C N T R I 



U T R S 



ROBERT COHEN 

New York University 

American Student Union 
American Youth Congress 



G. WAYNE DOWDY 

Memphis/Shelby County Public Library and 
Information Center 

Grassroots Democracy 



BLANCHE WIESEN COOK 

John Jay College, The City University of New York 
Roosevelt, Eleanor 

DOUGLAS CRAIG 

Australian National University 
Raskob, John J. 

THOMAS CRIPPS 

Morgan State University 
Micheaux, Oscar 



MELVYN DUBOFSKY 

Binghamton University, SUNY 

United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) 

MICHAEL DUNNE 

University of Cambridge 
World Court 

DAVID EISENBACH 

Columbia University 

Federal Savings and Loan Insurance 
Corporation (FSLIC) 



JOHNT. CUMBLER 

University of Louisville 

International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union 
(ILGWU) 

BARRY CUSHMAN 

University of Virginia 
Cummings, Homer 
Supreme Court 
Supreme Court "Packing" Controversy 



MELVIN PATRICK ELY 

College of William and Mary 
Amos V Andy 

JOSEPH ENTIN 
Brooklyn College 

Caldwell, Erskine 

BETSY FAHLMAN 

Arizona State University 
Rothstein, Arthur 



TRACY E. DANESE 

Jacksonville, Fla. 
Pepper, Claude 

DOUGLAS HENRY DANIELS 

University of California, Santa 
Jazz 

ROGER DANIELS 

University of Cincinnati 

Bonus Army/Bonus March 

JUSTUS D. DOENECKE 

New College of Florida 
Fish, Hamilton 
Isolationism 



PETER FEARON 

University of Leicester 
Eccles, Marriner 
Economy, American 
Federal Emergency Relief Administration 

(FERA) 
Federal Reserve System 

International Impact of the Great Depression 
Stock Market Crash (1929) 

CHARLES A. FECHER 

Baltimore, Md. 

Mencken, H. L. 

DOUGLAS J. FEENEY 

Three Rivers Community College, Norwich, Conn. 
Sit-Down Strikes 



XXXI 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



F C N T 



U T R S 



HENRY C. FERRELL, JR. 

East Carolina University 
Byrnes, James F. 
Military: United States Army 
Military: United States Navy 

ROBERT FERRELL 

Indiana University, Bloomington 
Coolidge, Calvin 

SIDNEY FINE 

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 
Murphy Frank 

RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX 

University of Southern California 
Niebuhr, Reinhold 

MICHAEL FRENCH 

University of Glasgow 
Ford, Henry 

Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 
Hawley-Smoot Tariff 

Industry, Effects of the Great Depression on 
Kaiser, Henry 

PHILIP FURIA 

University of North Carolina, Wilmington 
"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" 
"Happy Days Are Here Again" 

SARAH E. GARDNER 

Mercer University 

Ames, Jesse Daniel 

DANIEL GEARY 

University of California, Berkeley 
Adamic, Louis 
Dos Passos, John 
McWilliams, Carey 

LARRY G. GERBER 

Auburn University 
Baruch, Bernard 
Fair Labor Standards Act 



National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner 

Act) 
Norris-La Guardia Act 

JESS GILBERT 

University of Wisconsin, Madison 
Land Use Planning 

ANN FAGAN GINGER 

Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute 
National Lawyers Guild 

JOHN M. GLEN 

Ball State University 

Highlander Folk School 

EDWARD A. GOEDEKEN 

Iowa State University 
Olson, Floyd B. 

RON GOEKEN 

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 

Elderly, Impact of the Great Depression on the 

COLIN GORDON 

University of Iowa 

Welfare Capitalism 

LINDA GORDON 

New York University 
Lange, Dorothea 

STEVEN K. GRAGERT 

Rogers State University, Claremore, Okla. 
Rogers, Will 

SARA M. GREGG 

Columbia University 

Conservation Movement 
Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation 
(FSCC) 

SALLY F. GRIFFITH 

Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pa. 
White, William Allen 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XXXIII 



LIST OF C N T R I 



U T R S 



DONALD A. GRINDE, JR. 

State University of New York, Buffalo 

Native Americans, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 

MARTIN HALPERN 

Henderson State University 
Cradle Will Rock, The 
Fascism 

Hunger Marches 
Peace Movement 
Women's Emergency Brigade 

DAVID HAMILTON 

University of Kentucky 

Agricultural Adjustment Act 

Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) 

Ezekiel, Mordecai 

MARY W. M. HARGREAVES 

University of Kentucky 
Shelterbelt Project 
Taylor Grazing Act 

JONATHAN HARRIS 

University of Liverpool 
Art 
Federal Art Project (FAP) 

ELLIS W. HAWLEY 

University of Iowa 

Association Against the Prohibition 

Amendment (AAPA) 
Midwest, Great Depression in the 

M. J. HEALE 

University of Lancaster, England 
Anticommunism 

House Un-American Activities Committee 
(HUAC) 

ISADORA ANDERSON HELFGOTT 

Harvard University 

New York World's Fair (1939-1940) 



JON HERBERT 

Keele University 

Kennedy, Joseph P. 

LAURA J. HILTON 

Muskingum College 

Dewson, Mary (Molly) 
Ethiopian War 
Gellhorn, Martha 
Kristallnacht 
Thompson, Dorothy 

JERROLD HIRSCH 

Truman State University 
Folklorists 
Slave Narratives 

PETER C. HOLLORAN 

Worcester State College 
Cagney, James 

JONATHAN SCOTT HOLLOWAY 

Yale University 
Bunche, Ralph 
Howard University 
Joint Committee for National Recovery 0CNR) 

MICHAEL HONEY 

University of Washington, Tacoma 
"Which Side Are You On?" 

JUNE HOPKINS 

Armstrong Atlantic State University 
Boondoggle 
Hopkins, Harry 

Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, 
New York (TERA) 

BENJAMIN K. HUNNICUTT 

University of Iowa 
Individualism 



A. SCOTT HENDERSON 

Furman University 

Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) 



R. DOUGLAS HURT 

Iowa State University 
Dust Bowl 



XXXIV 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



F C N T 



U T R S 



ROBERT P. INGALLS 

University of South Florida, Tampa 
Lehman, Herbert 

MARK ALLAN JACKSON 

American University 

"Which Side Are You On?" 

MEG JACOBS 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 
Consumerism 
Keyserling, Leon 
Ruml, Beardsley 

KENNETH R. JANKEN 

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 
White, Walter 

GLEN JEANSONNE 

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee 
Long, Huey P. 
Smith, Gerald L. K. 

JOHN W. JEFFRIES 

University of Maryland, Baltimore County 
Election of 1940 
New Deal, Second 
New Deal, Third 
Temporary National Economic Committee 

(TNEC) 
World War II and the Ending of the 
Depression 

BARRY DEAN KARL 

University of Chicago 

Communications Act of 1934 

J. B. KAUFMAN 
Wichita, Kans. 
Disney, Walt 

SUSAN ESTABROOK KENNEDY 

Virginia Commonwealth University 
Dewey, Thomas E. 
Hoover, Herbert 
Hoover, Lou Henry 
Mellon, Andrew 



STUART KIDD 

University of Reading 
American Scene, The 
Berle, Adolf A., Jr. 
Black Thirty-Hour Bill 
Cahill, Holger 

Farm Security Administration (FSA) 
Federal One 
Post Office Murals 
Road to Plenty, The 

JOHN B. KIRBY 

Denison University 
Black Cabinet 
Weaver, Robert Clifton 

RICHARD S. KIRKENDALL 

University of Washington, Seattle 
Wallace, Henry A. 

CATHY D. KNEPPER 

Kensington, Md. 

Greenbelt Towns 

STEVEN KOCZAK 

NewYork State Senate Research Service 
Route 66 
United Farmers' League (UFL) 

CLIFFORD M. KUHN 

Georgia State University 
Raper, Arthur 

DAVID E. KYVIG 

Northern Illinois University 
Prohibition 

JENNIFER LANGDON-TECLAW 

University of Illinois, Chicago 
Gold Diggers of 1933 
Gone with the Wind 

LAWRENCE H. LARSEN 

University of Missouri, Kansas City 
Pendergast, Tom 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XXXV 



LIST OF C N T R I 



U T R S 



DANIEL J. LEAB 
Seton Hall University 

Berkeley, Busby 

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 

Our Daily Bread 

Production Code Administration (Hays Office) 

Robinson, Edward G. 



PAUL LE BLANC 

La Roche College 
Stalin, Joseph 



MARK H. LEFF 

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 
Taxation 



DAVID W. LEVY 

University of Oklahoma 
Allen, Frederick Lewis 
Brandeis, Louis D. 
Fireside Chats 
Grapes of Wrath, The 
Muste, A. J. 
Shahn, Ben 



DAVID LEVERING LEWIS 

New York University 
Du Bois, W. E. B. 



JAMES G. LEWIS 
Falls Church, Va. 
Morgan, J. P., Jr. 



NELSON LICHTENSTEIN 

University of California, Santa 

United Automobile Workers (UAW) 



ALLAN J. LICHTMAN 

American University 
Election of 1928 
Election of 1930 
Smith, Alfred E. 



BLANCHE M.G. LINDEN 
Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. 

Golden Gate International Exposition 
(1939-1940) 

Hine, Lewis 

National Women's Party 

Museums, Art 

Museums and Monuments, Historic 

Photography 

KRISTE LINDENMEYER 

University of Maryland, Baltimore County 

Children and Adolescents, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 

MARK LOVE 

Central Missouri State University 

Farmers' Holiday Association (FHA) 

RICHARD LOWITT 

University of Oklahoma 
Norris, George 
Public Power 

STUART MACINTYRE 

University of Melbourne, Australia 

Australia and New Zealand, Great 
Depression in 

CHARLES J. MALAND 

University of Tennessee, Knoxville 
Chaplin, Charlie 
Ford, John 

MARK G. MALVASI 

Randolph-Macon College 
Southern Agrarians 

CHRISTOPHER E. MANNING 
Loyola University, Chicago 
Mitchell, Arthur W. 

KATHY MAPES 

State University of New York, Geneseo 
Class 
Migratory Workers 



XXXVI 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



F C N T 



U T R S 



National Farmers Union (NFU) 
Subsistence Homesteads Division 



Values, Effects of the Great Depression on 
Wizard of Oz, The 



IRWIN M. MARCUS 

Indiana University of Pennsylvania 
Memorial Day Massacre 



GENNA RAE MCNEIL 

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 
Houston, Charles 



GERALD MARKOWITZ 

John Jay College, The City University of New York 
Health and Nutrition 

CHARLES MARTIN 

University of Texas, El Paso 
Herndon, Angelo, Case 

WILLIAM J. MAXWELL 

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 
Culture and the Crisis 

DEAN L. MAY 

University of Utah 

Keynes, John Maynard 
Keynesian Economics 
Morgenthau, Henry T., Jr. 
Recession of 1937 

SEAN MCCANN 

Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. 

Hammett, Dashiell 

Hard-Boiled Detectives 

Literature 



PAUL E. MERTZ 

University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point 

Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937 
Resettlement Administration (RA) 
Sharecroppers 

GREGORY MILLER 

University of Toledo 
Black Legion 
Collective Bargaining 
Townsend Plan 
Union Party 

Wisconsin Progressive Party 
Work Ethic 

JOHN E. MILLER 

South Dakota State University 
La Follette, Philip 
La Follette, Robert M., Jr. 
La Follette Civil Liberties Committee 

BRIAN L. MISHARA 

CRISE, University of Quebec, Montreal 
Suicide 



COLLEEN MCDANNELL 

University of Utah 
Religion 

ROBERT S. MCELVAINE 

Millsaps College 

Causes of the Great Depression 

Gender Roles and Sexual Relations, Impact of 

the Great Depression on 
I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang 
Little Caesar 

Men, Impact of the Great Depression on 
"Remember My Forgotten Man" 
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 



GWEN MOORE 

Indiana University 
Communist Party 
Foster, William Z. 
International Labor Defense (ILD) 

CHESTER M. MORGAN 

Delta State University, Cleveland, Miss. 
Bilbo, Theodore 

IWAN MORGAN 

London Metropolitan University 
Deficit Spending 
Economy Act of 1933 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XXXVII 



LIST OF C N T R I 



U T R S 



Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 

Henderson, Leon 

Laissez-Faire 

National Housing Act of 1934 

BILL V.MULLEN 

University of Texas, San Antonio 

Don't Buy Where You Can't Work Movement 
Federal Writers' Project (FWP) 
Popular Front 

WILLIAM H. MULLINS 

Oklahoma Baptist University 
Okies 
West, Great Depression in the American 



BRUCE NELSON 

Dartmouth College 

International Longshoremen's Association 

(ILA) 
Steel Workers' Organizing Committee (SWOC) 

CARY NELSON 

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 
Abraham Lincoln Brigade 
Spanish Civil War 

LAWRENCE J. NELSON 

University of North Alabama 

Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) 
Davis, Chester 
Frank, Jerome 



KEVIN MUMFORD 

University of Iowa 
De Priest, Oscar 

PAUL T. MURRAY 

Siena College 

Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 
Harlem Riot (1935) 
Middletown in Transition 

MICHAEL V NAMORATO 

University of Mississippi 
Brain (s) Trust 
Cohen, Benjamin V. 
Ickes, Harold 
Moley, Raymond 

Southern Tenant Farmers'Union (STFU) 
Tugwell, Rexford G. 

DAVID NASAW 

The City University of New York Graduate Center 
Hearst, William Randolph 



CARYN E. NEUMANN 
Ohio State University 

Chavez, Dennis 

Flanagan, Hallie 

Flynn, Edward J. 

Sanger, Margaret 

Social Science 

Talmadge, Eugene 

STEVEN M. NEUSE 

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville 
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 

NATOMA N. NOBLE 

Millsaps College 

Gershwin, George and Ira 
Music 



ALICE O'CONNOR 

University of California, Santa 
Bakke, E. Wight 
Caste and Class 
Social Security Act 



MARY L. NASH 

Carnegie Mellon University 
Anderson, Marian 
"Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd" 
Holiday, Billie 



JOHN KENNEDY OHL 

Mesa Community College 

Guffey-Snyder Act of 1935 
Guffey-Vinson Act of 1937 
Johnson, Hugh 



XXXVI 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



F C N T 



U T R S 



National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) 
National Recovery Administration (NRA) 

JAMES S. OLSON 

Sam Houston State University 

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 

Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 

Jones, Jesse 

Labor's Non-Partisan League 

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) 

PHILIP E. ORBANES 

Winning Moves, Inc. 

Monopoly (Board Game) 

KENNETH O'REILLY 

University of Alaska, Anchorage 
Hoover, J. Edgar 
National Negro Congress 

LIESL MILLER ORENIC 

Dominican University, River Forest, III. 
Lindbergh, Charles 

DONALD L. PARMAN 

Purdue University 
Indian New Deal 
Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 

HERBERT S. PARMET 

Queensborough Community College, The City 
University of New York 
Willkie, Wendell 

STUART KEITH PATTERSON 

Emory University 

Arthur dale, West Virginia 
Back-to-the-Land Movement 

BURTON W. PERETTI 

Western Connecticut State University 
Ellington, Duke 
Goodman, Benny 
Radio 
Thomas, Norman 



ELISABETH ISRAELS PERRY 

Saint Louis University 
Moskowitz, Belle 

ADRIENNE M. PETTY 

Columbia University 

Farm Credit Administration (FCA) 
Farm Foreclosures 

TODD J. PFANNESTIEL 

Clarion University 
Boulder Dam 

PAULA F. PFEFFER 

Loyola University, Chicago 
Randolph, A. Philip 

MICHAEL J. PFEIFER 

Evergreen State College 
Lynchings 

CRAIG PHELAN 

University of Wales, Swansea 
Lewis, John L. 
Green, William 

KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN 

Columbia University 
Crime 

Dictatorship, Fear of in the United States 
Harlan County 
Income Distribution 
Unemployment, Levels of 

JAMES POLCHIN 

New York University 

Gays and Lesbians, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 

DANIEL POPE 

University of Oregon 

Advertising in the Great Depression 

DAVID L. PORTER 

William Venn University 
Election of 1938 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



XXXIX 



LIST OF C N T R I 



U T R S 



Hatch Act of 1939 
Wheeler, Burton K. 

KIMBERLY K. PORTER 

University of North Dakota 

American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) 

LUCA PRONO 

Bologna, Italy 

Gangster Films 

BERNADETTE PRUITT 

Sam Houston State University 
Domestic Service 
Vann, Robert 

NANCY QUAM-WICKHAM 

California State University, Long Beach 

Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) 
Hillman, Sidney 

ARNOLD RAMPERSAD 

Stanford University 
Hughes, Langston 

CHRIS RASMUSSEN 

Fairleigh Dickinson University 

Soil Conservation Service (SCS) 

PATRICK D. REAGAN 

Tennessee Technological University 
Hansen, Alvin 
Means, Gardiner C. 

National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) 
Planning 
Reorganization Act of 1939 

LINDA REESE 

East Central University, Ada, Okla. 
Ameringer, Oscar 



SUSAN M. REVERBY 

Wellesley College 

Tuskegee Syphilis Project 

GARY D. RHODES 

University of Oklahoma 
Freaks 

KIM RICHARDSON 

LB] Library and Museum 
Breadlines 
Farm Policy 

STEVEN A. RIESS 

Northeastern Illinois University 
Olympics, Berlin (1936) 
Sports 

DONALD A. RITCHIE 

U.S. Senate Historical Office, Washington, D.C. 
Corcoran, Thomas G. 
Pecora, Ferdinand 

Public Utilities Holding Company Act 
Securities Regulation 

J. SIMON ROFE 

King's College, London 
Dictatorship 

ALFRED B. ROLLINS JR. 

Old Dominion University 
Howe, Louis McHenry 

ELLIOT A. ROSEN 

Rutgers University, Newark, N.J. 
Election of 1932 

DIETMAR ROTHERMUND 

University of Heidelberg 

Africa, Great Depression in 
Asia, Great Depression in 



MICHAEL REISCH 

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 
Charity 



RACHEL RUBIN 

University of Massachusetts, Boston 
Workers Education Project 



xl 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



F C N T 



U T R S 



JAMES G. RYAN 

Texas A&M University, Galveston 
Browder, Earl 
Nazi- Soviet Pact 

FRANK A. SALAMONE 

Iona College 

American Federation of Labor (AFL) 
Federal Music Project (FMP) 



CHRISTOPHER W. SCHMIDT 

Harvard University 
Biddle, Francis 

Southern Conference for Human Welfare 
(SCHW) 

DAVID F. SCHMITZ 

Whitman College 
Stimson, Henry 



JOHN A. SALMOND 

La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia 
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) 
Gastonia, North Carolina 
National Youth Administration (NYA) 
Williams, Aubrey 

KATE SAMPSELL 

Bilkent University 

American Exodus, An 

ROGER J. SANDILANDS 

University of Strathclyde 
Currie, Lauchlin 

SEAN J. SAVAGE 

Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Ind. 

Cardozo, Benjamin N. 

Democratic Party 

Political Realignment 

Roosevelt, Franklin D. 

ROBERT FRANCIS SAXE 

Rhodes College 
Bridges, Harry 
Scottsboro Case 

YAEL SCHACHER 

Harvard University 
Homelessness 

LEONARD SCHLUP 

Akron, Ohio 

Borah, William 
Collier, John 
Farley, James A. 



J. CHRISTOPHER SCHNELL 

Southeast Missouri State University 
Hague, Frank 
Works Progress Administration (WPA) 

BONNIE FOX SCHWARTZ 

New York 

Cities and Suburbs 

JOEL SCHWARTZ 

Montclair State University 
Cities and Suburbs 

JUDITH SEALANDER 

Bowling Green State University 
Philanthropy 

BEN SIEGEL 

California State Polytechnic University 
West, Nathanael 

JOHN SILLITO 

Weber State University 

League for Independent Political Action 

JOHN J. SIMON 

New York 

American Labor Party 
Marcantonio, Vito 

JEFF SINGLETON 

Boston College 

Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) 
Civil Works Administration (CWA) 
Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 
1932 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



xli 



LIST OF C N T R I 



U T R S 



Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 
President's Emergency Committee for 

Employment (PECE) 
President's Organization for Unemployment 

Relief (POUR) 
Unemployed Councils 
Unemployment Insurance 

HARVARD SITKOFF 

University of New Hampshire 

American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) 
Bethune, Mary McLeod 
Bourke -White, Margaret 
Robeson, Paul 

JAMES SMETHURST 

University of Massachusetts, Amherst 
New Masses 
Poetry 

ERIC LEDELL SMITH 

The State Museum of Pennsylvania 
Fauset, Crystal Bird 

JASON SCOTT SMITH 

Harvard Business School 
Businessmen 
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) 

JOSEPH SMITH 

Exeter University 

Good Neighbor Policy 

Latin America, Great Depression in 

LARISSA M. SMITH 

Longwood University 
Byrd, Harry 
Glass, Carter 
Mason, Lucy Randolph 
Rivera, Diego 
Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) 

MARK C. SMITH 

University of Texas, Austin 
Cowley, Malcolm 
Odum, Howard 
President's Committee on Social Trends 



ALAN SPIEGEL 

State University of New York, Buffalo 
Agee, James 
Evans, Walker 

JOHN PARRIS SPRINGER 

University of Central Oklahoma 
Marx Brothers 

MICHAEL B. STOFF 

University of Texas, Austin 

Gabriel Over the White House 

GEORGE C. STONEY 

New York University 
Documentary Film 

JAMES STRIPES 

Whitworth College 

Grand Coulee Project 

PATRICIA SULLIVAN 

University of South Carolina; W. E. B. Du Bois 

Institute, Harvard University 
Foreman, Clark 

National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax 
Report on the Economic Conditions of the South 

MARTHA H. SWAIN 

Mississippi State University 
Harrison, Byron "Pat" 
Kerr, Florence 
Woodward, Ellen 

RICK SZOSTAK 

University of Alberta 

Science and Technology 

KRISTIN SZYLVIAN 

Western Michigan University 
Housing 
United States Housing Authority (USHA) 

JERRY BRUCE THOMAS 

Shepherd College 

Appalachia, Impact of the Great Depression on 



xlii 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



LIST 



F C N T 



U T R S 



RICHARD W. THOMAS 

Michigan State University 
National Urban League 

ALLISON BROWNELL TIRRES 

Harvard University 

Latino Americans, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 

KIM TOWNSEND 

Amherst College 

Anderson, Sherwood 

PAUL B. TRESCOTT 

Southern Illinois University 

Government, United States Federal, Impact of 
the Great Depression on 

JOE W. TROTTER 

Carnegie Mellon University 

African Americans, Impact of the Great 
Depression on 

MARK TUSHNET 

Georgetown University Law Center 
Black, Hugo 
Jackson, Robert 
Legal Profession 

ERROL LINCOLN UYS 

Cambridge, Mass. 

Boy and Girl Tramps of America 

RICHARD M.VALELLY 

Swarthmore College 

Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party 

MICHAEL T. VAN DYKE 

Michigan State University 
Hellman, Lillian 
Moses, Robert 

SUSAN WARE 

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard 

University 

Earhart, Amelia 



DENTON L. WATSON 

The Papers of Clarence Mitchell, Jr., State University 
of New York, Old Westbury 

Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada 

National Association for the Advancement of 
Colored People (NAACP) 

JILL WATTS 

California State University, San Marcos 
Father Divine 
West, Mae 

TRENT A. WATTS 

University of Missouri, Rolla 
American Guide Series 
History, Interpretation, and Memory of the 

Great Depression 
Wright, Richard 

DARYL WEBB 

Marquette University 
Education 

MICHAEL J. WEBBER 

University of San Francisco 
Election of 1936 
Landon, Alfred M. 

CLYDE P. WEED 

Southern Connecticut State University 
Republican Party 

CECIL E. WELLER, JR. 

San Jacinto College South, Houston 
Robinson, Joseph 

ELMUS WICKER 

Indiana University, Bloomington 
Banking Panics (1930-1933) 

DAVID K. WIGGINS 

George Mason University 
Louis, Joe 

VERNON J. WILLIAMS, JR. 

Purdue University 
Black Metropolis 

National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) 
Race and Ethnic Relations 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



xliii 



LIST OF C N T R I 



U T R S 



AUSTIN WILSON 

Millsaps College 

Chandler, Raymond 
Steinbeck, John 

DAVID B. WOOLNER 

Marist College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 
Hull, Cordell 
Reciprocal Trade Agreements 

ANDREW A. WORKMAN 

Mills College 

Murray, Philip 
Richberg, Donald 

BRADFORD W. WRIGHT 

University of Maryland University College, European 
Division 

Big Band Music 

Comics 

Guthrie, Woody 

Heroes 

Hollywood and the Film Industry 

Superman 



TINSLEY E.YARBROUGH 

East Carolina University 
Douglas, William O. 
Frankfurter, Felix 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. 
Hughes, Charles Evans 

NANCY BECKYOUNG 
McKendree College 

Garner, John Nance 

Johnson, Lyndon B. 

Maverick, Maury 

Patman, Wright 

WILLIAM H.YOUNG 

Lynchburg, Va. 
Leisure 

ROBERT L. ZANGRANDO 

University of Akron 

Anti-lynching Legislation 



xliv 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



OUTLINE OF CONTENTS 



This outline of contents -provides a general overview of the conceptual scheme of the encyclopedia, listing the titles of each entry. The 
outline is divided into twenty-one parts. 

Agriculture; Biographies; Business; Culture; Economic Conditions; Environment; Events; Government; Intellectual Trends and 
Developments; International Situation; Labor; Law, Justice, and Crime; New Deal; Places; Politics (The Left, The Right); Protest; 
Race and Ethnicity; Religion; Society (Commentai-y, Lifestyles, Programs); Sports and Leisure; Women and Gender. 

Because the section headings are not mutually exclusive, certain entries in the encyclopedia are listed in more than one section. 



AGRICULTURE 



Agricultural Adjustment Act 

Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) 

Agriculture 

Alabama Sharecroppers' Union 

American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) 

Back-to-the-Land movement 

Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act 

Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) 

Davis, Chester 

Dust Bowl 

Ezekiel, Mordecai 

Farm Credit Administration (FCA) 

Farmers' Holiday Association (FHA) 

Farmers Home Administration (FMHA) 

Farm Foreclosures 

Farm Policy 

Farm Security Administration (FSA) 

Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) 



Frank, Jerome 

Migratory Workers 

National Farmers Union (NFU) 

Okies 

Resettlement Administration (RA) 

Rural Electrification Administration (REA) 

Rural Life 

Sharecroppers 

Soil Conservation Service (SCS) 

Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) 

Subsistence Homesteads Division 

Taylor Grazing Act 

United Farmers' League (UFL) 

Wallace, Henry A. 



BIOGRAPHIES 



Adamic, Louis 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



xlv 



U T L I N 



F ( 



N T 



N T S 



Agee, James 
Allen, Frederick Lewis 
Ameringer, Oscar 
Ames, Jesse Daniel 
Anderson, Marian 
Anderson, Sherwood 
Armstrong, Louis 
Arnold, Thurman 
Bakke, E. Wight 
Baruch, Bernard 
Bauer, Catherine 
Berkeley, Busby 
Berle, Adolf A., Jr. 
Bethune, Mary McLeod 
Biddle, Francis 
Bilbo, Theodore 
Black, Hugo 
Borah, William 
Bourke -White, Margaret 
Brandeis, Louis D. 
Bridges, Harry 
Browder, Earl 
Bunche, Ralph 
Byrd, Harry 
Byrnes, James F. 
Cagney, James 
Cahill, Holger 
Caldwell, Erskine 
Capone, Al 
Capra, Frank 
Cardoza, Benjamin N. 
Cermak, Anton 
Chandler, Raymond 
Chaplin, Charlie 
Chavez, Dennis 
Church, Robert R., Jr. 
Cohen, Benjamin V. 
Collier, John 
Coolidge, Calvin 
Corcoran, Thomas G. 
Costigan, Edward 
Coughlin, Charles 
Cowley, Malcolm 
Cummings, Homer 
Currie, Lauchlin 
Darrow, Clarence 
Davis, Chester 
De Priest, Oscar 



Dewey, Thomas E. 
Dewson, Mary (Molly) 
Disney, Walt 
Dos Passos, John 
Douglas, William O. 
Dubinsky, David 
Du Bois, W. E. B. 
Earhart, Amelia 
Eccles, Marriner 
Ellington, Duke 
Evans, Walker 
Ezekiel, Mordecai 
Farley, James A. 
Father Divine 
Faulkner, William 
Fauset, Crystal Bird 
Fish, Hamilton 
Flanagan, Hallie 
Flynn, Edward J. 
Ford, Henry 
Ford, John 
Foreman, Clark 
Foster, William Z. 
Frank, Jerome 
Frankfurter, Felix 
Garner, John Nance 
Gellhorn, Martha 
Gershwin, George and Ira 
Glass, Carter 
Goodman, Benny 
Green, William 
Guthrie, Woody 
Hague, Frank 
Hammett, Dashiell 
Hansen, Alvin 
Harrison, Byron "Pat" 
Hearst, William Randolph 
Hellman, Lillian 
Henderson, Leon 
Hickok, Lorena 
Hillman, Sidney 
Hine, Lewis 
Hitler, Adolf 
Holiday, Billie 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. 
Hoover, Herbert 
Hoover, J. Edgar 
Hoover, Lou Henry 



xlvi 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



U T L I 



OF CO 



T E 



T S 



Hopkins, Harry 
Houston, Charles 
Howe, Louis McHenry 
Hughes, Charles Evans 
Hughes, Langston 
Hull, Cordell 
Hurston, Zora Neale 
Ickes, Harold 
Insull, Samuel 
Jackson, Robert 
Johnson, Hugh 
Johnson, Lyndon B. 
Jones, Jesse 
Kaiser, Henry 
Kennedy, Joseph P. 
Kerr, Florence 
Keynes, John Maynard 
Keyserling, Leon 
La Follette, Philip 
La Follette, Robert M., Jr. 
La Guradia, Fiorello H. 
Landon, Alfred M. 
Lange, Dorothea 
LeHand, Marguerite (Missy) 
Lehman, Herbert 
Lewis, John L. 
Lindbergh, Charles 
Long, Huey P. 
Louis, Joe 
Luce, Henry 
Marcantonio, Vito 
Marx Brothers 
Mason, Lucy Randolph 
Maverick, Maury 
McWilliams, Carey 
Means, Gardiner C. 
Mellon, Andrew 
Mencken, H. L. 
Micheaux, Oscar 
Mills, Ogden 
Mitchell, Arthur W. 
Moley, Raymond 
Morgan, J. P., Jr. 
Morgenthau, Henry T., Jr. 
Moses, Robert 
Moskowitz, Belle 
Mumford, Lewis 
Murphy, Frank 



Murray, Philip 
Mussolini, Benito 
Muste, A. J. 
Niebuhr, Reinhold 
Norris, George 
Odum, Howard 
Olson, Floyd B. 
Owens, Jesse 
Patman, Wright 
Pecora, Ferdinand 
Pendergast, Tom 
Pepper, Claude 
Perkins, Frances 
Randolph, A. Philip 
Raper, Arthur 
Raskob, John J. 
Reuther, Walter 
Richberg, Donald 
Rivera, Diego 
Robeson, Paul 
Robinson, Edward G. 
Robinson, Joseph 
Rogers, Will 
Roosevelt, Eleanor 
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 
Rothstein, Arthur 
Ruml, Beardsley 
Rumsey, Mary Harriman 
Ryan, Father John A. 
Sanger, Margaret 
Shahn, Ben 
Sinclair, Upton 
Smith, Alfred E. 
Smith, Gerald L. K. 
Stalin, Josef 
Steinbeck, John 
Stimson, Henry 
Talmadge, Eugene 
Thomas, Norman 
Thompson, Dorothy 
Tugwell, Rexford G. 
Tully, Grace 
Vann, Robert 
Wagner, Robert F. 
Wallace, Henry A. 
Weaver, Robert Clifton 
Welles, Orson 
West, Mae 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



xlvii 



U T L I N 



F ( 



N T 



N T S 



West, Nathanael 
Wheeler, Burton K. 
White, Walter 
White, William Allen 
Williams, Aubrey 
Willkie, Wendell 
Wilson, Edmund 
Woodward, Ellen 
Wright, Richard 



CULTURE 



BUSINESS 



Advertising in the Great Depression 

Banking Panics (1930-1933) 

Businessmen 

Collective Bargaining 

Communications Act of 1934 

Fair Labor Standards Act 

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 

Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) 

Federal Reserve System 

Ford, Henry 

Gold Standard 

Guffey-Snyder Act of 1935 

Guffey-Vinson Act of 1937 

Hollywood and the Film Industry 

Industry, Effects of the Great Depression on 

Insull, Samuel 

Johnson, Hugh 

Jones, Jesse 

Kaiser, Henry 

Kennedy, Joseph P. 

Luce, Henry 

Mellon, Andrew 

Morgan, J. P., Jr. 

National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) 

National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) 

National Recovery Administration (NRA) 

Pecora, Ferdinand 

Raskob, John J. 

Ruml, Beardsley 

Securities Regulation 

Stock Market Crash (1929) 

Welfare Capitalism 



Agee, James 

American Exodus, An 

American Guide Series 

American Scene, The 

Amos 'n' Andy 

Anderson, Marian 

Anderson, Sherwood 

Architecture 

Armstrong, Louis 

Art 

"Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd" 

Berkeley, Busby 

Big Band Music 

Bourke -White, Margaret 

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' - 

Cagney, James 

Cahill, Holger 

Caldwell, Erskine 

Capra, Frank 

Cartoons, Political 

Chandler, Raymond 

Chaplin, Charlie 

Comics 

Communications Act of 1934 

Communications and the Press 

Cowley, Malcolm 

Cradle Will Rock, The 

Culture and the Crisis 

Disney, Walt 

Documentary Film 

Dos Passos, John 

Ellington, Duke 

Evans, Walker 

Faulkner, William 

Federal Art Project (FAP) 

Federal Music Project (FMP) 

Federal One 

Federal Theatre Project (FTP) 

Federal Writers' Project (FWP) 

Flanagan, Hallie 

Folklorists 

Ford, John 

Freaks 

Gabriel Over the White House 

Gangster Films 

Gershwin, George and Ira 



xlviii 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



U T L I 



OF CO 



T E 



T S 



Gold Diggers of 1933 

Gone with the Wind 

Goodman, Benny 

Grapes of Wrath, The 

Guthrie, Woody 

Hammett, Dashiell 

"Happy Days Are Here Again" 

Hard-Boiled Detectives 

Hellman, Lillian 

Heroes 

Highlander Folk School 

Hine, Lewis 

Holiday, Billie 

Hollywood and the Film Industry 

Hughes, Langston 

Humor 

Hurston, Zora Neale 

I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang 

Jazz 

Lange, Dorothea 

Literature 

Little Caesar 

Lomax, Alan 

Luce, Henry 

Marx Brothers 

Mencken, H. L. 

Museums, Art 

Museums and Monuments, Historic 

Music 

New Masses 

Our Daily Bread 

Photography 

Poetry 

Post Office Murals 

Production Code Administration (Hays Office) 

Radio 

"Remember My Forgotten Man" 

Rivera, Diego 

Robeson, Paul 

Robinson, Edward G. 

Rogers, Will 

Rothstein, Arthur 

Shahn, Ben 

Slave Narratives 

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 

Steinbeck, John 

Superman 

Thompson, Dorothy 



Welles, Orson 
West, Mae 
West, Nathanael 
"Which Side Are You On?' 
White, William Allen 
Wilson, Edmund 
Wizard of Oz, The 
Wright, Richard 



ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 

Africa, Great Depression in 

Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) 

Agriculture 

Arnold, Thurman 

Asia, Great Depression in 

Australia and New Zealand, Great Depression in 

Banking Panics (1930-1933) 

Breadlines 

Canada, Great Depression in 

Causes of the Great Depression 

Charily 

Class 

Collective Bargaining 

Consumerism 

Currie, Lauchlin 

Deficit Spending 

Eccles, Marriner 

Economists 

Economy, American 

Economy Act of 1933 

Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932 

Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 

Europe, Great Depression in 

Fair Labor Standards Act 

Farm Credit Administration (FCA) 

Farm Policy 

Farm Security Administration (FSA) 

Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 

Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 

Gold Standard 

Hansen, Alvin 

Hawley-Smoot Tariff 

Income Distribution 

International Impact of the Great Depression 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



xlix 



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N T S 



Joint Committee for National Recovery 0CNR) 

Jones, Jesse 

Keynes, John Maynard 

Keynesian Economics 

Laissez-Faire 

Latin America, Great Depression in 

London Economic Conference of 1933 

Means, Gardiner C. 

Mexico, Great Depression in 

Midwest, Great Depression in the 

Monetary Policy 

National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) 

Northeast, Great Depression in the 

Planning 

Public Utilities Holding Company Act 

Recession of 1937 

Reciprocal Trade Agreements 

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) 

Road to Plenty, The 

Science and Technology 

South, Great Depression in the 

Stock Market Crash (1929) 

Strikes 

Taxation 

Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) 

Thomas Amendment 

Transportation 

Unemployment, Levels of 

West, Great Depression in the American 

World War II and the Ending of the Depression 



EVENTS 



ENVIRONMENT 



Boulder Dam 

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) 

Conservation Movement 

Dust Bowl 

Grand Coulee Project 

Greenbelt Towns 

Land Use Planning 

Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) 

Shelterbelt Project 

Soil Conservation Service (SCS) 

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 



Bonus Army/Bonus March 

Earhart, Amelia 

Golden Gate International Exposition (1939-1940) 

Harlem Riot (1935) 

Lindbergh, Charles 

Lynchings 

Nazi-Soviet Pact 

New York World's Fair (1939-1940) 

San Francisco General Strike (1934) 



GOVERNMENT 



Agricultural Adjustment Act 

Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) 

Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937 

Boulder Dam 

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) 

Civil Works Administration (CWA) 

Cohen, Benjamin V. 

Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) 

Communications Act of 1934 

Corcoran, Thomas G. 

Cummings, Homer 

Davis, Chester 

Eccles, Marriner 

Economists 

Economy Act of 1933 

Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932 

Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 

Fair Labor Standards Act 

Farm Credit Administration (FCA) 

Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) 

Farm Policy 

Farm Security Administration (FSA) 

Federal Art Project (FAP) 

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 

Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) 

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 

Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) 

Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 

Federal Music Project (FMP) 

Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) 

Federal One 

Federal Reserve System 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



U T L I 



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T S 



Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation 

(FSLIC) 
Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation (FSCC) 
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) 
Federal Writers' Project (FWP) 
Glass, Carter 

Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 
Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 
Government, United States Federal, Impact of the 

Great Depression on 
Governments, State, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Grassroots Democracy 
Guffey-Snyder Act of 1935 
Guffey- Vinson Act of 1937 
Hatch Act of 1939 
Hawley-Smoot Tariff 

Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) 
Hopkins, Harry 
House Un-American Activities Committee 

(HUAC) 
Hull, Cordell 
Ickes, Harold 
Johnson, Hugh 
Jones, Jesse 
Kennedy, Joseph P. 
Keyserling, Leon 
Land Use Planning 
Lehman, Herbert 
Mellon, Andrew 
Monetary Policy 
Morgenthau, Henry T., Jr. 
National Housing Act of 1934 
National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) 
National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act) 
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) 
National Recovery Administration (NRA) 
National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) 
National Youth Administration (NYA) 
Norris-La Guradia Act 
President's Committee on Social Trends 
President's Emergency Committee for 

Employment (PECE) 
President's Organization for Unemployment Relief 

(POUR) 
Prohibition 
Public Power 
Public Utilities Holding Company Act 



Public Works Administration (PWA) 

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) 

Reorganization Act of 1939 

Resettlement Administration (RA) 

Richberg, Donald 

Roosevelt, Franklin D. 

Ruml, Beardsley 

Rural Electrification Administration (REA) 

Securities Regulation 

Shelterbelt Project 

Social Security Act 

Social Workers 

Soil Conservation Service (SCS) 

Stimson, Henry 

Supreme Court 

Taxation 

Taylor Grazing Act 

Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, New 

York (TERA) 
Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) 
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 
Tugwell, Rexford G. 

United States Housing Authority (USHA) 
Wagner, Robert F. 
Wallace, Henry A. 
Woodward, Ellen 
Works Progress Administration (WPA) 



INTELLECTUAL TRENDS AND 
DEVELOPMENTS 

Architecture 

Arnold, Thurman 

Art 

Culture and the Crisis 

Economists 

Education 

History, Interpretation, and Memory of the Great 

Depression 
Individualism 
Keynes, John Maynard 
Keynesian Economics 
Literature 
Marxism 
Mumford, Lewis 
Museums, Art 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U T L I N 



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N T S 



Museums and Monuments, Historic 

Niebuhr, Reinhold 

Poetry 

Religion 

Science and Technology 

Social Science 

Southern Agrarians 

Values, Effects of the Great Depression on 



INTERNATIONAL SITUATION 

Abraham Lincoln Brigade 

Africa, Great Depression in 

Asia, Great Depression in 

Australia and New Zealand, Great Depression in 

Canada, Great Depression in 

Causes of the Great Depression 

Dictatorship 

Ethiopian War 

Europe, Great Depression in 

Fascism 

Gold Standard 

Good Neighbor Policy 

Hawley-Smoot Tariff 

Hitler, Adolf 

International Impact of the Great Depression 

Isolationism 

Keynes, John Maynard 

Kristallnacht 

Latin America, Great Depression in 

London Economic Conference of 1933 

Mexico, Great Depression in 

Military: United States Army 

Military: United States Navy 

Mussolini, Benito 

Nazi-Soviet Pact 

Olympics, Berlin (1936) 

Peace Movement 

Popular Front 

Reciprocal Trade Agreements 

Roosevelt, Franklin D. 

Spanish Civil War 

Stalin, Joseph 

Stimson, Henry 

World Court 

World War II and the Ending of the Depression 



LABOR 



Alabama Sharecroppers' Union 

Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) 

American Federation of Labor (AFL) 

American Labor Party 

Bridges, Harry 

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) 

Collective Bargaining 

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 

Dubinsky, David 

Fair Labor Standards Act 

Gastonia, North Carolina 

Green, William 

Harlan County 

Highlander Folk School 

Hillman, Sidney 

International Labor Defense (ILD) 

International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union 

(ILGWU) 
Labor's Non-Partisan League 
La Follette Civil Liberties Committee 
Lewis, John L. 
Little Steel Strike 
Mason, Lucy Randolph 
Memorial Day Massacre 
Murray, Philip 

National Farmers Union (NFU) 
National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act) 
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) 
Norris-La Guradia Act 
Organized Labor 
Perkins, Frances 
Randolph, A. Philip 
Reuther, Walter 

San Francisco General Strike (1934) 
Sit-Down Strikes 

Southern Tenant Farmers'Union (STFU) 
Steel Workers' Organizing Committee (SWOC) 
Strikes 

United Automobile Workers (UAW) 
United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) 
Wagner, Robert F. 
"Which Side Are You On?" 
Women's Emergency Brigade 



Mi 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



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LAW, JUSTICE, AND CRIME 

Anti-lynching Legislation 

Black, Hugo 

Bonnie and Clyde (Bonnie Parker and Clyde 

Barrow) 
Brandeis, Louis D. 
Cap one, Al 
Cardoza, Benjamin N. 
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 
Cohen, Benjamin V. 
Corcoran, Thomas G. 
Crime 

Darrow, Clarence 
Dewey, Thomas E. 
Douglas, William O. 
Frankfurter, Felix 
Herndon, Angelo, Case 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. 
Hoover, J. Edgar 
Houston, Charles 
Hughes, Charles Evans 
International Labor Defense (ILD) 
Jackson, Robert 

La Follette Civil Liberties Committee 
Law Enforcement 
Legal Profession 
Lynchings 

Missouri ex. rel. Gaines v. Canada 
Murphy, Frank 
National Lawyers Guild 
Scottsboro Case 
Supreme Court 
Supreme Court "Packing" Controversy 



NEW DEAL 

Agricultural Adjustment Act 

Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) 

Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) 

American Guide Series 

Arnold, Thurman 

Arthur dale, West Virginia 

Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937 

Baruch, Bernard 

Berle, Adolf A, Jr. 



Black Cabinet 

Boondoggle 

Brain (s) Trust 

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) 

Civil Works Administration (CWA) 

Cohen, Benjamin V. 

Collier, John 

Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) 

Communications Act of 1934 

Conservation Movement 

Corcoran, Thomas G. 

Davis, Chester 

Deficit Spending 

Democratic Party 

Dewson, Mary (Molly) 

Documentary Film 

Douglas, William O. 

Eccles, Marriner 

Election of 1932 

Election of 1934 

Election of 1936 

Election of 1938 

Election of 1940 

Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 

Ezekiel, Mordecai 

Fair Labor Standards Act 

Farley, James A. 

Farm Credit Administration (FCA) 

Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) 

Farm Policy 

Farm Security Administration (FSA) 

Federal Art Project (FAP) 

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 

Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) 

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 

Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) 

Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 

Federal Music Project (FMP) 

Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) 

Federal One 

Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation 

(FSLIC) 
Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation (FSCC) 
Federal Theatre Project (FTP) 
Federal Writers' Project (FWP) 
Fireside Chats 
Flanagan, Hallie 
Flynn, Edward J. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



liii 



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N T S 



Frank, Jerome 

Frankfurter, Felix 

Gellhorn, Martha 

Glass- Steagall Act of 1933 

Good Neighbor Policy 

Government, United States Federal, Impact of the 

Great Depression on 
Governments, State, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Grand Coulee Project 
Greenbelt Towns 
Guffey-Snyder Act of 1935 
Guffey-Vinson Act of 1937 
Henderson, Leon 
Hickok, Lorena 

Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) 
Hopkins, Harry 
Howe, Louis McHenry 
Hundred Days 
Ickes, Harold 
Indian New Deal 
Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 
Johnson, Hugh 
Jones, Jesse 
Kennedy, Joseph P. 
Keyserling, Leon 
Labor's Non-Partisan League 
LeHand, Marguerite (Missy) 
Moley, Raymond 
Morgenthau, Henry T., Jr. 
National Housing Act of 1934 
National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) 
National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act) 
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) 
National Recovery Administration (NRA) 
National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) 
National Youth Administration (NYA) 
New Deal 
New Deal, Second 
New Deal, Third 
Old-Age Insurance 
Perkins, Frances 
Planning 

Post Office Murals 
Public Power 

Public Utilities Holding Company Act 
Public Works Administration (PWA) 
Recession of 1937 



Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) 

Reorganization Act of 1939 

Resettlement Administration (RA) 

Roosevelt, Eleanor 

Roosevelt, Franklin D. 

Rural Electrification Administration (REA) 

Securities Regulation 

Shelterbelt Project 

Slave Narratives 

Social Security Act 

Soil Conservation Service (SCS) 

Subsistence Homesteads Division 

Supreme Court "Packing" Controversy 

Taxation 

Taylor Grazing Act 

Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) 

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 

Tugwell, Rexford G. 

Tully, Grace 

United States Housing Authority (USHA) 

Wagner, Robert F. 

Wallace, Henry A. 

Williams, Aubrey 

Woodward, Ellen 

Works Progress Administration (WPA) 



PLACES 

Africa, Great Depression in 

Appalachia, Impact of the Great Depression on 

Arthurdale, West Virginia 

Asia, Great Depression in 

Australia and New Zealand, Great Depression in 

Boulder Dam 

Canada, Great Depression in 

Cities and Suburbs 

Dust Bowl 

Europe, Great Depression in 

Gastonia, North Carolina 

Grand Coulee Project 

Harlan County 

Latin America, Great Depression in 

Mexico, Great Depression in 

Midwest, Great Depression in the 

Northeast, Great Depression in the 

Route 66 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



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South, Great Depression in the 

West, Great Depression in the American 



POLITICS 

Agricultural Adjustment Act 

American Labor Party 

American Liberty League 

Anticommunism 

Anti-lynching Legislation 

Association Against the Prohibition Amendment 

(AAPA) 
Bilbo, Theodore 
Black Cabinet 
Black Thirty-Hour Bill 
Borah, William 
Brain (s) Trust 
Byrd, Harry 
Byrnes, James F. 
Cartoons, Political 
Cermak, Anton 
Chavez, Dennis 

Communications and the Press 
Communist Party 

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 
Conservative Coalition 
Coolidge, Calvin 
Costigan, Edward 
Democratic Party 
De Priest, Oscar 
Dewey, Thomas E. 

Dictatorship, Fear of in the United States 
Election of 1928 
Election of 1930 
Election of 1932 
Election of 1934 
Election of 1936 
Election of 1938 
Election of 1940 

End Poverty in California (EPIC) 
Farley, James A. 
Fireside Chats 
Fish, Hamilton 
Flynn, Edward J. 
Garner, John Nance 
Glass, Carter 



Grassroots Democracy 

Hague, Frank 

Harrison, Byron "Pat" 

Hatch Act of 1939 

Hearst, William Randolph 

Hoover, Herbert 

Hopkins, Harry 

House Un-American Activities Committee 

(HUAC) 
Howe, Louis McHenry 
Ickes, Harold 
Johnson, Lyndon B. 

Joint Committee for National Recovery (JCNR) 
Labor's Non-Partisan League 
La Follette, Philip 
La Follette, Robert M., Jr. 
La Follette Civil Liberties Committee 
La Guradia, Fiorello H. 
Landon, Alfred M. 

League for Independent Political Action 
Lehman, Herbert 
Lewis, John L. 
Long, Huey P. 
Marcantonio, Vito 
Maverick, Maury 
Micheaux, Oscar 
Mills, Ogden 

Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party 
Mitchell, Arthur W. 
Moses, Robert 
Moskowitz, Belle 
Murphy, Frank 
National Women's Party 
Norris, George 
Olson, Floyd B. 
Patman, Wright 
Pecora, Ferdinand 
Pendergast, Tom 
Pepper, Claude 
Political Realignment 
Prohibition 
Raskob, John J. 
Reorganization Act of 1939 
Republican Party 
Robinson, Joseph 
Roosevelt, Eleanor 
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 
Sinclair, Upton 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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Smith, Alfred E. 

Socialist Party 

Social Security Act 

Stimson, Henry 

Supreme Court "Packing" Controversy 

Talmadge, Eugene 

Tammany Hall 

Taxation 

Taxpayers Leagues 

Thomas, Norman 

Thomas Amendment 

Townsend Plan 

Union Party 

Wagner, Robert F. 

Wallace, Henry A. 

Washington Commonwealth Federation (WCF) 

Wheeler, Burton K. 

White, William Allen 

Willkie, Wendell 

Wisconsin Progressive Party 

THE LEFT 

Abraham Lincoln Brigade 

Alabama Sharecroppers' Union 

American Labor Party 

American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) 

American Student Union 

American Youth Congress 

Bridges, Harry 

Browder, Earl 

Communist Party 

Cradle Will Rock, The 

Culture and the Crisis 

End Poverty in California (EPIC) 

Farmers' Holiday Association (FHA) 

Foster, William Z. 

Grassroots Democracy 

Guthrie, Woody 

Highlander Folk School 

Hunger Marches 

International Labor Defense (ILD) 

League for Independent Political Action 

Long, Huey P. 

Marcantonio,Vito 

Marxism 

Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party 

Muste, A. J. 



National Lawyers Guild 

New Masses 

Olson, Floyd B. 

Peace Movement 

Popular Front 

Sinclair, Upton 

Socialist Party 

Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) 

Southern Negro Youth Conference (SNYC) 

Southern Tenant Farmers'Union (STFU) 

Spanish Civil War 

Stalin, Joseph 

Thomas, Norman 

Unemployed Councils 

United Farmers' League (UFL) 

Washington Commonwealth Federation (WCF) 

"Which Side Are You On?" 

Wisconsin Progressive Party 

Workers Education Project 

THE RIGHT 

American Liberty League 

Anticommunism 

Anti-Semitism 

Black Legion 

Boondoggle 

Byrd, Harry 

Conservative Coalition 

Coughlin, Charles 

Dictatorship, Fear of in the United States 

Fascism 

Ford, Henry 

Hitler, Adolf 

House Un-American Activities Committee 

(HUAC) 
Kristallnacht 
Lindbergh, Charles 
Mussolini, Benito 
Smith, Gerald L. K. 
Spanish Civil War 
Taxpayers Leagues 
Union Party 



PROTEST 



Bonus Army/Bonus March 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



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Communist Party 

Conservative Coalition 

Coughlin, Charles 

Don't Buy Where You Can't Work Movement 

End Poverty in California (EPIC) 

Farmers' Holiday Association (FHA) 

Harlem Riot (1935) 

Hunger Marches 

Long, Huey P. 

Marxism 

Memorial Day Massacre 

San Francisco General Strike (1934) 

Sinclair, Upton 

Socialist Party 

Strikes 

Townsend Plan 

Unemployed Councils 

Union Party 



RACE AND ETHNICITY 

African Americans, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) 
Ames, Jesse Daniels 
Amos 'n'Andy 
Anderson, Marian 
Anti-lynching Legislation 
Anti-Semitism 
Armstrong, Louis 
Asian Americans, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Bethune, Mary McLeod 
Black Cabinet 
Black Metropolis 

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) 
Bunche, Ralph 
Caste and Class 
Chavez, Dennis 
Church, Robert R., Jr. 
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 
Collier, John 
De Priest, Oscar 
Domestic Service 

Don't Buy Where You Can't Work Movement 
Du Bois, W. E. B. 



Ellington, Duke 

Ethiopian War 

Father Divine 

Fauset, Crystal Bird 

Foreman, Clark 

Harlem Riot (1935) 

Herndon, Angelo, Case 

Holiday, Billie 

Houston, Charles 

Howard University 

Hughes, Langston 

Hurston, Zora Neale 

Indian New Deal 

Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 

Latino Americans, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Louis, Joe 
Lynchings 

Mason, Lucy Randolph 
Micheaux, Oscar 
Missouri ex. rel. Gaines v. Canada 
Mitchell, Arthur W. 
National Association for the Advancement of 

Colored People (NAACP) 
National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax 
National Negro Congress 
National Urban League 
Native Americans, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Owens, Jesse 

Race and Ethnic Relations 
Randolph, A. Philip 
Robeson, Paul 
Roosevelt, Eleanor 
Scottsboro Case 
Slave Narratives 

Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) 
Southern Negro Youth Conference (SNYC) 
Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) 
Tuskegee Syphilis Project 
Vann, Robert 
Weaver, Robert Clifton 
White, Walter 
Williams, Aubrey 
Wright, Richard 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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RELIGION 



Father Divine 

Niebuhr, Reinhold 

Religion 

Ryan, Father John A. 



SOCIETY 



COMMENTARY 

Adamic, Louis 

Agee, James 

American Exodus, An 

Ameringer, Oscar 

Ames, Jesse Daniel 

Anderson, Sherwood 

Bakke, E. Wight 

Boy and Girl Tramps of America 

McWilliams, Carey 

Middletown in Transition 

Odum, Howard 

President's Committee on Social Trends 

Raper, Arthur 

Report on the Economic Conditions of the South 

Road to Plenty, The 

Rumsey, Mary Harriman 

Ryan, Father John A. 

Sanger, Margaret 

Social Science 

Southern Agrarians 

Steinbeck, John 

LIFESTYLES 

African Americans, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Agriculture 
Asian Americans, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Back-to-the-Land Movement 
Breadlines 

Boy and Girl Tramps of America 
Caste and Class 

Causes of the Great Depression 
Charity 



Children and Adolescents, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Cities and Suburbs 
Class 

Consumerism 
Crime 

Domestic Service 
Dust Bowl 
Economy, American 
Education 

Elderly, Impact of the Great Depression on the 
Family and the Home, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Farm Foreclosures 
Gays and Lesbians, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Gender Roles and Sexual Relations, Impact of the 

Great Depression on 
Health and Nutrition 
History, Interpretation, and Memory of the Great 

Depression 
Homelessness 
Housing 

Income Distribution 
Individualism 

Industry, Effects of the Great Depression on 
Latino Americans, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Leisure 

Men, Impact of the Great Depression on 
Midwest, Great Depression in the 
Migration 
Migratory Workers 
Native Americans, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Okies 

Philanthropy 
Prostitution 

Psychological Impact of the Depression 
Rural Life 
Sharecroppers 
Social Workers 
Soup Kitchens 

South, Great Depression in the 
Suicide 
Transients 

Tuskegee Syphilis Project 
Unemployment, Levels of 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



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Values, Effects of the Great Depression on 
West, Great Depression in the American 
Work Ethic 



Owens, Jesse 

Radio 

Sports 



PROGRAMS 

Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) 

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) 

Civil Works Administration (CWA) 

Conservation Movement 

Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 

Farm Security Administration (FSA) 

Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) 

Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation (FSCC) 

Greenbelt Towns 

Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) 

Hopkins, Harry 

Ickes, Harold 

Kaiser, Henry 

Kerr, Florence 

Old-Age Insurance 

Public Works Administration (PWA) 

Resettlement Administration (RA) 

Social Security Act 

Subsistence Homesteads Division 

Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, New 

York (TERA) 
Townsend Plan 

United States Housing Authority (USHA) 
Works Progress Administration (WPA) 



SPORTS AND LEISURE 

Hollywood and the Film Industry 

Leisure 

Literature 

Louis, Joe 

Monopoly (Board Game) 

Music 

Olympics, Berlin (1936) 



WOMEN AND GENDER 



Dewson, Mary (Molly) 

Domestic Service 

Earhart, Amelia 

Fauset, Crystal Bird 

Gays and Lesbians, Impact of the Great 

Depression on 
Gellhorn, Martha 
Gender Roles and Sexual Relations, Impact of the 

Great Depression on 
Grapes of Wrath, The 
Hellman, Lillian 
Holiday, Billie 
Hoover, Lou Henry 
Hurston, Zora Neale 
Kerr, Florence 
Lange, Dorothea 
LeHand, Marguerite (Missy) 
Mason, Lucy Randolph 
Men, Impact of the Great Depression on 
Moskowitz, Belle 
National Women's Party 
Perkins, Frances 
Prostitution 

"Remember My Forgotten Man" 
Roosevelt, Eleanor 
Rumsey Mary Harriman 
Sanger, Margaret 
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 
Thompson, Dorothy 
Tully, Grace 
West, Mae 

Women, Impact of the Great Depression on 
Women's Emergency Brigade 
Woodward, Ellen 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



lix 




AAA. See AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT 
ADMINISTRATION. 



AAPA. See ASSOCIATION AGAINST THE 
PROHIBITION AMENDMENT. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE 

The name Abraham Lincoln Brigade refers to about 
3,000 Americans who volunteered to defend the 
Spanish Republic during Spain's 1936 to 1939 civil 
war. The brigade included not only those who 
fought in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, but also 
Americans who fought in other battalions or served 
in medical units. Although the average age of the 
American volunteers was twenty-seven, the bri- 
gade included three members as young as eighteen, 
and others as old as fifty-nine and sixty. Many vol- 
unteers were students or teachers, but others were 
seamen, autoworkers, steelworkers, electricians, 
and doctors or nurses. 

The International Brigades that fought in the 
Spanish Civil War were entirely integrated, and 
more than eighty members of the Abraham Lincoln 
Brigade were African American. In fact, the Abra- 
ham Lincoln Battalion was commanded, until he 



died in battle, by Oliver Law, an African-American 
volunteer from Chicago, marking the first time in 
American history that an integrated military force 
was led by an African-American officer. Most of the 
American volunteers were unmarried, although, as 
their letters reveal, many had relationships back 
home that they tried to sustain by correspondence. 
Most were from urban areas; about 18 percent came 
from New York. Perhaps a third were Jews, which 
was not surprising in view of Adolf Hitler's support 
of the rebel general Francisco Franco. About two- 
thirds of the American volunteers were Commu- 
nists, but their primary motive for volunteering was 
antifascism. Many of them believed a world war 
would ensue if fascism were not defeated, and in 
fact the Spanish Civil War effectively signaled the 
opening of World War II. 

The Abraham Lincoln Battalion officially en- 
tered the war when volunteers fought at Jarama in 
February 1937, though some American volunteers 
had fought in Madrid in the fall of 1936 before the 
International Brigades were organized. After Jara- 
ma, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion fought in un- 
bearable heat in the battle of Brunete in July 1937. 
This battle was followed by battles at Quinto and 
Belchite in August and Fuentes de Ebro in October. 
Then, after a brief period of training, the Abraham 
Lincoln Battalion endured the snows of Teruel in 
January and February of 1938. In spring of that year 



A C W 



they faced continuous bombing from the air and 
Panzer-style massed tank assaults at key points. 
The battalion then crossed the Ebro Paver south- 
west of Barcelona during the summer of 1938 to ini- 
tiate the largest battle of the war. Barcelona and 
Madrid fell to Franco's forces in early 1939, and the 
war ended on April 1 with the surrender of the Loy- 
alist forces. About seven hundred members of the 
Abraham Lincoln Brigade died in Spain. 

During the war and after, the Abraham Lincoln 
Brigade symbolized internationalism for a country 
that was often isolationist. The heroism and self- 
sacrifice of the American volunteers, each of whom 
made a personal decision to join the war effort, be- 
came a model for succeeding generations. Al- 
though the surviving members of the Abraham 
Lincoln Brigade were often hounded during the an- 
ticommunist McCarthy period of the 1950s, by the 
1990s sentiment had changed, and several monu- 
ments were erected in their honor. 

See Also: SPANISH CIVIL WAR. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Carroll, Peter. The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Bri- 
gade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. 1994. 

Nelson, Cary, and Hendricks, Jefferson, eds. Madrid 
1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the 
Spanish Civil War. 1996. 

Wolff, Milton. Another Hill: An Autobiographical Novel 
about the Spanish Civil War. 1994. 

Cary Nelson 



ACW. See AMALGAMATED CLOTHING WORKERS. 



ADAMIC, LOUIS 



the California leftist Carey McWilliams before mov- 
ing back to New York in 1929. Like many intellectu- 
als, Adamic was attracted to left-wing ideas during 
the Great Depression, though he was suspicious of 
the Communist Party. In the 1930s, Adamic be- 
came one of the most prominent advocates of 
American immigrant groups. Traveling across the 
United States, he chronicled the experiences of 
"new Americans" from southern and eastern Eu- 
rope, concentrating his attention on second- 
generation Americans. His Depression-era books, 
My America: 1928-1938 (1938) and From Many 
Lands (1940), were combinations of autobiographi- 
cal writings, political journalism, and stories he had 
collected in his journeys. 

Though Adamic was a cultural pluralist who 
sought to win respect and tolerance for ethnic mi- 
norities, he bemoaned the cultural fragmentation of 
American life. He thus sought both to combat the 
discrimination faced by ethnic minorities and to 
craft a notion of American identity that associated 
the nation not with its Anglo-Protestant roots but 
with ethnoracial diversity and democratic norms. 
Like other left-liberals in the 1930s, Adamic saw the 
labor movement as the most significant political 
agency capable of achieving his goals. He believed 
that the new labor federation, the Congress of In- 
dustrial Organizations (CIO), much of whose 
membership came from the "new American" 
groups Adamic championed, would be an "impor- 
tant factor in the delicate and vital process of inte- 
gration of our heterogeneous population" (My 
America). In 1940 Adamic founded Common Ground, 
the most significant World War Il-era journal advo- 
cating ethnoracial democracy. 

See Also: CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL 

ORGANIZATIONS (CIO); MCWILLIAMS, CAREY; 
RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS. 



The writer Louis Adamic (March 23, 1898-Septem- 
ber 4, 1951) played a key role in the 1930s move- 
ment for ethnoracial democracy. A Slovenian im- 
migrant, Adamic came to New York in 1913, but 
moved to southern California in the 1920s, where 
he made a name for himself as a chronicler of Los 
Angeles and established a lifelong friendship with 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of 
American Culture in the Twentieth Century. 1997. 

Weiss, Richard. "Ethnicity and Reform: Minorities and 
the Ambience of the Depression Years." Journal of 
American History 66 (1979): 566-585. 

Daniel Geary 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ADVERTISING 



I N 



T H E 



GREAT DEPRESSION 



ADC. See AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN. 



ADVERTISING IN THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION 

"Every advertisement is an advertisement for suc- 
cess," claimed an advertising campaign in 1926. 
During the Depression years of the 1930s, with suc- 
cesses hard to find, the advertising business faced 
severe challenges. Economic stringency, political 
attacks, and a need to recast their appeals all made 
the decade a difficult one for advertisers. Indeed, 
the advertising industry's achievements during the 
1920s in establishing its cultural and economic im- 
portance may have made the challenges of the 
Great Depression more severe. 

Spending on advertisements — from local clas- 
sified ads to major campaigns in national media — 
plunged by more than 60 percent between 1929 
and 1933, and it did not rise above pre-crash levels 
until after World War II. Although advertising 
agencies stressed the foolhardiness of cutting back 
on promotion during hard times and argued that 
advertising could help lift the nation out of its 
slump, many businesses, with revenues plunging, 
viewed advertising as an unnecessary expense. 

After initially attempting to slow the economic 
downslide by exhortation, advertising agencies 
themselves began to cut back. High-salaried em- 
ployees were dismissed, and competition for ac- 
counts became more intense. Advertisers pressed 
agencies to accept lower commissions; agencies in 
turn wooed potential clients away from their rivals. 
Despite this anxious environment, several new ad- 
vertising agencies made headway, some by bor- 
rowing the florid techniques of tabloid newspapers 
and comic strips. Other agencies pioneered in radio 
advertising as commercials became the main sup- 
port of the medium. 

As might be expected, advertising styles did not 
respond uniformly to the Depression. In the first 
few years, advertisers recycled themes of more 
prosperous times. By about 1932, however, there 
was a notable shift to hard-sell campaigns. Al- 
though ads still portrayed an unrealistically afflu- 



ent, racially and ethnically homogeneous America, 
ominous threats, fear appeals, and insistent de- 
mands to buy became more prominent. As Roland 
Marchand observed in Advertising the American 
Dream (1985), campaigns adopted tropes like the 
"parable of the sickly child" or displayed images of 
defeated, prematurely aged fathers to warn of the 
dire consequences of failing to consume the appro- 
priate products. Coupled with this, images of sun- 
beams promised a hopeful future and clenched fists 
symbolized the determination to persevere — and 
purchase — despite hard times. 

While advertisements depicted consumers 
under pressure, the advertising business found it- 
self beleaguered by a reinvigorated consumer 
movement and the threat of regulation by New 
Dealers. A bill introduced in 1933 proposed to give 
the Food and Drug Administration power to pro- 
hibit false and misleading advertising of the prod- 
ucts it regulated. Advertising interests worked to 
kill the measure. The 1938 amendments to the Pure 
Food and Drug Act contained a less stringent defi- 
nition of "misleading" than earlier versions. The 
Wheeler-Lea Act, also passed in 1938, gave the 
Federal Trade Commission explicit authority to act 
against advertising that deceived consumers. Previ- 
ously, the Commission's mandate had protected 
only competitors. The new laws themselves made 
no dramatic difference to advertisers, but industry 
efforts to preempt government control by self- 
regulation, along with public revulsion against the 
most vulgar publicity of the decade, seems to have 
reduced blatant dishonesty in advertising during 
the thirties. Still, as the Japanese attack on Pearl 
Harbor approached, advertising leaders saw them- 
selves under siege from power-hungry bureaucrats 
and radical ideologues. 

Despite the Depression-era's adversities, in 
several ways advertising and the consumer culture 
it promoted gained ground. In big cities, as Liza- 
beth Cohen demonstrated in Making a New Deal 
(1990), economic pressures on workers and their 
families weakened earlier loyalties to ethnic neigh- 
borhood retailers and brought consumers into 
chain stores offering low-priced, mass-produced 
products. Commercial radio provided an effective 
way to reach consumers with national advertising 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A F 



campaigns. In the countryside, inducements to 
modernize through consumption accompanied 
drives for rural electrification. By 1940, nearly all 
homes served by Rural Electrification Administra- 
tion cooperatives had radios and more than half 
had washing machines. Although wartime short- 
ages soon replaced the privations of Depression- 
era America, the industry's struggles during the 
1930s marked a delay, not a denial, of advertising's 
promises of fulfillment through consumption. 

See Also: COMMUNICATIONS AND THE PRESS; 
CONSUMERISM; RADIO. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers 
in Chicago, 1919-1939. 1990. 

Kline, Ronald R. Consumers in the Country: Technology and 
Social Change in Rural America. 2000. 

Lears, T. J. lackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural Histo- 
ry of Advertising in America. 1994. 

Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Mak- 
ing Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. 1985. 

Pease, Otis. The Responsibilities of American Advertising: 
Private Control and Public Influence, 1920-1940. 1958. 

Rorty, lames. Our Master's Voice: Advertising. 1934. 

Daniel Pope 



AFBF. See AMERICAN FARM BUREAU 
FEDERATION. 



elaborate land revenue systems, African peasants 
did not pay taxes on land; rather, they paid a poll 
tax or a hut tax. Such taxes did not require a sophis- 
ticated system of assessment or a record of rights in 
land. Colonial governments in Africa did not bother 
much about land laws and protected "customary 
law" if it suited them. 

The export of African produce was controlled 
by large European trading companies, and a few 
major ports provided the channels through which 
such exports had to pass. By collecting export taxes 
in those ports, colonial rulers could conveniently 
raise additional revenue. 

The African colonies did not have currencies of 
their own; they depended on the currencies of their 
respective colonial rulers. At the time of the Great 
Depression, this gave rise to differentiation in the 
economic fate of the colonies. Great Britain and 
Portugal left the gold standard in 1931, and their 
currencies depreciated. France, on the other hand, 
which had returned to the gold standard only in 
1928 but at a much lower parity than other nations, 
stuck to the gold standard until 1936. This caused 
competition that was particularly keen when the 
same type of produce was exported by colonies that 
were adjacent to each other but used different cur- 
rencies. In this context, African peasants were 
sometimes forced to grow cash crops that gave 
them no returns. 

A few regional case studies illustrate the fate of 
the peasants and the problems of the export of pro- 
duce at the time of the Depression. 



AFL. See AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR. 



AFRICA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 

African peasants were deeply affected by the steep 
fall in agrarian prices caused by the worldwide De- 
pression of the 1930s. Like peasants in Asia, they 
would not have been affected by a fall in prices if 
they had relied solely on subsistence agriculture, 
but colonial taxation forced African peasants to 
produce for the market to earn cash for paying 
taxes. Unlike their counterparts in Asia, with its 



WEST AFRICAN PEASANTS AND EUROPEAN 
TRADING COMPANIES 

The Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Togo, 
and Nigeria were producers of palm kernels and 
cocoa. These products were exported by European 
companies, which were also active in the import 
trade. In the latter capacity they were interested in 
maintaining the purchasing power of their African 
customers, and lobbied colonial governments for a 
reduction of the export tax, arguing that this would 
help African peasants. But when the export tax was 
lowered, the poll tax had to be increased, which the 
companies did not mind because it forced the peas- 
ants to produce for the market. If the peasants re- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A F R I C 



GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



belled, the government could suppress them. In the 
French Ivory Coast, everybody above the age of 
fourteen was required to pay a higher poll tax, a tax 
that had already been increased as recently as the 
late 1920s. At that time, the tax had been collected 
without difficulty, but when the government chose 
to raise rather than reduce it during the Depression, 
many Ivory Coast peasants left the countryside and 
disappeared into the slums of the towns. 

The British Gold Coast levied no poll tax, and 
the government relied entirely on the export tax. 
The British departure from the gold standard gave 
the Gold Coast a competitive edge over the French 
colonies, and exports increased. The government in 
Togo, which was by that time a French mandate 
territory, relied heavily on the poll tax and had to 
repress a peasant rebellion in 1933. British Nigeria 
had a more diversified agrarian production, with 
palm kernels in the Southeast, cocoa near Lagos, 
and peanuts in the North. A poll tax, which had 
been introduced in southern Nigeria in 1927, was 
vigorously collected by 1931 and promptly caused 
peasant unrest. 

The European companies, however, tried to 
make profits even at the worst of times. Many of 
them failed, and only larger companies, such as the 
United Africa Company and Lever Brothers, sur- 
vived. 



FORCED CULTIVATION IN THE BELGIAN 
CONGO 

Sixty percent of exports from the Belgian Congo 
consisted of products from the mines; palm kernels 
and cocoa made up most of the remaining 40 per- 
cent. The colonial government in the Congo mainly 
depended on the poll tax; in 1930 this tax had only 
amounted to one-sixth of its revenue, but it had 
risen to one-fourth by 1932. Rebellions were brutal- 
ly suppressed, and the government resorted to an 
old system of forced labor that had been replaced 
by the poll tax in 1910. During the Depression, the 
Congo's colonial rulers practically converted the 
whole colony into a huge plantation, ordering the 
peasants what to produce, dictating prices, and 
controlling delivery. While imposing this system of 
forced cultivation, the government also diversified 
production, pushing the cultivation of cotton, cof- 



fee, rice, and peanuts, in addition to the traditional 
crops, such as palm kernels and cocoa. Cotton ex- 
ports from this region tripled from 1929 to 1937. 
The government could be proud of its economic 
success, but the peasants suffered. 

SETTLERS AND PEASANTS: KENYA AND 
SOUTHERN RHODESIA 

The presence of white settlers had a special im- 
pact on African peasants because many of them 
had to provide the settlers with cheap labor. The 
case of Kenya's "white highlands" was particularly 
striking. This area had been extensively cultivated 
in the past by Kikuyu tribesmen, but when white 
settlers arrived, they introduced a modern capitalist 
system of agriculture. The tribesmen, who were tol- 
erated as "squatters" on the settlers' large land- 
holdings, had few options but to work for them at 
low wages. Under colonial legislation, the breach of 
a labor contract was a criminal offence, and those 
who had entered into such contracts were practical- 
ly treated like slaves. In shifting the burden of the 
Depression onto the shoulders of their African la- 
borers, white settlers could survive the Depression. 
But some of these settlers found it difficult to make 
ends meet, particularly if they produced maize and 
not the more profitable cash crops, such as sisal, 
coffee, and tea. 

Maize had become so inexpensive that it was 
hardly worth growing any longer. The colonial gov- 
ernment in Kenya subsidized its cultivation, how- 
ever, because it was required as food for the African 
laborers. The maize subsidy ceased when the gov- 
ernment could no longer afford it. White maize 
farmers petitioned for a maize control act to regu- 
late production, but its passage was prevented by 
other settlers who would have had to pay higher 
wages to their laborers so that they could afford to 
buy maize. The maize farmers then stopped pro- 
ducing maize, and turned their land over to African 
tenants. When the Depression ended under the im- 
pact of Word War II, the white settlers wanted to 
recover their land from these tenants, calling them 
"squatters" once more. This situation contributed 
to a growing unrest that culminated in the Mau- 
Mau rebellion. 

In Southern Rhodesia maize was a major cash 
crop produced by white settlers. Since they did not 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AFRICA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



face the resistance of other settlers here, Rhodesian 
maize farmers did manage to get a maize control 
act passed. According to this act, output was se- 
verely restricted, produce was procured by the gov- 
ernment at a fixed price, and consumers had to buy 
maize at a price well above the export price. The 
maize control was exercised in such a way that only 
white settlers benefited from it. But the government 
soon realized that the restrictions prevented African 
peasants from producing for the market, and they 
were thus unable to pay the poll tax. The govern- 
ment then commuted the poll tax, offering the 
peasants the option of working for twenty-three 
days on road construction instead. But so many 
poor peasants took up this offer that the govern- 
ment had to withdraw it. There could not have been 
a more striking testimony to the terrible poverty 
that had hit the peasantry. 

FRENCH COLONIES IN NORTH AFRICA 

The Arab countries of North Africa that were 
under French colonial rule also experienced a pecu- 
liar competition between European settlers and in- 
digenous peasants. The main crop in Algeria, Mo- 
rocco, and Tunisia was wheat, but there were two 
varieties of it, hard wheat (Triticum durum) and nor- 
mal wheat (Triticum vulgare). The latter was mostly 
grown by European settlers, whereas hard wheat 
was produced by indigenous people. Both varieties 
were exported, hard wheat mostly to Italy, where it 
was used for the preparation of pasta. When wheat 
became the first major crop whose price fell due to 
the Depression, the French colonial governments 
were pressed by the settlers (mostly French) to sup- 
port the price of normal wheat; they did this to 
some extent, but showed no interest in the price of 
hard wheat grown by the Arabs. Similarly the colo- 
nial authorities ignored the problems of the indige- 
nous producers of olive oil in Tunisia, many of 
whom became heavily indebted during the Depres- 
sion and lost their land to their creditors. 

SOUTH AFRICA 

At the opposite end of the continent South Af- 
rica provided another striking contrast to the rest of 
Africa. It was dominated by a white minority and 
enjoyed political independence as a dominion in 
the British Commonwealth. The country was rich in 



natural resources and was the world's largest gold 
producer. The average annual production in the 
1930s amounted to eleven million ounces (311 met- 
ric tons). Under such conditions it could hold on to 
the gold standard even after Great Britain had 
abandoned it in September 1931. 

South Africa was governed by the Nationalist 
Party, which was caught in a dilemma. It represent- 
ed the white farmers, who were affected by the fall 
in prices and stood to gain from a devaluation, but 
the party was also pledged to upholding national 
autonomy as embodied in the gold standard. There 
was a fear that if South Africa abandoned that stan- 
dard, gold would be given up as a standard of value 
worldwide and that this would harm South African 
gold production. The mine owners did not share 
this fear. Gold prices had risen after September 
1931 and this made the processing of low-grade ore 
profitable, which would extend the life of the mines 
considerably. 

In the meantime, speculators invested their 
money in the depreciating pound sterling in the 
hope that they could shift it back to South Africa at 
a profit once the South African currency was taken 
off the gold standard. Banking business in South 
Africa was in the hands of two British banks, Stan- 
dard and Barclays, whose headquarters was in Lon- 
don. Thus, South Africa was intimately linked with 
the British financial market. In December 1932, 
these various pressures combined and forced South 
Africa to abandon the gold standard. The specula- 
tors then repatriated their funds. The South African 
economy was reflated. In February 1932, the South 
African currency was pegged to the pound sterling 
and maintained this relationship for a long time. 

Great Britain absorbed the total production of 
South African gold and built up massive reserves 
for the sterling area. The fears that going off gold 
would harm gold production proved to be un- 
founded. From 1929 to 1936 world gold production 
increased by 50 percent and the price of gold rose 
by 66 percent. Because Great Britain and the United 
States stored vast amounts of gold in their reserves, 
the increase in the price of gold was not reflected 
in commodity prices. Nevertheless, reflation did 
push up prices in South Africa, which helped the 
farmers. The black farmhands who worked for the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A F R I C 



GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



white farmers, and the miners in the gold mines did 
not share the benefits of reflation because the em- 
ployers managed to keep wages down. 

EGYPT 

Egypt stood in contrast to the countries sur- 
veyed above. It had been a British colony but had 
achieved a kind of independent status in 1922. Its 
currency was still tied to the pound sterling, but the 
Egyptian government was free to impose a gold ex- 
port embargo after Britain left the gold standard. In 
this way the distress gold of indebted peasants, 
which would have poured out of the country as it 
did elsewhere at that time, was retained by the 
Egyptian government and could be used for fight- 
ing the deflation of the national economy. 

Another special feature of the Egyptian econo- 
my was its dependence on the cultivation of cotton. 
Cotton production was mostly controlled by absen- 
tee landlords, who relied on the state for protection 
of their interests. Egypt had expanded its cotton 
production from 0.27 to 0.38 million metric tons 
from 1920 to 1929, and cotton exports constituted 
about 75 percent of total Egyptian exports. The 
country was therefore particularly vulnerable to a 
fall in cotton prices. In June 1929 the world price of 
cotton stood at eighteen cents; by 1932 it had 
dropped to six cents per pound, its lowest price dur- 
ing the Depression. This two-thirds reduction with- 
in three years was more severe than the price drop 
for most other commodities. Nevertheless the rate 
of cotton production was not reduced because de- 
mand for it remained stable. 

Egypt's system of taxation, a land revenue sys- 
tem of the Indian type, differed from tax systems in 
other African countries. The tax was fixed at about 
one-third of the rental assets, and was collected 
without remission even during the years of the De- 
pression. The rigidity of this system was due to the 
fact that the income from this tax had been pledged 
to Egypt's foreign creditors. 

Despite these problems there were attempts at 
sponsoring industries that produced goods such as 
textiles, which previously had to be imported. Egypt 
was the only country in Africa where such an in- 
dustry existed. The availability of cheap cotton was 
a boon to an indigenous textile industry, and a 



group of Egyptian entrepreneurs who had also 
been behind the establishment of the Bank Misr as 
a "national" bank now tried their hand at this type 
of industrialization. 

It is difficult to gauge the deterioration of the 
standard of living in Egypt, and in other African 
countries, during the Depression years. There are 
only a few indicators that throw light on the condi- 
tions of the people: The per capita consumption of 
food and grain, for example, dropped by about 26 
percent, even though wheat and barley became 
much cheaper; school attendance receded; and the 
number of Muslim pilgrims who performed the hajj 
dwindled in 1933 to about one-tenth the 1920s fig- 
ure. 

In Egypt, as elsewhere in Africa, the burden of 
the Depression was mostly shouldered by the rural 
poor, whereas the urban classes, particularly those 
who received salaries that had been fixed in better 
times, lived very well. Thus the gap between town 
and countryside widened considerably in the 1930s. 

THE AFTERMATH OF THE DEPRESSION 

In terms of the value of world trade, Africa suf- 
fered less from the Depression than other parts of 
the world. Whereas the value of world exports de- 
clined by 66 percent from 1929 to 1934, the value 
of African exports declined only by 48 percent. Ag- 
riculturists were affected by this drop in value more 
than mine owners. 

The European colonists who depended entirely 
on export production were discouraged by the ex- 
perience of the Depression, and the declining reve- 
nues affected colonial governments. The possession 
of colonies was no longer profitable, but colonial 
rulers were also creditors, who did not wish to re- 
linquish their control. In the long run, the Depres- 
sion contributed to the decolonization of Africa. 

See Also: EUROPE, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; 
ETHIOPIAN WAR; GOLD STANDARD; 
INTERNATIONAL IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brown, Ian, ed. The Economies of Africa and Asia in the 
Inter-War Depression. 1989. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AFRICAN A M E R I C 



N S 



IMPACT 



f 



T H E 



GREAT DEPRESSION 



N 



Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catharine, ed. L'Afrique et la crise de 
1930. Special issue. Revue frangaise a" outre mer 63 
(1976). 

Drummond, Ian M. The Floating Pound and the Sterling 
Area, 1931-1939. 1981. 

Hailey, Lord. An African Survey. 1957. 

Jewsiewicki, B. "The Great Depression and the Making 
of the Colonial Economic System in the Belgian 
Congo." African Economic History 4 (1977): 153-171. 

Lonsdale, John. "The Depression and the Second World 
War in the Transformation of Kenya." In Africa and 
the Second World War, edited by David Killingray 
and Richard Rathbone. 1986. 

Mejcher, Helmut. "Die Reaktion auf die Krise in Westa- 
sien und Nordafrika." In Die Peripherie in der Welt- 
wirtschaftskrise: Afrika, Asien, und Lateinamerika, 
1929-1939, ed. Dietmar Rothermund. 1982. 

Moor, Jaap de, and Dietmar Rothermund, eds. Our Laws, 
Their Lands: Land Use and Land Laws in Modern Colo- 
nial Societies. 1995. 

Rothermund, Dietmar. The Global Impact of the Great De- 
pression, 1929-1939. 1996. 

Dietmar Rothermund 



AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF 
THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON 

The Great Depression brought mass suffering to all 
regions of the country. National income dropped by 
50 percent and unemployment rose to an estimated 
25 percent of the total labor force. At the same time, 
twenty million Americans turned to public and pri- 
vate relief agencies for assistance. As the "Last 
Hired and the First Fired," African Americans en- 
tered the Depression long before the stock market 
crash in 1929, and they stayed there longer than 
other Americans. By 1933, African Americans found 
it all but impossible to find jobs of any kind in agri- 
culture or industry. As cotton prices dropped from 
eighteen cents per pound on the eve of the Depres- 
sion to less that six cents per pound in 1933, some 
12,000 black sharecroppers lost their precarious 
footing in southern agriculture and moved increas- 
ingly toward southern, northern, and western cit- 
ies. Mechanical devices had already slowly reduced 
the number of workers required for plowing, hoe- 
ing, and weeding, but now planters also experi- 



mented with mechanical cotton pickers, which dis- 
placed even more black farm workers. Despite 
declining opportunities in cities, the proportion of 
blacks living in urban areas rose from 44 percent in 
1930 to nearly 50 percent by the onset of World War 
II. 

HARD TIMES AND RISE OF NEW DEAL FOR 
BLACKS 

As the number of rural blacks seeking jobs in 
cities escalated, urban black workers experienced 
increasing difficulties. Black urban unemployment 
reached well over 50 percent, more than twice the 
rate of whites. In southern cities, white workers ral- 
lied around such slogans as, "No Jobs for Niggers 
Until Every White Man Has a Job" and "Niggers, 
back to the cotton fields — city jobs are for white 
folks." The most violent episodes took place on 
southern railroads, as unionized white workers and 
the railroad brotherhoods intimidated, attacked, 
and murdered black firemen in order to take their 
jobs. Nearly a dozen black firemen lost their jobs in 
various parts of the South. As one contemporary 
observer succinctly stated, "The shotgun, the whip, 
the noose, and Ku Klux Klan practices were being 
resumed in the certainty that dead men not only tell 
no tales, but create vacancies." For their part, in the 
North and South, black women were forced into 
the notorious Depression era "slave market," 
where even working-class white women employed 
black women at starvation wages, as little as $5 per 
week for full-time laborers in northern cities. In 
their studies of the market in Bronx, New York, two 
black women compared the practice to the treat- 
ment of slaves in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel 
Uncle Tom's Cabin. 

Despite mass suffering, the Republican admin- 
istration of Herbert Hoover did little to aid the poor 
and destitute. Instead, the federal government es- 
tablished the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 
which relieved the credit problems of large bank- 
ing, insurance, and industrial firms. Although Hoo- 
ver believed that such policies would create new 
jobs, stimulate production, and increase consumer 
spending, benefits did not "trickle down" to the 
rest of the economy and end the Depression. Still, 
African Americans rallied to the slogan "Who but 
Hoover" in the presidential contest of 1932. In the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON 




During most of the 1930s, African Americans found it all but impossible to find jobs of any kind in agriculture or industry. The 
father of this impoverished family, photographed in 1937 by Lewis Hine, was a miner who lost his job in the Scott's Run area of 
West Virginia. National Archives and Records Administration 



eyes of blacks, the Republican Party remained the 
party of emancipation, partly because Democratic 
candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt had embraced 
the segregationist policies of the Democratic Party. 

Following his inauguration, Roosevelt's atti- 
tude toward African Americans changed little. He 
not only opposed vital civil rights legislation like the 
anti-lynchingbill, designed to make lynching a fed- 
eral offense, but showed little interest in challeng- 
ing even the most blatant manifestations of racial 
injustice in the proliferation of New Deal agencies. 
The National Recovery Administration (NRA), Ag- 
ricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the 



Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Ten- 
nessee Valley Authority (TV A), the Civilian Conser- 
vation Corps (CCC), and the Federal Emergency 
Relief Administration (FERA), to name only a few, 
all failed to protect blacks against discriminatory 
employers, agency officials, and local whites. 

When the AAA paid farmers to withdraw cot- 
ton lands from production, county officials barred 
African Americans from representation and de- 
prived them of government checks. For their part, 
by exempting domestic service and unskilled labor 
from minimum wage and participatory provisions, 
the NRA and the social security programs eliminat- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AFRICAN AMERICANS 



IMPACT OF THE 6 R E A F DEPRESSION ON 




Many African-American children in the rural South, like these photographed by Dorothea Lange at their farm in Mississippi in 
1936, lived in extreme poverty during the Depression years. Library of Concress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI 
Collection 



ed nearly 60 percent of African Americans from 
benefits. When the jobs of African Americans were 
brought under the provisions of the NRA in south- 
ern textile firms, employers reclassified such jobs 
and removed them from coverage of the higher 
wage code. 



As they encountered various forms of discrimi- 
nation in New Deal Agencies, many African Ameri- 
cans concluded that the so-called New Deal was in- 
deed a "raw deal." Only during the mid-1930s 
would African Americans gain broader access to the 
New Deal social programs. By 1939, income from 



10 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON 




A group of young men study radio operations in 1933 at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp for African-American men in Kane, 
Pennsylvania. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



New Deal work and relief programs nearly matched 
African -American income from private employ- 
ment. African Americans occupied about one-third 
of all federal low-income housing projects, and 
gained a growing share of CCC jobs, Federal Farm 
Security loans, and benefits from WPA educational 
and cultural programs. African Americans now fre- 
quently hailed the New Deal as "a godsend." Some 
blacks even quipped that God "will lead me" and 
relief "will feed me." 

The emergence of a "new deal" for blacks was 
closely intertwined with the growth of the Commu- 
nist Party, the resurgence of organized labor, and 
the increasing political efforts of blacks on their 
own behalf. When the Communist Party helped 



save nine black youths, the Scottsboro Boys, from 
execution and secured the release of their own 
black comrade Angelo Herndon from a Georgia 
chain gang, the African -American community took 
notice. When the party helped to initiate hunger 
marches, unemployed councils, farm labor unions, 
rent strikes, and mass demonstrations to prevent 
the eviction of black families from their homes, its 
work gained even greater recognition within the 
African -American community. As one black news- 
paper editor, William Kelley of the Amsterdam 
News, reported, "The fight that they are putting up 
. . . strike [s] forcefully at the fundamental wrongs 
suffered by the Negro today." 

The rise of the Congress of Industrial Organiza- 
tions (CIO) in 1935 facilitated the emergence of a 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



II 



AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 6 R E A F DEPRESSION ON 




During the Depression, thousands of black sharecroppers lost their precarious footing in southern agriculture and moved 
increasingly toward southern, northern, and western cities. This family was evicted from their farm in 1938 after drought caused 
their crops to fail. They were photographed while encamped along the highway in New Madrid county, Missouri. Library of 
Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



real New Deal for African Americans. Unlike the 
old American Federation of Labor (AFL), the CIO 
made a firm commitment to organize both black 
and white workers. The organization soon 
launched the Packinghouse Workers Organizing 
Committee (PWOC), the United Automobile 
Workers (UAW), and the Steel Workers Organizing 
Committee (SWOC). The new unions appealed to 
civil rights organizations like the National Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of Colored People 
(NAACP) and the Urban League, recruited black 
organizers, and advocated an end to unequal pay 
scales for black and white workers. Although most 
AFL unions continued to exclude black workers, 
the national leadership gradually supported a more 
equitable stance toward black workers. The union 



finally approved an international charter for the 
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in 
1935 and endorsed efforts to free the Scottsboro 
Boys and Angelo Herndon. 

Following the lead of anthropologist Franz 
Boas and his associates, social scientists encouraged 
the lowering of racial barriers in American society. 
As early as the 1920s, they had gradually turned 
away from earlier biological definitions of race, 
which defined African Americans as innately inferi- 
or. The new social scientists challenged the biologi- 
cal determinists to "prove" that African Americans 
occupied a lower socioeconomic and political status 
in American society because of their hereditary in- 
feriority. Legal change lagged significantly behind 
the new intellectual perspectives on race; yet, even 



IZ 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON 




Three young African-American women, trained in office skills by the National Youth Administration, work ■part-time in the offices 
of the YWCA in Chicago, Illinois, in 1936. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



here, African Americans witnessed the slow transi- 
tion to a new deal. As early as 1935, the Maryland 
Court of Appeals ordered the University of Mary- 
land to admit blacks to the state's law school or set 
up a new separate and equal facility for blacks. 
Rather than face the expense of establishing a new 
all-black law school, university officials lowered ra- 
cial barriers and admitted black students to the all- 
white institution. 



COMMUNITY AND INSTITUTIONAL 
RESPONSES 

Despite the rise of interracial alliances and the 
emergence of anti-racist movements among 
whites, African Americans developed their own 



strategies for social change and helped to create 
their own "new deal." African Americans cared for 
each other's children, offered emotional support, 
and creatively manipulated their family's resources. 
As one Georgia relief official noted, "These people 
are catching and selling fish, reselling vegetables, 
sewing in exchange for old clothes, letting out 
sleeping space, and doing odd jobs . . . Stoves are 
used in common, wash boilers go their rounds, and 
garden crops are exchanged and shared." Urban 
blacks also maintained vegetable gardens, staged 
rent parties, played the numbers game, and ex- 
panded their church-based social welfare activities. 
While rent parties provided "down home" food, 
drink, music, and a place to dance for a small ad- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 6 R E A F DEPRESSION 



13 



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mission fee, the "policy" or numbers game em- 
ployed large numbers of African Americans as run- 
ners and as bookkeepers. According to some 
observers, for example, Chicago's south side em- 
ployed seven thousand people in the numbers 
business and cushioned them from unemployment 
even as it provided hope for thousands of blacks 
seeking to make a "hit." For their part, some "num- 
bers kings" provided donations to black churches 
and charitable organizations, but religious organi- 
zations launched their own social welfare activities. 
In addition to the work of established denomina- 
tions, new religious movements also expanded 
their efforts to feed the poor. Started during the 
1920s, for example, Father Divine's Peace Mission 
moved its headquarters from Sayville on Long Is- 
land to Harlem in 1932 and gained credit for feed- 
ing the masses and offering relief from widespread 
destitution. At about the same time, Bishop Charles 
Emmanuel Grace, known as "Daddy Grace," 
founded the United House of Prayer of All People, 
opened offices in twenty cities, and offered thou- 
sands of people respite from suffering. 

As African Americans used their community- 
based social networks and institutions to address 
their needs, they also turned toward the labor 
movement. Under the growing influence of the 
new CIO unions, African Americans expanded 
their place in the house of labor. Perhaps more than 
any other single figure, however, A. Philip Ran- 
dolph epitomized the persistent struggle of black 
workers to organize in their own interests. Born in 
Crescent City, Florida, in 1889, Randolph had mi- 
grated to New York City in 1911 and spearheaded 
the formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car 
Porters and Maids in 1925. When New Deal federal 
legislation (the Railway Labor Act of 1934) legiti- 
mized the rights of workers to organize, Randolph 
and the BSCP intensified its organizing drive 
among black porters. By 1933, the union represent- 
ed some 35,000 porters. Two years later, the union 
defeated a company union and won the right to 
represent porters at the bargaining table with man- 
agement, which signed its first contract with the 
union in 1937. The BSCP victory not only helped to 
make African Americans more union conscious, but 
increased their impact on national labor policy. 



The NAACP, Urban League, and other civil 
rights organizations also increased their focus on 
the economic plight of African Americans. In 1933, 
these organizations formed the Joint Committee on 
National Recovery (JCNR) and helped to publicize 
the racial inequities in New Deal programs. African 
Americans also launched the "Don't Buy Where 
You Can't Work" campaign in New York, Chicago, 
Washington, D. C, and other cities. They boycotted 
white merchants who served the African-American 
community but refused to employ blacks except in 
domestic and common laborer positions. When 
Harlem store owners refused to negotiate, New 
York blacks formed the Citizens League for Fair 
Play and set up pickets around Blumstein's Depart- 
ment Store. In 1938, their actions produced con- 
crete results when the New York Uptown Chamber 
of Commerce and the Greater New York Coordi- 
nating Committee for Employment agreed to give 
African Americans one-third of all new retail exec- 
utive, clerical, and sales jobs. 

African Americans usually expressed their 
grievances through organized and peaceful action, 
but sometimes they despaired and turned to vio- 
lence. Racial violence erupted in Harlem in 1935 
when a rumor spread that a black youth had been 
brutally attacked and killed by police. Although the 
rumor proved false, African-American crowds soon 
gathered and smashed buildings and looted stores 
in a night of violence that left one person dead, over 
fifty injured, and thousands of dollars in property 
damage. Some blacks believed that radicalism of- 
fered the most appropriate response to the deepen- 
ing crisis of African Americans. Some African 
Americans joined the Socialist Southern Tenant 
Farmers Union (STFU) and the Communist Ala- 
bama Sharecroppers Union. Nate Shaw (Ned 
Cobb), whose life became the subject of an oral bi- 
ography, recalled that he had joined the sharecrop- 
pers union to fight the system that oppressed him. 
Shaw later recalled that he had to act because he 
had labored "under many rulins, just like the other 
Negro, that I knowed was injurious to man and dis- 
pleasin to God and still I had to fall back." In Bir- 
mingham, the Communist Party's League of Strug- 
gle for Negro Rights (LSNR) and its energetic fight 
on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys also attracted un- 
employed workers, such as Al Murphy and Hosea 



K 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AFRICAN 



M E R I C A N S 



IMPACT 



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G R E A F DEPRESSION 



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Hudson. As Hudson put it, "I always did resent in- 
justice and the way they used to treat Negroes. . . . 
My grandmother used to talk about these things. 
She was very militant herself, you know." 



BLACKS AND THE NEW DEAL COALITION 

Although some blacks joined radical social 
movements and parties, most worked hard to 
broaden their participation in the New Deal coali- 
tion. As Republicans continued to take black votes 
for granted, blacks increasingly turned toward the 
northern wing of the Democratic Party. As early as 
1932, the editor of the black weekly Pittsburgh Cou- 
rier had urged African Americans to change their 
political affiliation: "My friends, go turn Lincoln's 
picture to the wall . . . that debt has been paid in 
full." By the mid-1930s, nearly forty-five blacks had 
received appointments to New Deal agencies. Re- 
ferred to as the Black Cabinet, these black advisors 
included Robert L. Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh 
Courier, Robert C. Weaver, an economist, and Mary 
McCleod Bethune, founder of Bethune-Cookman 
College in Florida. In 1936, African Americans 
formed the National Negro Congress (NNC), 
which aimed to unite all existing political, fraternal, 
and religious organizations and push for policies 
designed to bring about the full socioeconomic re- 
covery of the black community. Spearheaded by 
Ralph Bunche, a professor of political science at 
Howard University in Washington, D.C, and John 
Davis, executive secretary of the Joint Committee 
on National Recovery, the founding meeting of the 
NNC brought together some six hundred organiza- 
tions and selected A. Philip Randolph as its first 
president. The NNC symbolized as well as promot- 
ed the growing political mobilization of the Afri- 
can-American community. In the presidential elec- 
tion of 1936, African Americans voted for the 
Democratic Party in record numbers; Roosevelt re- 
ceived 76 percent of northern black votes. 

After the election of 1936, African Americans 
intensified demands on Roosevelt's New Deal ad- 
ministration. They placed justice before the law 
high on their list of priorities. As early as 1933, the 
NAACP organized a Writers League Against 
Lynching and intensified its national movement for 
a federal anti-lynching law. The Costigan-Wagner 



anti-lynching bill gained little support from Roose- 
velt and failed when southern senators filibustered 
the measure in 1934, 1935, 1937, 1938, and 1940. 
Despite failure to pass a federal anti-lynching law, 
partly because of the campaign, the number of re- 
corded lynchings dropped from eighteen in 1935 to 
two in 1939. 

During the 1930s, black attorneys like Charles 
Hamilton Houston and William Hastie assaulted 
the legal supports of Jim Crow, while black histori- 
ans, social scientists, and writers challenged its in- 
tellectual underpinnings. Under the leadership of 
historian Carter G. Woodson, the Association for 
the Study of Negro Life and History (founded in 
1915) continued to promote the study of African- 
American history, emphasizing the role of blacks in 
the development of the nation. African-American 
intellectuals (e.g., E. Franklin Frazier, W. E. B. Du 
Bois, Charles S. Johnson, Langston Hughes, and 
Richard Wright) reinforced the work of Carter G. 
Woodson. 

As suggested by the role of black intellectuals 
and attorneys on the one hand and the rent parties 
of poor and working-class blacks on the other, Afri- 
can-American responses to poverty were by no 
means uniform. They varied across class, gender, 
and generational lines. Women manipulated 
household resources, while black men predominat- 
ed in the organized labor and civil rights move- 
ments. Moreover, elite men dominated the leader- 
ship positions of civil rights and social service 
organizations like the NAACP and the Urban 
League. Yet, African Americans during the period 
were united through a common history, color, and 
culture. The emergence of Joe Louis as a folk hero 
symbolized African Americans' sense of common 
plight, kinship, and future. The exploits of Louis 
helped to unify African Americans and gave them 
hope that they could demolish the segregationist 
system. When Joe Louis lost, African Americans la- 
mented, as in his first fight with the German Max 
Schmeling, who symbolized Adolf Hitler's doctrine 
of Aryan supremacy. When Louis knocked out Max 
Schmeling in the first round of their rematch, black 
people celebrated. The singer Lena Home later re- 
called that Joe Louis "was the one invincible Negro, 
the one who stood up to the white man and beat 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 6 R E A F DEPRESSION 



15 



AFRICAN A M E R I C 



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IMPACT 



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GREAT DEPRESSION 



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him down with his fists. He in a sense carried so 
many of our hopes, maybe even dreams of ven- 
geance." 

Despite the transition from a raw deal to a new 
deal between 1935 and 1939, the persistence of ra- 
cial discrimination within and outside governmen- 
tal agencies limited the achievements of the Roose- 
velt administration. As whites returned to full-time 
employment during the late 1930s, African Ameri- 
cans remained dependent on public service and re- 
lief programs. While the CIO aided blacks who 
were fortunate enough to maintain or regain their 
jobs during the Depression years, it did little to en- 
hance the equitable reemployment of black and 
white workers as the country slowly pulled itself out 
of the Depression. The Communist Party helped to 
change attitudes toward racial unity, but the bene- 
fits of such changes were largely symbolic as racial 
injustice continued to undermine the material posi- 
tion of African Americans. As the nation increas- 
ingly mobilized for War after 1939, African Ameri- 
cans resolved that World War II would be fought on 
two fronts. They wanted a "Double-V," victory at 
home and victory abroad. 

See Also: AMERICAN NEGRO LABOR CONGRESS 
(ANLC); BLACK CABINET; BLACK METROPOLIS; 
BROTHERHOOD OF SLEEPING CAR PORTERS 
(BSCP); LYNCHINGS; NATIONAL ASSOCIATION 
FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE 
(NAACP); NATIONAL NEGRO CONGRESS; 
SCOTTSBORO CASE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Anderson, lervis. A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Por- 
trait. 1986. 

Dickerson, Dennis C. Out of the Crucible: Black Steelwork- 
ers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980. 1986. 

Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. Black Metropolis: 
A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, rev. edition, 
1962. 

Egerton, John. Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation 
Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. 1994. 

Foner, Philip S. Organized Labor and the Black Workers, 
1619-1973. 1974. 

Franklin, John Hope, and August Meier, eds. Black Lead- 
ers of the Twentieth Century. 1982. 

Giddings, Paula. When and Where 1 Enter: The Impact of 
Black Women on Race and Sex in America. 1984. 



Grant, Nancy L. TV A and Black Americans: Planning for 
the Status Quo. 1990. 

Gray, Brenda Clegg. Black Temale Domestics during the De- 
pression in New York City, 1930-1940. 1993. 

Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. Or Does It Explode?: Black Har- 
lem in the Great Depression. 1991. 

Harris, William H. Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, 
Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car 
Porters, 1925-37. 1977. 

Harris, William H. The Harder We Run: Black Workers 
Since the Civil War. 1982. 

Hine, Darlene Clark. Black Women in White: Racial Con- 
flict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 
1890-1950. 1989. 

lones, lacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black 
Women, Work, and the Family, From Slavery to the 
Present. 1985. 

Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Commu- 
nists during the Great Depression. 1990. 

Kirby, lohn B. Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liber- 
alism and Race. 1992. 

Kusmer, Kenneth L., ed. Black Communities and Urban 
Development in America, 1720-1960, Vol. 6: Depres- 
sion, War, and the New Migration, 1930-1960. 1991. 

Lerner, Gerda, ed. Black Women in White America: A Doc- 
umentary History. 1973. 

Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: 
Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. 
1977. 

Lewis, Earl. In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power 
in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia. 1991. 

Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. Black Detroit and the 
Rise of the UAW. 1979. 

Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem during the Depres- 
sion. 1983. 

Natanson, Nicholas. The Black Image in the New Deal: The 
Politics ofFSA Photography. 1992. 

Painter, Nell Irvin. The Narrative ofHosea Hudson: His Life 
as a Communist. 1979. 

Rosengarten, Theodore. All God's Dangers: The Life of 
Nate Shaw. 1974. 

Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of 

Civil Rights as a National Issue, Vol. 1: The Depression 

Decade. 1978. 
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. 

1971. 
Sternsher, Bernard, ed. The Negro in Depression and War: 

Prelude to Revolution, 1930-1945. 1969. 
Sullivan, Patricia. Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the 

New Deal Era. 1996. 

Trotter, Joe William, Ir. Black Milwaukee: The Making of 
an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45. 1985. 



16 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



G E E 



AMES 



Trotter, Joe William, Jr. The African American Experience. 
2001. 

Watts, Jill. God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story. 
1992. 

Weiss, Nancy Joan. Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black 
Politics in the Age of FDR. 1983. 

Wolters, Raymond. Negroes and the Great Depression: The 
Problem of Economic Recovery. 1970. 

Wright, Richard, and Edwin Rosskam. 12 Million Black 
Voices. 1941. 

Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade against Lynch- 
ing, 1909-1950. 1980. 

Joe W. Trotter 



AGEE, JAMES 

James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909-May 16, 
1955) was a gifted man of letters who in his brief 
but intense life left an indelible touch on a variety 
of literary forms: poetry, novels, film criticism, 
screenplays, essays, and journalism. Born in Knox- 
ville, Tennessee, Agee was one of America's best 
film critics (for Time and The Nation, 1941-1948), 
and the first to raise the mechanics of weekly re- 
viewing to the level of prose art. His scripts for such 
films as The African Queen (1951) and The Night of 
the Hunter (1955) were generally judged superior to 
their novelistic sources. His posthumous autobio- 
graphical novel, A Death in the Family (1957), which 
won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, remains a 
much-loved period evocation of southern Ameri- 
cana, as well as an aching memoir of parents, chil- 
dren, and the negotiation of loss. Arguably, his 
greatest achievement was a product of his late 
youth, the Depression-era classic Let Us Now Praise 
Famous Men (1941), co-authored with the photog- 
rapher Walker Evans. Part anatomy of the impover- 
ished conditions surrounding a tenant farmer's life, 
part poetic and metaphysical inquiry into the mys- 
teries of existence, part intimate confession of the 
author's search for his aesthetic identity and family 
roots, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book like 
no other. Admittedly unclassifiable, it is without 
doubt one of the most brilliant and original junc- 
tures of image and text in the annals of mixed 
media creation. 



In the summer of 1936, Fortune magazine sent 
Agee and Evans to the South "to prepare an article 
on cotton tenantry in the United States." The co- 
authors spent approximately six weeks on assign- 
ment, much of the time actually living with three 
tenant families in Hale County, Alabama. Agee 
meant for the resulting text of almost five hundred 
pages and Evans's thirty-one plates (later expanded 
to sixty-two) to be understood as analogous but 
very different views of the same subject. According- 
ly, the images were lucid, surgical, and selfless, 
while the prose was turbulent, extravagant, and 
self-reflexive. Evans's models were connoisseurs of 
fact, the photographers Eugene Atget and Matthew 
Brady; Agee's were visionary poets, William Shake- 
speare, Walt Whitman, and William Blake. Occa- 
sionally self-indulgent, the author's language is fre- 
quently breathtaking in its intellectual passion, 
moral force, and near holographic reproduction of 
the physical reality. Equally characteristic is the way 
Agee refuses to view the farmer as a ready-made 
protest symbol, or in any way as an applicant for the 
reader's pity or patronization. Let Us Now Praise Fa- 
mous Men remains honorably distinct in the litera- 
ture of the Depression in its vision of the imperiled 
family as exalted in tragedy, inheritors of a moral 
aristocracy, and virtual gods in ruins. 

See Also: EVANS, WALKER. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Agee, James. Agee on Film, Vol. 1: Reviews and Comments. 
1958. Reprint, 1983. 

Agee, James. A Death in the Family. 1957. Reprint, 1969. 

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Fa- 
mous Men. 1941. Reprint, 1960. 

Bergreen, Lawrence. James Agee: A Life. 1984. 

Spiegel, Alan. James Agee and the Legend of Himself: A 
Critical Study. 1998. 

Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties Amer- 
ica. 1973. 



Alan Spiegel 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



17 



AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT 



AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT 
ACT 

The Agricultural Adjustment Act was signed into 
law on May 12, 1933, and was a crucial part of the 
New Deal recovery program of the First Hundred 
Days. It passed Congress after many weeks of de- 
bate between the Roosevelt administration, farm 
organization leaders, and agrarian militants and 
their representatives in Congress. Led by Secretary 
of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, the administration 
wanted a farm program based on voluntary produc- 
tion controls. Farmers who agreed to curtail pro- 
duction would receive a benefit payment financed 
by a tax on agricultural processors, such as flour 
millers. The amount the farmers would curtail pro- 
duction would be determined by a decentralized 
system of farmer committees in cooperation with 
the Department of Agriculture. This system, Wal- 
lace and his advisers hoped, would reduce the mas- 
sive surpluses glutting American markets and en- 
gage farmers themselves in the administration of 
the new farm program. Farm leaders wanted a 
price-raising measure to boost prices and incomes, 
but they were reluctant to endorse production con- 
trols for fear such measures would entail a large bu- 
reaucracy. Agrarian militants also opposed produc- 
tion controls and demanded some form of currency 
inflation and the power for government-mandated 
prices to bring about immediate increases in farm 
income. While Congress debated the bill, frustrated 
farmers in the Midwest launched farm strikes and 
mortgage foreclosure protests that sometimes 
turned violent. 

In its final form, Title I of the act authorized the 
secretary of agriculture to create a production con- 
trol program for eight major commodities and to 
impose a tax on the processors of these commodi- 
ties. It also authorized the secretary to establish 
marketing agreements among producers of other 
commodities, such as dairy goods, in order to per- 
mit greater control over production and distribu- 
tion. It committed the Department of Agriculture to 
raising farm prices to a level that would gain farm- 
ers the same purchasing power they had enjoyed 
for the years 1909 to 1914 in order to achieve "pari- 
ty" between the farm and non-farm economies. 



Title II became the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, 
which authorized emergency mortgage loan refi- 
nancing. Title III, introduced by Senator Elmer 
Thomas, a Democrat from Oklahoma, granted the 
president discretionary power to undertake curren- 
cy inflation and to reduce the gold content of the 
dollar. The act became the basis for the Agricultural 
Adjustment Administration. On January 6, 1936, 
the Supreme Court ruled the processing tax and 
production control features of the Agricultural Ad- 
justment Act unconstitutional in the Butler decision. 

The act advanced farm policy beyond the failed 
actions of the Hoover administration's Federal 
Farm Board, made possible programs that con- 
tained farm protest movements, and initiated a fun- 
damental change in the role of the federal govern- 
ment in the American farm economy. 

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT 

ADMINISTRATION (AAA); FARM POLICY; 
HUNDRED DAYS. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Fite, Gilbert C. George N. Peek and the Fight for Farm Pari- 
ty. 1954. 

Hamilton, David E. From New Day to New Deal: American 
Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928-1933. 
1991. 

Perkins, Van L. Crisis in Agriculture: The Agricultural Ad- 
justment Administration and the New Deal, 1933. 1969. 

Romasco, Albert U. The Politics of Recovery: Roosevelt's 
New Deal. 1983. 

David Hamilton 



AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT 
ADMINISTRATION (AAA) 

The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) 
was established in 1933 to carry out the production 
control and marketing agreement provisions of the 
Agricultural Adjustment Act. Unlike the Federal 
Farm Board of the Herbert Hoover administration, 
the AAA was made a part of the U.S. Department 
of Agriculture (USDA). The AAA was originally 
conceived as an emergency program to meet the 
farm crisis of the Great Depression, but it evolved 



18 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMINISTRATION (AAA 




The Mattress Project Center in Newberry Country, South Carolina, offered temporary work to low -income farmers and their 
families. The Center, pictured in early 1941, was established by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in cooperation with 
the Surplus Marketing Administration and the Extension Seroice of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. National Archives and 
Records Administration 



into a permanent system of price and income sup- 
ports for American farmers. Although much criti- 
cized, the AAA was able to resuscitate a devastated 
system of agriculture and overcome the deep- 
rooted constitutional and political obstacles to an 
enlarged role for the federal government in Ameri- 
can life. 



THE CRISIS, CHALLENGES, AND PROGRAMS 

At the start of the New Deal, agriculture's con- 
dition was grim. Prices of staple commodities and 
annual farm incomes were lower than they had 



been in decades; the farm credit system had nearly 
ceased to function, and massive unemployment 
and a gnarled system of international trade were 
depressing prices and causing commodity stocks to 
pile up. The effects of the deflation were brutal be- 
cause farmers could not shield themselves from 
credit and price risks in the increasingly capital- 
intensive farm economy of the twentieth century. 
How to respond to the immediate crisis and how to 
rebuild the farm economy posed formidable chal- 
lenges because of deeply ingrained fears that gov- 
ernmental programs would mean the creation of 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



19 



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L T U R A L ADJUSTMENT ADMINISTRATION 



A A 



coercive bureaucracies, and maybe even a police 
state, in agriculture. 

Deep divisions over the AAA's objectives fur- 
ther complicated its task. Farmers, farm leaders, 
members of Congress, and some USDA officials 
wanted the AAA to restore farm purchasing power 
to the more profitable levels of the 1909 to 1914 pe- 
riod, or what had come to be known as parity price 
levels. Major figures within the Department of Ag- 
riculture, including the economists M. L. Wilson, 
Mordecai Ezekiel, and Howard Tolley, saw the 
AAA as an short-term "adjustment" program that 
would stabilize the farm economy and serve as a 
transition to a long-term farm program based on 
trade liberalization, land use planning, and soil 
conservation. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. 
Wallace hoped for both higher incomes and long- 
term adjustments. 

From 1933 through 1935, the AAA focused on 
establishing production control programs for 
wheat, cotton, tobacco, hogs, corn, milk and milk 
products, rice, and potatoes. Participation was to be 
voluntary and farmers who agreed to cooperate 
would be paid a benefit payment for reducing acre- 
age. The payments were financed by a tax on the 
processors of agricultural goods. The program 
would be administered through a decentralized 
system of farmer committees in collaboration with 
county extension agents, land-grant universities, 
and the USDA. Curtailed production would im- 
prove domestic prices while the benefit payments 
would supply desperate farmers with immediate 
income. The cooperative and voluntary nature of 
the program, Wallace and other USDA officials 
hoped, would create new forms of grassroots de- 
mocracy within agriculture. 

Implementing the AAA programs was an un- 
precedented undertaking. It required establishing a 
three-year production base for all participating 
farmers, determining how much each farm would 
have to cut back on acreage, ensuring compliance, 
allocating benefit payments, and adjudicating dis- 
putes. This array of tasks was made easier by the 
prior development of the Department of Agricul- 
ture's data-gathering capabilities, its county and 
state extension system, and its economic research 
divisions, but even so the AAA administrators faced 
constant challenges. 



CONTROVERSY AND OPPOSITION 

The AAA was engulfed in controversy from the 
start. Faced with gluts of hogs and cotton before 
production controls could be instituted, the AAA 
paid producers to slaughter pigs and plow up plant- 
ed cotton. Critics denounced these attempts to 
create artificial scarcities when many millions of 
Americans were in need of food and clothing. Inter- 
nal policy divisions marred the AAA's early months 
as well. Its first administrator, George N. Peek, was 
a prominent farm leader who objected to the em- 
phasis on production controls and frequently 
clashed with Wallace. He resigned after seven 
months and was replaced by Chester Davis, also a 
farm leader, but one who was more sympathetic to 
reducing acreage. Under Davis, the AAA's cotton 
program became the center of a national controver- 
sy when southern landlords began exploiting the 
production control contracts to evict sharecroppers 
or deny them an equitable distribution of AAA ben- 
efit payments. Davis investigated but, in spite of ex- 
tensive evidence indicating wholesale violations of 
the contracts by growers, he was unwilling to im- 
pose new rules that would protect the South's rural 
poor. When Jerome Frank, the head of the AAA's 
legal division, tried to impose a stricter interpreta- 
tion of the contract for the benefit of tenants and 
sharecroppers in 1935, Davis responded by hastily 
firing Frank and many of his staff. The New Deal 
then tried to address rural poverty outside the AAA 
by creating first the Resettlement Administration in 
1935 and then the Farm Security Administration in 
1937. 

Economic and political crises also forced fre- 
quent changes in AAA policies and programs. In 
October and November of 1933, a sharp increase in 
the prices of manufactured goods, caused in part by 
the policies of the National Recovery Administra- 
tion, brought new threats of farm strikes and de- 
mands for currency inflation and price -fixing. Presi- 
dent Roosevelt responded to the protests with an 
executive order creating the Commodity Credit 
Corporation (CCC) to make commodity loans to 
farmers and to serve as an adjunct to AAA pro- 
grams. The CCC could establish loan rates for com- 
modities, and if prices fell below the rate, farmers 
did not have to repay the loan. Political pressure 
from growers also minimized the voluntary features 



20 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A G R I C 



L T U R A L ADJUSTMENT 



D M I N I S T R A T I N 



of some commodity programs. Angry at the effect 
non-cooperators were having on prices, growers of 
potatoes, tobacco, and cotton succeeded in pressur- 
ing Congress in 1934 and 1935 to make participa- 
tion in their acreage control programs virtually 
mandatory. 

The processors and the Supreme Court posed 
a more formidable problem. Bitterly resentful at 
having to pay the processing tax, the middlemen 
challenged its constitutionality and in a six to three 
vote the Supreme Court ruled in their favor in the 
United States v. Butler decision of January 6, 1936. 
During the nearly three years before Butler, the 
AAA succeeded in injecting $1.1 billion in benefit 
payments into the farm economy and contributed 
to a modest but desperately needed $2.5 billion in- 
crease in gross farm income. The AAA did succeed 
in involving many thousands for farmers in its com- 
mittee system, but the results were not always what 
the advocates of grassroots planning had envi- 
sioned. In the south, the committees empowered 
white landlords who took advantage of black and 
white tenants and sharecroppers. The AAA also en- 
couraged a dramatic growth in American Farm Bu- 
reau Federation membership, which in turn fos- 
tered a narrow interest group orientation on the 
part of many farmers. 

Following Butler, AAA programs shifted yet 
again. In response to the devastating droughts of 
1934 and 1936, which had greatly curtailed grain 
production, Henry Wallace began to advocate the 
creation of an Ever-Normal Granary. This would 
involve extensive CCC commodity loans and stor- 
age operations, which, Wallace argued, would en- 
sure stable food supplies and also help maintain 
higher levels of farm income. In addition, Congress 
approved the Soil Conservation and Domestic Al- 
lotment Act (1936), which authorized the AAA to 
pay farmers to shift some portion of their acreage 
to soil-conserving crops in place of surplus com- 
modities. In 1937 Wallace campaigned for a more 
extensive farm bill, which became the second Agri- 
cultural Adjustment Act (1938). The act formally es- 
tablished the CCC commodity loans and crop stor- 
age programs, provided conservation payments for 
growers who restricted production, established a 
system of crop insurance, and provided mandatory 



production controls, or marketing quotas, if two- 
thirds of the producers of a commodity voted to ac- 
cept them. The act was a compromise between 
Wallace, who favored price supports as a means of 
establishing economic security for farmers, and the 
Farm Bureau, which wanted rigid production con- 
trols and high price-support loans to ensure parity 
prices. 

Unlike the original Agricultural Adjustment 
Act, the second act envisioned the Department of 
Agriculture having a permanent role in supporting 
farm prices and incomes. The efficacy of the new 
tools, however, was almost immediately over- 
whelmed by the combination of an economic reces- 
sion, favorable growing weather, and a deteriorat- 
ing world trade situation. Faced with a new round 
of crises, the AAA and the CCC struggled to sustain 
prices and needed both supplemental appropria- 
tions from Congress and massive export subsidies 
for wheat, cotton, and corn to avoid sharp price 
breaks. Only the sudden increase in wartime de- 
mand prevented a major farm crisis at the start of 
the 1940s. 

ASSESSMENT 

Economists have criticized the AAA for its inef- 
fective production controls, for limiting American 
agricultural exports by pushing U.S. prices out of 
line with world prices, and for impeding adjust- 
ments in crop and livestock specializations. Histori- 
ans and other critics have criticized the AAA for 
programs that benefited successful commercial 
farmers at the expense of the rural poor and for 
spurring the growth of narrowly focused farm inter- 
est groups. Such criticisms have validity, but they 
should not obscure the fact that the AAA ended the 
catastrophic unraveling of the farm economy dur- 
ing the early Depression years, allowed many farm- 
ers to survive the 1930s, and stabilized the farm 
economy in ways that encouraged new investment 
in tractors and technology later in the decade. Nor 
should the AAA's critics overlook the limited tools 
and strategies available for devising a farm program 
amidst the Great Depression. 

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT; 
COMMODITY CREDIT CORPORATION (CCC); 
FARM POLICY; SUPREME COURT. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



Zl 



A G R I C U L T 



R E 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Badger, Anthony J. Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobac- 
co, and North Carolina. 1980. 

Clarke, Sally H. Regulation and the Revolution in United 
States Tarm Productivity. 1994. 

Conrad, David Eugene. The Porgotten Farmers: The Story 
of Sharecroppers in the New Deal. 1965. 

Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land: The Transformation of 
Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880. 1985. 

Fite, Gilbert C. George N. Peek and the Fight for Farm Pari- 
ty. 1954. 

Hamilton, David E. From New Day to New Deal: American 
Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928-1933. 
1991. 

Kirkendall, Richard S. Social Scientists and Farm Politics in 
the Age of Roosevelt. 1966. 

McConnell, Grant. The Decline of Agrarian Democracy. 
1953. 

Nourse, E. G, Joseph Davis, and John D. Black. Three 
Years of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. 
1937. 

Perkins, Van L. Crisis in Agriculture: The Agricultural Ad- 
justment Administration and the New Deal, 1933. 1969. 

Saloutos, Theodore. The American Farmer and the New 
Deal. 1982. 

Schuyler, Michael W. The Dread of Plenty: Agricultural Re- 
lief Activities of the Federal Government in the Middle 
West, 1933-1939. 1989. 

Skocpol, Theda, and Kenneth Finegold. State and Party 
in America's New Deal. 1995. 

David Hamilton 



AGRICULTURE 

Agriculture underwent fundamental changes dur- 
ing the Great Depression because of the crushing 
need of farmers to find relief from severe economic 
hardship and their need to make adjustments to 
their new position in American society. American 
farmers had been shifting away from self- 
sufficiency to commercialism since the Civil War, 
but the speed of the process began increasing at the 
start of the twentieth century and particularly since 
World War I. In the mid 1920s the prices of com- 
modities such as wheat and cotton slipped down- 
ward, and they fell harshly in 1930. Only with 
World War II did substantial improvement come. 



During that interval the position of the farmer as an 
independent yeoman changed to that of a busi- 
nessman dependent on government support. This 
development had been steadily creeping forward 
for the past generation, and the farmer now had to 
accept this role to remain a viable part of the Ameri- 
can economy. 

In 1930 agriculture found itself facing old and 
unresolved problems. To begin with, farm prices 
were simply too low. Cotton had been 28.7 cents 
per pound in 1924, but hit bottom at 5.9 cents in 
1931, and never rose above 12.4 cents during the 
Depression. Wheat followed a similar pattern, ris- 
ing in price but never reaching the level it had held 
in some years of the previous decade. Exports, long 
a vital part of the commodity market, also fell dra- 
matically, but the loss of this market had begun in 
the 1920s, partly because of America's new position 
as a global creditor after World War I. This new 
condition, along with the country's protective tar- 
iffs, severely hampered the ability of foreign buyers 
to tap the U. S. market and led to the collapse of ex- 
port sales in 1930. By the 1920s, furthermore, the 
United States had a surplus farm population, and 
with their incomes falling, farm workers were un- 
deremployed. In the South and Midwest, tenant 
farming reached high proportions, about 40 percent 
by 1930, and these farmers lived in extreme poverty. 
Once the Depression hit, consumer demand for 
farm produce dropped and sent agriculture spiral- 
ing downward. Since farmers had been steadily be- 
coming less self-sufficient and more dependent on 
cash flow, they fell into one of their most extreme 
periods of hardship. 

Wretched conditions in agriculture during the 
Depression had severe ramifications. For one thing, 
the rural farm population in 1930 made up about 25 
percent of the total U.S. population, but a larger 
percentage of Americans depended on agriculture. 
During the past generation urban America had be- 
come more cosmopolitan, but rural residents lacked 
the amenities of modern living, such as electric 
lighting, radios, running water, adequate health 
care, and education. For this segment of the popu- 
lation, the standard of living was below the national 
level, and rural educational and cultural opportuni- 
ties were not keeping pace. Until farm incomes im- 



22 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



G R I C U L T 



R E 




During the 1930s many farmers continued to rely on mules and horses to work their fields. These brothers, photographed in 1939, 
worked the land on their father's farm near Outlook in Yakima county, Washington. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs 
Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



proved, the gap in lifestyles between urban and 
rural Americans would remain. For these reasons, 
the administration of President Franklin D. Roose- 
velt believed that agriculture had equal importance 
with industry in restoring prosperity to the nation, 
and therein lay one of the important Depression- 
era changes related to agriculture. 

Under the aegis of the New Deal, numerous as- 
sistance and relief programs went into operation in 
hopes of bringing prosperity back to agriculture. 



The price support programs, particularly the first, 
the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 
which started in 1933, and the second AAA of 1938, 
set a guaranteed minimum price under staple 
crops. New Dealers thought improvements in sta- 
ple prices would also bring hikes in other agricul- 
tural goods. Along with the Commodity Credit 
Corporation (CCC), which offered farmers an op- 
portunity to store their crops in government ware- 
houses until commodity prices rose, the support 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



Z3 



AGRICULTURE 










«■■■■• 



A Farm Security Administration country superoisor and his assistant examine the oat crop of a rural rehabilitation borrower in 
West Carroll parish, Louisiana, in 1940. Many farmers kept their farms running during the Depression with loans and other aid 
from the Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



programs managed to raise prices, but only mod- 
estly. On the eve of America's entry into World War 
II, the United States still had large surpluses, or car- 
ryovers, in cotton, corn, and wheat. 

Price supports constituted only a portion of the 
federal assistance programs initiated during the 
Depression. In 1933 the Farm Credit Administra- 
tion began refinancing mortgage loans at low inter- 
est. Two years later the Farm Mortgage Moratorium 
Act implemented a three-year moratorium against 
seizure of farm property, which helped debt-laden 
farmers refinance their farms. That same year the 
Soil Conservation Service (SCS) went into opera- 
tion, and the Resettlement Administration (RA) 



undertook to furnish assistance to small farmers 
trying to buy land or relocate into different areas. 
The RA also offered assistance to tenants and 
sharecroppers trying to establish their own home- 
steads. In 1935 Roosevelt created the Rural Electri- 
fication Administration (REA) by executive order, 
but Congress gave it statutory authority in 1936. 
The REA began a program using farmer-owned co- 
operatives to provide rural residents with electricity. 
In 1936 the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allot- 
ment Act temporarily replaced the first AAA, which 
had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme 
Court. Later in 1937 the Farm Security Administra- 
tion went into operation. It absorbed and expanded 



Z4 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



G R I C U L T 



R E 




This farmer in Door county, Wisconsin, stopped cultivating his field to discuss his plans with the Farm Security Administration 
county supervisor in 1940. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



the operations of the RA by offering small land- 
owners, tenants, and sharecroppers opportunities 
to buy land, refurbish their homes, and participate 
in rural health cooperatives. 

These New Deal agencies represented a new 
effort to extend assistance and relief to agriculture. 
They offered help to all classes of farmers and land- 
owners, large and small, and to tenants and share- 
croppers. Not all the agencies survived past the 
New Deal, but a number of them, such as the REA, 
continued. What was probably the most important 
new concept of the Depression, the introduction of 
subsidized farming, became a regular feature of the 
American economy and continued into the twenty- 
first century. At the close of the Depression, agri- 
culture relied heavily on federal supports in various 



forms, ending the independence of farmers as indi- 
vidualistic yeomen. Farming was also on the road 
to becoming more commercial, a practice that had 
begun, however, prior to the Depression. 

NEW AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES 

Mechanization continued to advance during 
the Depression, though at a much slower rate. The 
Cotton Belt lagged drastically behind in the use of 
tractors and other implements owing to the techni- 
cal difficulty of developing machines to pick cotton 
and remove weeds in cotton fields. Southern farm- 
ers continued to rely heavily on hand labor and ani- 
mal power, but there were efforts nonetheless to 
develop a mechanical cotton picker by the Rust 
brothers and International Harvester. It was not 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



25 



A I D 



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DEPENDENT 



I L D R E N 



A D C 



until after World War II, however, that a mechani- 
cal picker became available. 

In 1937 rubber tires became available for trac- 
tors, which made them more attractive for a variety 
of chores and tasks other than the cultivation of 
crops. During the nine-year period after 1930, the 
number of tractors used in agriculture nearly dou- 
bled; most were general purpose tractors used in 
the grain belt, Corn Belt, and areas of specialized 
production, such as dairying and vegetable farming. 
Improvements in other devices like water pumps, 
irrigation systems, and small motors also greatly 
aided the farmer. 

Advances in seed varieties greatly aided pro- 
duction. Hybrid corn replaced much of the open- 
pollinated varieties in the Corn Belt, and wheat that 
was resistant to "rust" began to be more widely cul- 
tivated during the Depression. Similar progress oc- 
curred with sugar beets, soybeans, and grain sor- 
ghum. New cotton varieties resistant to wind 
damage encouraged the spread of cotton on the 
Texas plains. And California began to expand its 
acreage of cotton with the development of the acala 
variety. Research into livestock production contin- 
ued with advances in cross breeding, artificial in- 
semination, nutritional feeds, and disease preven- 
tion. All of these advances enabled farmers to 
obtain greater yields and thereby increase the 
country's total production. As animal power de- 
clined, more land became available for food crop 
production rather than animal feed. By the late 
1930s manpower needs were expected to drop, par- 
ticularly in the southern states where advances in 
mechanization would soon occur. 

Improvements in mechanization and technolo- 
gy caused farmers to have greater capital needs, 
shoving them into commercial operations. In order 
to earn profit, landowners needed to expand the 
size of their operations, meaning more land, larger 
herds of livestock, and the use of more hybrid varie- 
ties of crops. Higher production per acre and great- 
er total volume of output became mandatory to re- 
main a viable part of the economy. 

CONCLUSION 

Once war broke out in Europe in 1939 and the 
economy began to improve from the effects of the 



war, agriculture was on the threshold of entering a 
new era. The federal government had become a 
partner in farming operations. Small family farms, 
or "dirt farmers," faced greater difficulty surviving 
in the competitive economics of commercial farm- 
ing, and tenants and sharecroppers began to sense 
the draw of city life as the United States started in- 
dustrializing for the war. 

The Depression had brought recognition that 
agriculture needed to modernize and overcome its 
reliance on hand labor and animal power. It was 
clear that small family operations would no longer 
provide an adequate standard of living, and if farm 
residents intended to keep pace in the increasingly 
modern and cosmopolitan world, they would have 
to abandon farming or operate on a commercial 
basis. This process had been underway prior to the 
Depression, of course, but the compelling hardship 
of the era forced this realization upon agriculture. 

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT; 

AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMINSTRATION 
(AAA); AMERICAN FARM BUREAU FEDERATION 
(AFBF). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Conrad, David Eugene. The Forgotten Farmers: The Story 
of Sharecroppers in the New Deal. 1965. 

Saloutos, Theodore. The American Farmer and the New 
Deal. 1982. 

U. S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers in a Changing 
World (Yearbook of Agriculture) . 1940. 

D. Clayton Brown 



AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN 
(ADC) 

Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), Title IV of the 
Social Security Act of 1935, provided federal match- 
ing grants to state programs for poor, "dependent" 
children. Although it was one of the least contro- 
versial provisions of the 1935 law, ADC paved the 
way for the single-parent family entitlement 
("welfare") that has provoked so much opposition 
and public criticism since the Depression. 

ADC federalized the state mothers' aid pro- 
grams that had been passed during the World War 



Z6 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN (ADC) 




The Aid to Dependent Children program was established to provide assistance to low -income families with minor children, like 
these in Hale county, Alabama, photographed by Walker Evans in 1936. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, 
FSA/OWI Collection 



I era. These were state laws mandating that local 
governments assist mothers in homes where the 
"breadwinner" was incapacitated. A product of the 
Progressive -era reform crusade, mothers' aid pro- 
grams were often justified as a way of keeping low- 
income families intact and keeping children out of 
institutional care. The caseloads were generally 
small, as authorities sought to restrict mothers' aid 
to a few "deserving" recipients who conformed to 
middle-class norms. Mothers' aid programs spread 
quickly and were implemented by nearly every 
state in the two decades that preceded the Great 
Depression. In most localities, mothers' aid pro- 
grams were administered separately from tradition- 
al public and private "general relief" programs that 
assisted impoverished families and single individu- 
als. 



During the early years of the Great Depression, 
however, it was general relief that absorbed the 
bulk of unemployed workers seeking aid. Mothers' 
pension caseloads increased, but these programs 
were dwarfed by the national unemployment relief 
system, which by late 1932 was bankrolled in part 
by federal funds from the Reconstruction Finance 
Corporation. Mothers' aid programs were initially 
not eligible to receive federal funding under the 
New Deal's relief program, the Federal Emergency 
Relief Administration. 

When the Committee on Economic Security 
(CES), which wrote the Social Security Act, was 
created in June 1934, it was assumed that state 
mothers' aid programs would receive federal funds 
under the new legislation. This fact, coupled with 
the decision later in the year to abandon the federal 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



27 



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DEPENDENT 



I L D R E N 



A D C 



general relief program, represented an abrupt 
about-face for the New Deal. Now so-called "cate- 
gorical" programs (programs targeted to the elder- 
ly, children, and the disabled) would receive federal 
aid, and general assistance would be returned to 
the states. 

The planning and legislative process that pro- 
duced ADC attracted little public attention, yet 
there was a good deal of behind-the-scenes ma- 
neuvering for control of the program. Initially it was 
assumed that the United States Children's Bureau, 
the federal agency that oversaw national child wel- 
fare polices, would administer ADC. Children's Bu- 
reau officials actually wrote the initial policy draft 
for the CES. But these officials were a minority on 
the advisory committees that assisted the CES. Just 
prior to the submission of the legislation to Con- 
gress, the ADC program was taken from the Bureau 
and given to the Federal Emergency Relief Admin- 
istration, the New Deal agency that had been ad- 
ministering relief since 1933. This was a small and 
short-lived victory for the new federal bureaucracy 
of the early New Deal. 

Congress eventually decided to have ADC ad- 
ministered by a Bureau of Public Assistance located 
within the new Social Security Board. The Bureau 
of Public Assistance was also charged with admin- 
istering the larger and more politically important 
grant program for the elderly (Old Age Assistance). 
ADC, as the name implied, was now targeted to 
children and the term "mothers' pensions" was 
abandoned. Initially, federal grants provided for 
one-third of state program expenditures. This was 
expanded to a fifty-fifty matching grant in 1939. 

The overall impact of the new federal program 
was to liberalize the mothers' aid policies inherited 
from the Progressive era. To be eligible for federal 
aid, states were required to allocate funds for ADC 
and operate programs in all local areas. As a result, 
many states that had previously resisted appropri- 
ating funds for needy families were now forced to 
do so, and programs were established in many lo- 
calities that had never implemented mothers' aid. 
State and local policies that restricted aid to a limit- 
ed number of "worthy" widows were weakened, 
particularly by the influx of single parents who had 
worked their way onto the federal general relief 
rolls during the early years of the Depression. 



Still, ADC incorporated many of the restrictive 
features of the old mothers' pension programs. No 
adequate standard of aid was established, and pay- 
ments varied widely from state to state. States were 
allowed to keep traditional mothers' aid provisions 
requiring that aid be given only to those who main- 
tained a "suitable home" for their children. While 
such language could be used to increase benefit 
payments to make the homes more "suitable" (the 
approach federal officials advocated), it was also 
used to deny aid to needy applicants who did not 
conform to white middle-class norms. In southern 
states, suitable home requirements were widely 
used to deny aid to needy black families. 

Some historians have argued that the limita- 
tions inherent in ADC and the flaws in its early im- 
plementation sowed the seeds of the modern wel- 
fare dilemma. The New Deal's Social Security 
legislation, it is suggested, created a two-tiered 
welfare system: one set of popular national pro- 
grams (old-age insurance and unemployment com- 
pensation) existing side-by-side with an unpopular 
and politically vulnerable welfare entitlement 
(ADC). Others argue that the New Deal established 
a limited but politically defensible entitlement for 
children and suggest that the "welfare explosion" 
of the 1960s altered the original intent of ADC. Yet 
all agree that the ADC policy, which received virtu- 
ally no attention when the Social Security Act was 
passed in 1935, produced unforeseen consequences 
in social policy and politics 

See Also: CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS, IMPACT 
OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; SOCIAL 
SECURITY ACT. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bell, Winifred. Aid to Dependent Children. 1965. 

Brown, Tosephine. Public Relief, 1929-1939. 1940. 

Gordon, Linda. Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and 
the History of Welfare, 1890-1935. 1994. 

Howard, Christopher. "Sowing the Seeds of 'Welfare': 
The Transformation of Mothers' Pensions, 
1900-1940." Journal of Policy History 4, no. 2 (1992): 
188-227. 

Piven, Frances Fox, and Cloward, Richard A. Regulating 
the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. 1971. 

Skocpol, Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Polit- 
ical Origins of Social Policy in the United States. 1992. 



Z8 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ALABAMA SHARECROPPERS 



N I N 



Teles, Stephen M. Who's Welfare?: AFDC and Elite Poli- 
tics. 1996. 

Jeff Singleton 



ALABAMA SHARECROPPERS' 

UNION 

The Alabama Sharecroppers' Union was the largest 
Communist-organized, black-led mass organiza- 
tion in the Deep South during the Great Depres- 
sion. Composed of African-American sharecrop- 
pers, tenant farmers, and agricultural wage 
laborers, the union at its peak numbered an esti- 
mated ten to twelve thousand members. However, 
due to persistent opposition from white southern- 
ers, shifts in agricultural production, unfavorable 
New Deal policies, and, ultimately, lack of Commu- 
nist support, the union was never able to effect per- 
manent change in working conditions for rural 
blacks in the South. 

Founded in 1931, the Alabama Sharecroppers' 
Union was part of a larger Communist Party effort 
to organize African Americans as a separate group 
of Americans that required "liberation" from capi- 
talist society. Most of the union's first members 
were semi-independent African -American farmers 
and sharecroppers who had been displaced by in- 
creasing farm mechanization and depressed com- 
modity prices. Within months of the group's found- 
ing, many members and nonmembers had to go 
into hiding after local white authorities killed an Af- 
rican-American union leader, Ralph Gray, in a dis- 
pute over working conditions. 

After Gray's death the organization regrouped 
and adopted the name Sharecroppers' Union. Fear- 
ing more white violence, the new secretary of the 
union, Al Murphy, an African-American Commu- 
nist from Georgia, turned the group into a secret 
underground organization whose members were 
armed for self defense. Under Murphy's leadership, 
the union spread into Alabama's "black belt" coun- 
ties and beyond to the Alabama-Georgia border; 
white violence spread along with it. A confronta- 
tion between white authorities and Sharecroppers' 
Union members in Reeltown, Alabama, in 1932 left 



three dead and several others wounded; eventually, 
five Sharecroppers' Union members were convicted 
and jailed for assault with a deadly weapon. 

Still, the Sharecroppers' Union continued to 
grow as African-American sharecroppers faced 
with evictions resulting from New Deal acreage re- 
duction policies joined in large numbers. By June 
1933 the union's membership was estimated at two 
thousand; fifteen months later estimates ran as 
high as eight thousand members. 

In 1934, a new white Sharecroppers' Union 
leader, Clyde Johnson, tried to merge the group 
with the newly formed Socialist-led Southern Ten- 
ant Farmers' Union, but the effort failed when the 
leadership of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union 
denounced the Sharecroppers' Union as a Commu- 
nist front. Meanwhile, white violence persisted. 
Two strikes in Alabama in the spring and summer 
of 1935 left six dead and dozens of strikers jailed 
and beaten. 

In 1936 the Sharecroppers' Union, now at its 
peak membership, moved into Louisiana and Mis- 
sissippi as its leaders tried again to merge with the 
Southern Tenant Farmers' Union. When that at- 
tempt failed, the Communist Party ordered the 
Sharecroppers' Union to disband. Sharecroppers 
and tenant farmers were transferred to the National 
Farmers' Union, while the agricultural wage labor- 
ers of the Sharecroppers' Union were told to join 
the Agricultural Worker's Union, an affiliate of the 
American Federation of Labor (AFL). However, 
some Sharecroppers' Union locals in Alabama and 
Louisiana chose not to affiliate and remained inde- 
pendent into the 1940s. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION; COMMUNIST PARTY; 
SOUTH, GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dyson, Lowell K. Red Harvest: The Communist Party and 
American Farmers. 1982. 

Shaw, Nate. All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, 
compiled by Theordore Rosengarten. 1974. 

Mary Jo Binker 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



Z9 



A L E 



A N D E R 



WILLI 



ALEXANDER, WILLIAM. See FARM 
SECURITY ADMINISTRATION (FSA). 



ALLEN, FREDERICK LEWIS 

Frederick Lewis Allen (July 5, 1890-February 13, 
1954) was a writer, magazine editor, and popular 
historian. The son of an Episcopalian minister, 
Allen was descended from a line of estimable New 
Englanders that went back to the Mayflower. He re- 
ceived a superb education at Groton School and 
then at Harvard University, where he helped edit 
the literary magazine, and earned a B A. in English 
in 1912 and an MA. in modern languages in 1913. 
In 1914, he was hired by the prestigious Atlantic 
Monthly. After working for the Council on National 
Defense from 1917 to 1918 and a stint as Harvard's 
publicity manager from 1919 to 1923, Allen was 
hired as an editor for Harper's Magazine and spent 
the rest of his career there, becoming Harper's edi- 
tor-in-chief in 1941. A skillful and sensitive editor, 
Allen attracted distinguished contributors to Har- 
per's and solidified the magazine's reputation for 
intelligence and literary brilliance. He stole eve- 
nings and weekends from his editorial duties, how- 
ever, to write the books that were to make him fa- 
mous. 

In 1931, Allen published his best-known work, 
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen- 
Twenties. It was a remarkable survey of American 
popular culture from 1919 to 1929, written in a live- 
ly and engaging style, and filled with dramatic an- 
ecdotes and colorful personalities. Notable both for 
its acute perceptions of recent times and for its ap- 
peal to the general reading public, Only Yesterday 
sold more than a million copies and ran through 
twenty-two printings. Although Allen's book, 
along with numerous other influences, may have 
helped to fasten to the 1920s its exuberant, carefree, 
jazz-age image, it should not be dismissed as mere 
popularization: The historian William Leuchten- 
burg remarked that Only Yesterday was "written in 
such a lively style that academicians often under- 
rate its soundness." 

Allen tried to duplicate his success with a look 
at the 1930s, Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-Thirties 



in America, published in 1940. It was inevitably a 
more somber and serious portrait, emphasizing 
economic hardship, Franklin Roosevelt, and the 
darkening international scene. Since Yesterday re- 
tained the absorbing literary style of the earlier 
work and also became a best-seller, although it 
never reached the success of Only Yesterday. In ad- 
dition to these two works, Allen wrote three impor- 
tant books in his trademarked manner: The Lords of 
Creation (1935) was a study of Wall Street high fi- 
nance, centering on the figure of J. P. Morgan, a 
subject to which Allen returned in The Great Pier- 
pont Morgan (1949). Finally, Allen attempted a sur- 
vey of the first half of the twentieth century in The 
Big Change: America Transforms Itself 1900-1950 
(1952). 

Allen was respected and admired by his col- 
leagues, not only for his literary talents, but also for 
his generosity, modesty, fairness, and compassion. 
He died in New York City at the age of sixty-three. 

See Also: COMMUNICATIONS AND THE PRESS; 

HISTORY, INTERPRETATION, AND MEMORY OF 
THE GREAT DEPRESSION. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

"F. L. A. (1890-1954)." Harper's Magazine 208 (April 
1954): 74-75. 

Payne, Darwin. The Man of Only Yesterday: Frederick 
Lewis Allen. 1975. 

David W. Levy 



AMALGAMATED CLOTHING 
WORKERS (ACW) 

Founded in 1914, the Amalgamated Clothing 
Workers of America (ACW) was one of the nation's 
first independent industrial unions. Its leadership 
was largely drawn from the Jewish political left, in- 
cluding socialists like president Sidney Hillman, 
anarchists, syndicalists, and others. Targeting 
workers in the profitable men's clothing industry, 
the ACW actively organized women and immi- 
grant — especially southern and eastern Europe- 
an — workers. The ACW experienced its first suc- 



30 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A M A L G 



T E D 



CLOT 



I N G WORKERS 



A C W 



cesses in the 1910s, in an industry rapidly 
undergoing structural changes, where labor orga- 
nizers were bedeviled by production divisions be- 
tween "primary sector" firms like Hart, Schaffner & 
Marx that operated on a large-scale, rationalized 
shop basis, and garment industry subcontractors 
who engaged in the most exploitative forms of 
sweated-labor production. By the time of the Great 
Depression, the ACW had established itself as one 
of the leading independent industrial unions, al- 
though the most skilled workers in some shops, like 
cutters and tailors (called "labor aristocrats," some- 
times derisively), remained outside of the organiza- 
tion. 

The economic contraction of the early Depres- 
sion years devastated the ACW. By some estimates, 
only 10 percent of the members of the ACW were 
employed in January 1932, while union officials ne- 
gotiated temporary wage cuts (euphemistically 
termed "loans") to keep shops open and members 
employed. Both child labor and sweated labor ex- 
panded within the industry; in Baltimore, nearly 25 
percent of women workers in the industry labored 
in illegal conditions, and enforcement of local labor 
codes proved impossible. Open shop employers or- 
ganized to protect their interests. In New York, 
racketeering and criminal activity affected several 
locals; Hillman himself brought charges against 
corrupt union officials associated with the Jewish 
underworld. As conditions worsened, president 
Hillman vilified both the Herbert Hoover adminis- 
tration and the craft-based American Federation of 
Labor for their staunch adherence to the ethic of 
voluntarism. Militant leaders like Hillman called for 
a "new unionism" that linked workers' demands to 
government intervention in the economy, a devel- 
opment realized with the 1932 election of Franklin 
D. Roosevelt and the institution of the New Deal. 

The passage of the National Industrial Recov- 
ery Act coincided with aggressive ACW organizing 
drives. Hillman's influence within the Roosevelt 
administration resulted in a men's clothing code in 
the NRA that was advantageous to the ACW; con- 
sequently, homeworkers (sweated labor) were re- 
employed in manufacturing establishments, wages 
rose significantly, child labor was prevented, and 
membership surged within the union. Increasingly, 



the union's membership included not only Jewish, 
but also Italian workers; among the former, sectari- 
an political differences sometimes threatened to 
disrupt relations between the union's locals and its 
national officials, as in New York and Wisconsin in 
the late 1930s when Hillman prevented ACW locals 
from affiliating with state CIO councils heavily in- 
fluenced by Communist Party members. There 
were some fascist tendencies among Italian work- 
ers, especially in New York and Boston. Although 
women were generally discouraged from pursuing 
leadership positions within the ACW, the organiza- 
tion's elaborate cultural program, including labor 
colleges, helped to hold together an increasingly 
ethnically diverse membership. 

The ACW was a founding member of the Con- 
gress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). With sup- 
port from the CIO, the union expanded its mem- 
bership, taking in garment workers in the 
manufacture of nightclothes, work pants, and cov- 
eralls, as well as workers in laundry and dry- 
cleaning establishments. The ACW successfully ne- 
gotiated its first nationwide contract in 1937, in- 
cluding a significant wage increase. At the same 
time, Hillman and ACW organizers embarked on 
an ambitious plan to organize southern textile 
workers into the Textile Workers Organizing Com- 
mittee (TWOC), an undertaking that achieved only 
moderate success despite favorable rulings from the 
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in North 
Carolina and elsewhere. 

By the end of the 1930s, local ACW officials 
often found themselves at odds with national union 
officials, particularly in times of economic recession 
when local officials negotiated "local agreements," 
often calling for lower wages or "give-backs," to the 
national contract. On political issues, however, the 
ACW rank-and-file generally worked in concert 
with its leadership. Like Hillman and other leaders 
within the union, workers had flirted with third 
party movements, including New York's American 
Labor Party, in the mid-1930s. But most had re- 
turned to the Democratic Party by 1940, when Hill- 
man turned the ACW annual convention into a ve- 
hicle for Roosevelt's reelection in a grand "labor 
unity" pageant. Members responded enthusiasti- 
cally, voting in record numbers for Roosevelt and 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



31 



k H [ H I C 



[ X D U 5 



k H 



thus helping to further solidify the labor- 
government coalition that characterized much of 
the ACW's activities during the Depression years. 

See Also: AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); 
CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS 
(CIO); HILLMAN, SIDNEY; INTERNATIONAL 
LADIES GARMENT WORKERS UNION (ILGWU); 
ORGANIZED LABOR. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Argensinger, Jo Ann. Making the Amalgamated: Gender, 
Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry, 
1899-1939. 1999. 

Bernstein, Irving. The Lean Years: A History of the Ameri- 
can Worker, 1920-1933. 1960. 

Fraser, Steven. Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the 
Rise of American Labor. 1991. 

Seidman, Joel. The Needle Trades. 1942. 

Zeiger, Robert. The CIO, 1935-1955. 1995. 

Nancy Quam-Wickham 



AMERICAN EXODUS, AN 

In 1939 photographer Dorothea Lange and sociolo- 
gist Paul Schuster Taylor collaborated to publish a 
record of their social science observations and con- 
clusions drawn from their experiences in the Great 
Depression. They had collected the data for that re- 
cord, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Ero- 
sion, over the previous five years and while traveling 
through rural America under the aegis of the Reset- 
tlement Administration and, after the agency's 
name changed on January 1, 1937, the Farm Securi- 
ty Administration (RA-FSA). The book is divided 
into five sections: Old South, Plantation Under the 
Machine, Midcontinent, Dust Bowl, and Last West. 
All but nine of the photographs in the book are 
Lange's. 

Agricultural reform, the agenda of the RA-FSA, 
shaped American Exodus. Lange and Taylor con- 
cluded that the migrants who fled to California 
from devastated rural areas in the South and Mid- 
west could be compared to Europeans who had fled 
agricultural disasters to immigrate to America. 



Lange and Taylor saw a close parallel to one cause 
of European emigration: a process of agricultural 
consolidation known as enclosure, which dissolved 
small family-occupied or family-owned farms into 
large single-owner tracts. Enclosure in America was 
exacerbated by secondary hardships: agricultural 
mechanization and disfranchisement due to the 
poll tax. In addition, Lange and Taylor set the book 
in the wider cultural narrative of Frederick Jackson 
Turner's then-popular frontier thesis. 

Many of the captions accompanying the photo- 
graphs are descriptive of the subject of the photo- 
graph or of conditions that Lange and Taylor per- 
ceived had created the opportunity for the 
photograph to be taken; other captions consist of 
reported statistical data or historical quotes. Still 
others are quotations recorded by Lange and Taylor 
from the subjects in the photographs; some of these 
captions are extracts from longer statements, repro- 
duced out of context. 

Lange and Taylor had difficulty persuading a 
publisher to assume the expensive project. The suc- 
cess of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) 
and widespread attention drawn by Carey McWil- 
liams's Factories in the Field (1939) ultimately con- 
vinced Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc., to take the project 
on. The book's distribution on January 19, 1940, five 
days before the release of John Ford's highly popu- 
lar film version of Steinbeck's novel, gave sales a 
boost. Nonetheless, contemporary critics unfavor- 
ably compared Lange and Taylor's self-styled social 
science reportage/argument to the compelling dra- 
matic narrative of the Joad family, notwithstanding 
American Exodus's subsequent and enduring critical 
acclaim. 

With national attention turning to World War 
II, An American Exodus went quickly out of print. It 
was reissued by Yale University Press in 1969 for 
the Oakland Museum of California and was pub- 
lished in a facsimile edition in 1999 by Jean-Michel 
Place. 

See Also: AGRICULTURE; LANGE, DOROTHEA; 
MIGRATION; PHOTOGRAPHY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Lange, Dorothea, and Paul Taylor. An American Exodus: 
A Record of Human Erosion. 1939. Reprint, 1999. 



32 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AMERICAN 



FARM 



R E A 



FEDERATION 



A F B f 



Mayer, Henry. "The Making of a Documentary Book." In 
An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion 
(1939). 1999. 

Sampsell, Kate. "To Grab a Hunk of Lightning': An In- 
tellectual History of Depression-Era American Pho- 
tography." Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University. 
2002. 

Shindo, Charles J. Dust Bowl Migrants in the American 
Imagination. 1997. 

Stourdze, Sam. "Introduction." In An American Exodus: 
A Record of Human Erosion (1939). 1999. 

Kate Sampsell 



AMERICAN FARM BUREAU 
FEDERATION (AFBF) 

Organized in 1919, the American Farm Bureau Fed- 
eration (AFBF) initially sought educational and co- 
operative marketing solutions to the economic 
emergency gripping agriculture throughout the 
1920s. However, as these failed and the crisis deep- 
ened, membership waned. From a 1921 high of 
466,422 families, membership fell to 205,348 by 
1932. 

Desperate, the traditionally Republican AFBF 
offered its support to Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt 
repeatedly declared that insufficient farm income 
was at the root of the Depression and promised to 
direct the nation's attention to the farm crisis. Even 
before his election, Roosevelt met with farm lead- 
ers, including AFBF President Edward O'Neal, to 
discuss solutions to the emergency. 

What ultimately arose was the Agricultural Ad- 
justment Act (AAA). Allotting each producer a 
share of the domestic market required the involve- 
ment of tens of thousands of farmers. Counting pi- 
glets, measuring ground, and examining productiv- 
ity records dictated that extension agents enlist 
volunteers, most of whom were farm bureau mem- 
bers. Indeed, some argue that the AFBF's support 
for the AAA was predicated on the use of extension 
agents, assuming that their close association would 
revive flagging membership and finances. 

Membership climbed steadily during the 1930s, 
particularly in the cotton states. Some farmers may 



have been misled into joining the AFBF as a pre- 
sumed prerequisite for participation in the AAA. 
Elsewhere, membership rose with the suggestion 
that dues be deducted from benefit checks. Others 
joined hoping membership would gain them favor 
from county agents. In 1937, the AFBF recorded 
409,766 memberships. 

The substitution of the Soil Conservation and 
Domestic Allotment Act for the AAA gained initial 
support from the AFBF. Both programs relied upon 
the oversight of county agents and their associated 
farm bureaus. The price supports and economic as- 
sistance provided by the Commodity Credit Corpo- 
ration and the Farm Credit Administration also gar- 
nered AFBF favor. Members and leadership alike 
perceived of both agencies as relief mechanisms for 
commercially oriented, land-owning farmers. Sup- 
port for the second AAA was similarly based. 

Not all New Deal agricultural enterprises found 
favor with the AFBF. Particularly distasteful to the 
organization were the Resettlement Administration 
and its successor, the Farm Security Administration 
(FSA). According to the AFBF, FSA aid to tenant 
and small-scale farmers hindered agriculture's re- 
covery and prevented its efficient growth. The FSA 
focused more on reform than relief and did not 
have a particular role for county agents or farm bu- 
reau members. 

Whether a response to the increased visibility 
of the AFBF during the New Deal years, the per- 
ceived necessity of membership in the organiza- 
tion, or the improved farm economy of the 1930s, 
membership by 1940 reached 444,485 families. By 
2003 the organization had grown to 5,000,000 
members. 

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT (AAA); 
FARM POLICY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

American Farm Bureau. Homepage at: www.fb.com 

Campbell, Christina McFadyen. The Farm Bureau and the 
New Deal: A Study of the Making of National Farm Pol- 
icy, 1933-40. 1962. 

Kile, Orville M. The Farm Bureau through Three Decades. 
1948. 

Saloutos, Theodore. The American Farmer and the New 
Deal. 1982. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 6 R E A F DEPRESSION 



33 



AMERICAN FEDERATION E L 



B R 



E L 



Schuyler, Michael W. The Dread of Plenty: Agricultural Re- 
lief Activities of the Federal Government in the Middle 
West, 1933-1939. 1989. 

Kimberly K. Porter 



AMERICAN FEDERATION OF 
LABOR (AFL) 



American labor movement. The fact that it obtained 
significantly improved working conditions for its 
members is undeniable, and the federation pointed 
to its record of gaining higher wages, shorter hours, 
workmen's compensation, laws against child labor, 
an eight-hour workday for government employees, 
and the exemption of labor from antitrust legisla- 
tion as proof of the success of its conservatism in 
comparison with other unions of its day. 



The American Federation of Labor (AFL) began as 
a conservative response to earlier labor unions in 
the United States. Late nineteenth-century labor 
leaders who opposed the socialist ideals of the 
Knights of Labor, as well as its belief in a central- 
ized labor movement, organized what became the 
AFL. The organization's founders believed that 
each member union should have a considerable de- 
gree of self-rule and the power to bring its concerns 
and views to an executive board that would work 
to implement agreed upon goals. Toward that end, 
representatives of a number of craft unions met in 
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1881 and formed the 
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions 
in the United States and Canada. Five years later at 
a meeting in Columbus, Ohio, this group reorga- 
nized and changed its name to the American Feder- 
ation of Labor. Samuel Gompers was behind the 
move of the cigar workers and other craft unions to 
make a clean break from the Knights of Labor. 
Gompers became the first president of the AFL and 
held that post, except for one year (1895), from 1886 
until his death in 1924. 

Under the AFL's plan of organization, individ- 
ual workers held membership in craft unions, while 
those unions belonged to, or were affiliated with, 
the AFL. These craft unions were made up of skilled 
workers, such as plumbers or electricians. The AFL 
resisted organizing or affiliating with industrial 
unions that were made up of all the workers in a 
particular industry, such as automobile workers. 

In conformity with its conservative nature, the 
AFL refused to form a labor party, generally re- 
frained from political action, and tended to empha- 
size its ability to promote labor-management har- 
mony. Because the AFL opposed Socialist and 
Communist influence, it considered itself a truly 



THE AFL DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION 

During the Great Depression, the AFL began to 
chart new paths while adapting older approaches to 
new conditions. At the beginning of the Depres- 
sion, for example, the AFL called for a broad ap- 
proach that took into account production, employ- 
ment, and consumption. The AFL's program called 
for a federal employment service, public works, and 
a federal program to stabilize management and 
labor, with labor input. Moreover, the AFL called 
for the establishment of a federal bureau of labor 
statistics to compile accurate unemployment data. 

The AFL also called on the president to estab- 
lish a national relief committee, and supported 
Herbert Hoover's President's Emergency Commit- 
tee on Employment. The AFL's member unions do- 
nated time and aid to get the relief movement 
working, and later in the decade the federation 
supported what became the Wagner Act (National 
Labor Relations Act, 1935), which protected organi- 
zation efforts and gave unions federal protection. 

Although the AFL initially rejected unemploy- 
ment insurance, branding it as un-American, mem- 
ber unions supported it and pressed the federa- 
tion's executive council to do likewise. The council 
however, repeated its stand that unemployment in- 
surance would foster idleness and retard recovery, 
citing the experience of Great Britain and Germany 
to support its opposition. During the year the AFL 
executive council indicated repeatedly that it would 
not alter its stand against unemployment insur- 
ance. The council's further argument against un- 
employment insurance was that it would require 
registration of every worker and lead to control by 
federal and state governments. This control would, 
the council argued, lead to a limit on the rights of 
union workers to fight for better conditions and 



3<, 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AMERICAN F E D E R 



E I N 



E LA 



R 



A F L 



would weaken unions by forcing workers to take 
jobs in non-union plants. 

The AFL, in sum, had three basic ideas about 
the Depression: (1) The Depression was caused by 
the failure of wages and salaries to keep up with in- 
dustry's power to produce; (2) management caused 
the Depression because of its failure to maintain a 
balance between production and consumption; and 
(3) government had a responsibility to help workers 
find jobs and should push management toward 
adopting policies that promoted stability. To com- 
bat the effects of the Depression, the AFL urged 
that working hours be reduced to help stabilize in- 
dustry. The federation also called for the govern- 
ment to establish a national economic council to 
maintain economic equilibrium through a national 
employment system, efficient industry planning for 
production, public works, vocational guidance and 
retraining, studies of technological unemployment 
and relief proposals, and a general program of edu- 
cation to meet the changing needs of industry. The 
AFL called, additionally, for a five-day workweek 
and six-hour workday. Finally, the AFL called on 
Hoover to convene a joint management-labor 
meeting to develop a plan to end the Depression. 

During the Depression, the AFL began to take 
more notice of industrial unions. There were two 
major industrial unions in the AFL at the beginning 
of the Depression, the Brewery Workers and the 
United Mine Workers. The United Mine Workers, 
under John L. Lewis, began to push the AFL toward 
organizing other industrial workers, and the feder- 
ation was receptive to this stimulus. The problems 
faced by the railway unions further moved the AFL 
into support of industrial unionism. The railway 
unions faced serious problems, including cuts in 
wages, when the railway industry underwent major 
reorganization, and railway workers became more 
radical. The AFL's advocacy of industrial stabiliza- 
tion with governmental aid made it important to 
foster industrial unionism. Moreover, the AFL 
changed its policy from one of opposition to gov- 
ernment aid in union-management negotiations to 
one of advocating such government intervention. 
Federal protection for collective bargaining became 
one of the AFL's major goals. 

During the Depression the AFL did not cling 
rigidly to conservative positions. Rather, it began to 



embrace bolder views, reaching out for solutions to 
various segments of the labor movement. The fact 
that the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 
embraced more radical positions long overshad- 
owed the major changes that the Depression stim- 
ulated in the AFL. 



THE CREATION OF THE CIO AND ITS 
CHALLENGE TO THE AFL 

From its beginnings, the AFL had opposed in- 
dustrial unions. Conditions, however, were greatly 
different in the United States of the 1930s. World 
War I had changed the country forever, and it had 
become a great industrial power. The Great De- 
pression further changed social and economic reali- 
ty, making clear how closely and inextricably social 
and economic conditions were intertwined. 

A large minority of the AFL's members recog- 
nized the necessity of organizing industrial work- 
ers. The mass-production industries, including 
steel, automobiles, and rubber, required organiza- 
tion on an industry-wide basis. John L. Lewis, head 
of the United Mine Workers of America, recognized 
the need for industrial unions, and he became lead- 
er of the group within the AFL that formed a Com- 
mittee for Industrial Organization in 1935. The CIO 
left the AFL in 1938, and changed its name to the 
Congress of Industrial Organizations, immediately 
launching organizing drives in the industrial sector 
and achieving spectacular success with the aid of 
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's strong sup- 
port. 

The two confederations of unions remained 
separated until 1955 when George Meany of the 
AFL and Walter Reuther of the CIO led a drive to 
merge them. The new organization, the American 
Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Or- 
ganizations (AFL-CIO), elected George Meany as 
its president. Despite some problems, including 
Reuther's withdrawal of the automobile workers 
and the expulsion of the Teamsters Union, the 
merger has held. The decline in union membership 
and power since the 1950s has been a major factor 
in keeping the AFL-CIO together. 

See Also: COLLECTIVE BARGAINING; CONGRESS OF 
INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (CIO); GREEN, 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



35 



A M E R I C 



GUIDE 



SERIES 



WILLIAM; INTERNATIONAL LONGSHOREMEN'S 
ASSOCIATION; LABOR'S NON-PARTISAN 
LEAGUE; ORGANIZED LABOR. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bancroft, Gertrude, and the U.S. Social Science Research 
Council. The American Labor Force: Its Growth and 
Changing Composition. 1958. 

Brody, David. Labor's Cause: Main Themes on the History 
of the American Worker. 1993. 

Browder, Laura. Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in De- 
pression America. 1998. 

Galenson, Walter. The CIO Challenge to the ALL: A History 
of the American Labor Movement, 1935-1941. 1960. 

Goldberg, Arthur J. AFL-CIO, Labor United. New York: 
McGraw-Hill, 1956. 

Gompers, Samuel, ed. Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An 
Autobiography. 1925. 

Gould, William B. Black Workers in White Unions: fob Dis- 
crimination in the United States. 1977. 

Harris, Herbert. Labor's Civil War. 1940. 

Jacoby, Daniel. Laboring for Freedom: A New Look at the 
History of Labor in America. 1998. 

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American Peo- 
ple in Depression and War, 1929-1945. 1999. 

McKelvey, Jean Trepp. AFL Attitudes toward Production, 
1900-1932. 1952. 

Millis, Harry A., and Emily Clark Brown. From the Wagner 
Act to Taft-Hartley: A Study of National Labor Policy 
and Labor Relations. 1950. 

Northrup, Herbert R. Organized Labor and the Negro. 
1944. 

Northrup, Herbert, and Gordon F. Bloom. Government 
and Labor: The Role of Government in Union- 
Management Relations. 1963. 

O'Brien, Ruth Ann. Workers' Paradox: The Republican Ori- 
gins of New Deal Labor Policy, 1886-1935. 1998. 

Frank A. Salamone 



in length, and include a brief history of the state, as 
well as descriptions of its geography, culture, in- 
dustry, and agriculture. In addition to the state 
guides, the series also produced shorter guides and 
pamphlets for major cities, including Los Angeles, 
New Orleans, and Philadelphia; regional guides for 
such areas as the Oregon Trail and U.S. Route One, 
which ran from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, 
Florida; and local guides to such sites as Death Val- 
ley and Mount Hood. 

Produced by the Federal Writers' Project of the 
Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Ameri- 
can Guide series, like other WPA ventures, aimed 
to give meaningful skilled work to unemployed 
Americans. No comparable guide series existed, 
while the seemingly neutral content of the guides 
promised not to attract controversy. Generically, 
the guides represent a combination of encyclopedia 
and travel narrative; their prose is economical. Al- 
though the writing in most guides is not credited, 
the American Guide series employed the talents of 
more than 7,500 writers, including major figures. 
For instance, the Illinois guide featured the work of 
Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, and 
Jack Conroy. 

The guides demonstrate Americans' growing 
fascination with the country's regional variations 
and its history. Each guide includes detailed direc- 
tions for recommended tours of each state, thus en- 
couraging domestic travel and tourism. The guides 
also represent the New Deal's concern with region- 
al interdependence and national planning. The se- 
ries asserted the vitality of the nation during its 
worst economic crisis. Finally, because of its size, 
the series stands as a testimony to the New Dealers' 
faith in large-scale projects. 

See Also: FEDERAL ONE; FEDERAL WRITERS' 
PROJECT (FWP); WORKS PROGRESS 
ADMINISTRATION (WPA). 



AMERICAN GUIDE SERIES 

Published between 1935 and 1943, the American 
Guide series of more than one thousand books and 
pamphlets provided travel guides of the American 
states, as well as the territories of Alaska and Puerto 
Rico. The state volumes average five hundred pages 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bold, Christine. The WPA Guides: Mapping America. 1999. 

Mangione, Jerre. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal 
Writers' Project, 1934-1943. 1972. 

Schindler-Carter, Petra. Vintage Snapshots: The Fabrica- 
tion of a Nation in the W.P.A. American Guide Series. 
1999. 

Trent A. Watts 



36 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AMERICAN 



LABOR PARTY 




FOUR COLOR ROAD MAP AND 14 MAPS 

OF SPECIFIC AREAS • 624 PAGES 

■I60GRAVURE ILLUSTRATIONS* 



S *'CAH GU\^ 



FORNIA - WORKS PROGRESS ADM 1 N I STRATJO^ 



This Federal Art Project poster promoted an American Guide Series volume on California. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division. WPA Poster Collection 



AMERICAN LABOR PARTY 

In 1936 it was feared that traditional anti-Tammany 
D emocratic voting habits among New York's immi- 
grant and first generation working-class voters, 
especially Jews, might cost Franklin D. Roosevelt 
the electoral votes of his home state. Two 
pro-Roosevelt labor leaders, Sidney Hillman 
of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union 
and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies' 
Garment Workers' Union, formed the American 
Labor Party (ALP) to appeal to voters who other- 
wise might have voted for Socialist and even Re- 
publican candidates. The effort was successful: 



More than a quarter million voted for Roosevelt on 
the ALP line. 

The formation of the ALP coincided with other 
third party efforts aimed at pressuring the New 
Deal from the left, especially the midwestern Far- 
mer Labor Party movement. Many independent 
radicals, as well as members of the Communist 
Party, joined these movements. In New York, leftist 
trade unionists, Communists, and others organized 
local constituency clubs. In return, the ALP was 
courted by liberal candidates in both the major par- 
ties. In 1937, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, 
who had formed his own ad hoc "Fusion" party in 
his first election, and had previously run for Con- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



37 



AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE 



gress on Republican and Socialist tickets, received 
nearly a half-million ALP votes, providing his mar- 
gin of victory. La Guardia became an enrolled 
member of the party. The ALP also elected two 
New York city council members (something it con- 
tinued to do for the next decade under New York's 
proportional representation laws). In 1938 the ALP 
secured the radical Vito Marcantonio's return to 
Congress. 

Providing unions and community activists with 
an electoral voice — and maintaining an uneasy co- 
alition of Communist and anti-Communist constit- 
uencies — the ALP championed racial equality in 
schools, housing, and employment, and subsidized 
public housing and an array of welfare programs, at 
the some time that it effectively muted the corrupt 
Tammany machine's hold on political life. The 
ALP's arrangement of constituent community ser- 
vice, pioneered by Marcantonio, replaced Tamma- 
ny's corrupt system, involving bribes, payoffs, and 
election fraud. The party also played a central role 
in the election of African Americans and Hispanics 
to the New York city council, the U.S. Congress, 
and the New York state legislature. 

But with the Nazi- Soviet pact in 1939, the 
Communist/non-Communist split became irrepa- 
rable. Marcantonio and his pro-Communist sup- 
porters gained control of the party and in 1944 the 
an ti- Communist wing left to form the Liberal Party. 
The ALP provided large vote totals for Roosevelt in 
1944, for Henry A. Wallace's independent presi- 
dential candidacy in 1948, and for Marcantonio's 
mayoral race in 1949. But with the Cold War, anti- 
Communism, and suburbanization sapping the 
ALP's working-class voter base, the party vanished 
in the mid-fifties. 

See Also: LA GUARDIA, FIORELLO H.; 

MARCANTONIO, VITO; ORGANIZED LABOR. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Marcantonio, Vito. I Vote My Conscience: Debates, Speech- 
es, and Writings of Vito Marcantonio, 1935-1950, ed- 
ited by Annette T. Rubinstein and associates. 1956. 

Meyer, Gerald. Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician, 
1902-1954. 1989. 

Walzer, Kenneth Alan. "The American Labor Party: 
Third Party Politics in New Deal-Cold War New 



York, 1936-1954." Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 
1977. 

John J. Simon 



AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE 

On August 22, 1934, spokesman Jouett Shouse an- 
nounced the creation of the American Liberty 
League. According to Shouse, the group was 
formed to defend the Constitution, to protect pri- 
vate property rights, and to encourage the public to 
support traditional American political values. The 
league's founders were disgruntled business con- 
servatives, Wall Street financiers, right-wing oppo- 
nents of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and de- 
feated rivals within Roosevelt's Democratic Party. 
The league's benefactors included the du Pont 
brothers (Pierre, Irenee, and Lammot); their busi- 
ness partner and former Democratic Party chair- 
man, John J. Raskob; financier E. F. Hutton; and ex- 
ecutive Sewell Avery of Montgomery Ward. Many 
of the politicians active in the league were Republi- 
cans, but more visible were anti-Roosevelt Demo- 
crats such as 1924 and 1928 presidential nominees 
John W. Davis and Alfred E. Smith. Many league 
activists had worked together earlier for the relegal- 
ization of the U. S. liquor industry through the As- 
sociation Against the Prohibition Amendment. 

Motivating league founders was a growing dis- 
taste of the expansion of federal power and of gov- 
ernment intrusions upon the prerogatives of private 
businessmen. They condemned early New Deal re- 
lief and public jobs programs, agricultural produc- 
tion controls and subsidies, sponsorship of collec- 
tive-bargaining rights, federal regulation of the 
banking and securities industries, and creation of 
public power facilities. Expansion in 1935 of federal 
regulation and taxation of business, promotion of 
labor rights, and income support for the poor and 
elderly through the Works Progress Administra- 
tion, the Wagner Act, Social Security, and the 
Wealth Tax Act infuriated leaguers even more. But 
critics effectively lampooned league members as 
champions of privilege, ungrateful critics of an ad- 
ministration that had saved capitalism, and vindic- 



38 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AMERICAN 



NEGRO 



L A 



OR CONGRESS 



N L C 



tive and selfish individuals seeking revenge on a 
president for betraying his social class. 

The Liberty League raised money and financed 
legal critiques of New Deal measures, published 
anti-New Deal pamphlets and political propagan- 
da, and aided the effort to defeat Roosevelt in 1936. 
Despite the organization's help for Republican 
nominee Alfred M. Landon, the incumbent won in 
a landslide. With the 1936 election seen as a repudi- 
ation of the league, it rapidly faded into obscurity, 
playing but a minimal role in such battles as the 
1937 court-packing fight. By 1940, the Liberty 
League had ceased active operation. However, its 
legacy of fund-raising tactics, ideology-driven is- 
sues research and public education, and coordina- 
tion with partisan legislative and electoral cam- 
paigns foreshadowed today's political action 
committees and independent-expenditure organi- 
zations. 

See Also: CONSERVATIVE COALITION; ELECTION OF 
1936; RASKOB, JOHN J.; SMITH, ALFRED E. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burk, Robert F. The Corporate State and the Broker State: 
The du Fonts and American National Politics, 
1925-1940. 1990. 

Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. 
1956. 

Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin Roosevelt and the New 
Deal, 1932-1940. 1963. 

Wolfskill, George. The Revolt of the Conservatives: A Histo- 
ry of the American Liberty League, 1934-1940. 1962. 

Robert F. Burk 



AMERICAN NEGRO LABOR 
CONGRESS (ANLC) 

Organized in Chicago in October 1925 by the 
American Communist Party and its Trade Union 
Educational League, the American Negro Labor 
Congress (ANLC) sought "the abolition of all dis- 
crimination, persecution, and exploitation of the 
Negro race and working people generally." In a sig- 
nificant shift from the party's earlier strategy to or- 
ganize black laborers along separatist black nation- 



alist or "Pan-Africanist" lines in the African Blood 
Brotherhood (ABB), the ANLC, led by former ABB 
proponents Lovett Fort-Whiteman, H. V. Phillips, 
Edward Doty, and Harry Haywood, planned to 
achieve its goal by bringing black and white work- 
ers and farmers together in a nondiscriminatory 
trade union movement — an interracial proletarian 
movement. The ANLC hoped to form local councils 
in all centers of African-American population, es- 
pecially in the South. The councils in turn would 
form interracial labor committees to eliminate all 
practices that divided black and white workers and 
to support all efforts to unite them. 

The few hundred black laborers who attended 
the ANLC's opening session, however, quickly be- 
came disenchanted with the organization when the 
evening's entertainment turned out to be a Russian 
ballet and a play by Alexander Pushkin, performed 
in Russian. Only a handful attended the next day's 
organizing meeting, and even fewer local councils 
were formed. The National Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Colored People, the National Urban 
League, and the African-American press each casti- 
gated the ANLC for being under the thumb of 
Communists. Lacking popular support, the 
ANLC's major activity became its opposition to the 
Socialist and anti- Communist A. Philip Randolph, 
the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Por- 
ters (BSCP). When the BSCP applied for affiliation 
with the American Federation of Labor in 1926, the 
ANLC criticized Randolph and the BSCP leaders 
for selling out: "They have forsaken the militant 
struggle in the interests of the workers for the policy 
of class collaboration with the bosses." By then, 
however, the ANLC, beset by African -American in- 
difference and disunity, as well as white hostility, 
barely existed. Outside of several tiny units in Chi- 
cago, only the ANLC's official paper, the Negro 
Champion, subsidized by the American Communist 
Party, struggled on. After several years of stagna- 
tion, its objectives never realized, the ANLC ceased 
existence in 1930, and was succeeded by the Na- 
tional Negro Labor Congress the following year. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; BROTHERHOOD OF 
SLEEPING CAR PORTERS (BSCP); RANDOLPH, A. 
PHILIP. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



39 



AMERICAN 



SCENE 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an 
Afro-American Communist. 1978. 

Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depres- 
sion. 1983. 

Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and Af- 
rican-Americans, 1917-1936. 1998. 

Spero, Sterling D., and Abram L. Harris. The Black Work- 
er. 1931. 

Harvard Sitkoff 



AMERICAN SCENE, THE 

The American Scene emerged in the 1920s and was 
related to the earlier Ashcan school of New York re- 
alists. It became the prevailing form of fine art ex- 
pression during the 1930s as the economic Depres- 
sion and the developing international crisis 
prompted American artists to become more cultur- 
ally introspective and more socially committed. 
Echoing the New Deal's own values, its most sa- 
lient characteristics were nationalism and de- 
mocracy. 

The American Scene is associated most closely 
with the regionalist school of painters based in the 
Midwest, such as Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) 
of Missouri, Grant Wood (1892-1942) of Iowa, and 
John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) of Kansas. The re- 
gionalist artists were committed to an art of the lo- 
cality and produced engaging images of their re- 
gion, its landscape, and its people. Their ideal of 
America was rural, and it is resonant in spirit of the 
significance that historian Frederick Jackson Turner 
attached to the frontier in molding American values 
and institutions. Such an American particularism 
was often sharpened by the fact that their practice 
drew upon the "naive" school of nineteenth- 
century American art. Unlike the "Lost Genera- 
tion" of the 1920s, their work was inspired by 
"commitment" and a determination to engage with 
their society. This involved not only relating their 
work to "the people," but also making it accessible 
for their subjects to appreciate. Its strong represen- 
tational emphasis and the incorporation of readily 
recognizable symbols and images have given some 



of their work lasting iconographic significance. 
Wood's American Gothic (1930), for example, has 
been copied, parodied, and recycled in diverse 
forms. 

Visits to Europe during the 1920s reinforced the 
regionalists' determination to work with American 
themes and idioms. In 1932 Benton claimed that 
"No American art can come to those who do not 
live an American life, who do not have an American 
psychology, who cannot find in America justifica- 
tion for their lives." Modernism provoked the scorn 
of the regionalists. In 1935 Wood wrote a manifes- 
to, "Revolt against the City," which proposed that 
American art free itself of European influences, es- 
pecially from abstractionism. The regionalists' 
fierce patriotism, localism, anti-urbanism, and anti- 
Marxism provoked the scorn of some critics who re- 
garded the group as parochial and complacent. 
Their celebration of such embattled qualities in De- 
pression America as social order, organic commu- 
nity, and the work ethic was dismissed as an embit- 
tered restorationism. The regionalists were also 
resented because of their influence in New Deal 
agencies and the prestigious commissions that they 
received. 

However, the regionalists' work was never as 
uncritical or unproblematic as is often claimed. 
Benton's decoration of the Missouri State Capitol in 
Jefferson City (1936) and Curry's murals for the 
Kansas Statehouse in Topeka (1937-1942) pro- 
voked considerable controversy. Despite the re- 
gionalists' identification with the people of the 
Midwest, some of their constituents complained 
that the murals presented them as caricatures and 
they objected to their states being associated with 
the James Brothers, John Brown, and tornadoes. In- 
deed, the regionalists' anti-modernism should not 
be overemphasized, their rhetoric notwithstanding. 
In the rhythmical lines and cartoon figures of Ben- 
ton's canvases and the satirical and surreal aspects 
of Wood's work, influences other than American 
ones are readily apparent, and it should not be for- 
gotten that Jackson Pollock was one of Benton's 
pupils. The work of Benton, Curry, and Wood was 
more diverse and less given to cliche than that of 
their many imitators who worked for the Treasury 
Department's Section of Fine Arts or the WPA's 
Federal Art Project. 



kO 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



AMERICAN STUDENT 



UNION 



While the American Scene is often associated 
with the midwestern regionalists, it should include, 
also, social realist artists whose outlook was more 
urban and whose point of view was more critical of 
existing institutions and values. The didactic paint- 
ings of Philip Evergood, Ben Shahn, Moses Soyer, 
and their metropolitan colleagues provided cri- 
tiques of the capitalist system, and by affirming 
working-class lives and satirizing those of the 
upper classes, they sought to prompt militant polit- 
ical consciousness and action. Like the regionalists, 
they were committed to an aesthetic of place and 
to the principle of relating their work to ordinary 
people, although their focus was upon the everyday 
experience of the urban working class and the im- 
pact of the Depression upon them. Stylistic accessi- 
bility was also essential for art as a political project 
and the social realists condemned the development 
of modernist abstractionism as politically and so- 
cially irrelevant. Although some social realists 
hoped that the people would become their patrons 
under the auspices of the union movement, more 
artists gained the opportunity to communicate to a 
wider public through federal employment. Their 
style was ubiquitous, although necessarily political- 
ly constrained, and social realists received major 
commissions, such as Shahn's decoration of the So- 
cial Security Building in Washington, D.C. 
(1941-1942). 

Both groups became objects of growing criti- 
cism as the decade progressed and they came to be 
associated with representational art in totalitarian 
states. According to the influential critic Clement 
Greenberg, "art for the millions" was tantamount 
to "kitsch" that could be manipulated by the state 
for its own purposes. He believed that cultural pres- 
ervation and progress was possible only through 
the promotion of a politically innocent avant-garde. 
It is ironic that for all the strident Americanism of 
the 1930s, it would be abstract expressionism that 
would become recognized globally as the first truly 
authentic American form of art. 

See Also: ART; FEDERAL ART PROJECT (FAP). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Baigell, Matthew. The American Scene: American Painting 
of the 1930s. 1974. 



Corn, Wanda M. Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision. 
1983. 

Dennis, James M. Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Inde- 
pendence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and 
John Steuart Curry. 1998. 

Doss, Erika. Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: 
From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. 1991. 

Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Parti- 
san Review 6 (1939). Reprinted in Clement Green- 
berg. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. 1961. 

Heller, Nancy, and Julia Williams. Painters of the Ameri- 
can Scene. 1982. 

Kendall, M. Sue. Rethinking Regionalism: John Steuart 
Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy. 1986. 

Shapiro, David, ed. Social Realism: Art as a Weapon. 1973. 

Stuart Kidd 



AMERICAN STUDENT UNION 

The Depression decade witnessed the rise of the 
first mass student protest movement in American 
history. This movement, which crusaded against 
war and fascism, and initially promoted a political 
agenda to the left of the New Deal, was led by the 
American Student Union (ASU), the largest U.S. 
student activist organization of its time 
(1935-1941). At its peak years of influence in the 
mid and late 1930s, the ASU had some 20,000 
members, mobilized almost half the nation's col- 
lege students in antiwar protests, lobbied for great- 
er federal aid to low income students and unem- 
ployed youth, became a campus voice for racial 
equality and workers' rights, championed student 
free speech rights, attracted the support of Eleanor 
Roosevelt, and even generated student activism in 
some of the nation's high schools. 

Although it arose during the Depression, the 
ASU-led student movement's most massive mobi- 
lizations focused on peace rather than the econo- 
my. Convinced that World War I had served plutoc- 
racy rather than democracy, and had paved the way 
for the rise of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, 
many college students embraced isolationism, paci- 
fism, and anti-interventionism. This antiwar mood 
facilitated the rise of a mass peace movement on 
campus, which beginning in 1934 featured the first 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T T H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



u 



AMERICAN STUDENT 



UNION 



national student strikes in American history, annual 
one-hour peace rallies, and boycotts of classes held 
on the anniversary of U.S. intervention in World 
War I. These strikes, which mobilized 25,000 stu- 
dents in April 1934 and more than 100,000 students 
in 1935, were organized by the Communist-led Na- 
tional Student League (NSL) and the Socialist-led 
Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). 
The success of these strikes, together with the 
Communists' new Popular Front movement, which 
urged unity against fascism, led NSL and SLID to 
merge into the ASU during a national unity con- 
vention of student activists in Columbus, Ohio, in 
December 1935. The ASU's biggest successes in its 
early life were the 1936 and 1937 antiwar strikes, 
each of which rallied more than 500,000 students 
for peace. 

The ASU was emblematic of the shift leftward 
of American student politics in the 1930s, marking 
a sharp break with the conservatism that had domi- 
nated the campuses in the 1920s, when students 
endorsed Republican presidential candidates by 
even larger majorities than did the American elec- 
torate. Although its leaders were predominantly 
leftists, the ASU found much common ground with 
liberals as it urged students to show solidarity with 
the burgeoning labor movement, supported the 
New Deal's more egalitarian measures, and criti- 
cized racial discrimination both on campus and off. 
With this kind of left-liberal ideology setting the 
tone of campus politics, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 
1936 became the first Democratic presidential can- 
didate in decades to win a plurality of the national 
student straw vote. It is little wonder, then, that El- 
eanor Roosevelt, attracted by their youthful ideal- 
ism, befriended several ASU leaders, worked with 
them in their campaign to expand federal aid to 
needy students, and defended them when they 
were attacked by the red-hunting House Commit- 
tee on Un-American Activities. 

International events, most notably the Spanish 
Civil War, rocked the ASU and the student peace 
movement and undermined their anti- 
interventionist ethos. That war seemed to prove 
that U.S. neutrality could not preserve peace, for 
while the United States embargoed the Spanish Re- 
public, Hitler gave military assistance to the fascist 



rebels who ultimately crushed the young republic. 
The ASU, influenced by these events — especially by 
the deaths of several ASU members who joined the 
International Brigade in its fight to save the Spanish 
Republic — and by the Popular Front line of the 
Comintern, shifted its emphasis from anti- 
interventionism to collective security against fas- 
cism. Although this shift alienated left-wing social- 
ists, pacifists, and isolationists, it conferred upon 
the ASU the elan of being at the forefront of the 
battle against Hitlerism. 

The ASU's demise was rooted in the machina- 
tions of its Communist faction, which forced the or- 
ganization into a series of disastrous flipflops on 
foreign policy. This began in fall 1939 when, in the 
wake of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the ASU dropped its 
anti-fascism in favor of an isolationist "Yanks Are 
Not Coming" position at a time when Hitler 
seemed more threatening than ever. This, together 
with the ASU's refusal to criticize the Soviet inva- 
sion of Finland in 1940 — which found an ostensibly 
antiwar organization unwilling to protest Stalin's 
military aggression — discredited the ASU with both 
mainstream students and such key liberal allies as 
Eleanor Roosevelt, who saw the organization as a 
puppet of the USSR and the American Communist 
Party, causing the collapse of the ASU by the time 
the United States entered World War II. Not until 
the 1960s would a student organization duplicate 
the ASU's initial success in leading a mass protest 
movement on American campuses. 

See Also: AMERICAN YOUTH CONGRESS; 
COMMUNIST PARTY; FASCISM; PEACE 
MOVEMENT. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cohen, Robert. When the Old Left Was Young: Student 
Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 
1929-1941. 1993. 

Cohen, Robert, and Thomas Thurston. "Student Activ- 
ism in the 1930s." New Deal Network. Available at: 
www.newdeal.feri.org/students/index.htm 

Draper, Hal. "The Student Movement of the Thirties: A 
Political History." In As We Saw the Thirties: Essays 
on Social and Political Movements of a Decade, edited 
by Rita James Simon. 1969. 

Eagan, Eileen. Class, Culture, and the Classroom: The Stu- 
dent Peace Movement of the 1930s. 1982. 

Lash, Joseph, P. Eleanor: A Friend's Memoir. 1964. 



i.Z 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AMERICAN V U T 



CONGRESS 



Wechsler, James A. Revolt on the Campus. 1935. 

Robert Cohen 



AMERICAN YOUTH CONGRESS 

Coming of age at a time of war crises abroad and 
economic crisis at home, Depression generation 
youth embraced new forms of political activism. 
They organized, for the first time in American his- 
tory, a national youth lobby, the American Youth 
Congress (AYC), which promoted a left-liberal 
agenda, demanding expanded government assis- 
tance to underprivileged youth and rallying against 
war and fascism. At its peak in the late 1930s the 
AYC assembled a broadly based youth coalition, 
which claimed to represent some 4.5 million young 
Americans from civil rights, labor, student, reli- 
gious, fraternal, political party, and peace organiza- 
tions. Arising in an era when the voting age was 
twenty-one, and in a political system that had tra- 
ditionally ignored young people — especially blue 
collar, unemployed, student, and minority youth — 
the AYC found daring and effective ways to give 
voice to the needs of the young. The AYC organized 
the first national youth marches on Washington 
(demanding jobs and education), held international 
congresses of young people, and sponsored its own 
youth assistance legislation — the American Youth 
Act. This activism made headlines and for a time at- 
tracted influential allies to the AYC, most notably 
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who befriended AYC 
national officers, raised money for the Youth Con- 
gress, attended some its meetings, and defended 
the Youth Congress's leaders when they came 
under attack by the red-hunting House Committee 
on Un-American Activities. 

Although the Youth Congress's founder, Viola 
lima, was a political moderate, the organization 
would be dominated by the Left, beginning at its 
first national meeting in 1934 when lima was oust- 
ed from the Congress's leadership by a coalition 
headed by young Communists and Socialists. Re- 
flecting the radicalism of this new leadership, the 
AYC was initially critical of the New Deal for failing 
to solve the problems of unemployed youth and 



needy students and for its other shortcomings, in- 
cluding its refusal to challenge the discriminatory 
racial practices of the Jim Crow South. Complaining 
that the National Youth Administration (NYA), the 
New Deal's primary youth relief organization, as- 
sisted only a fraction of the five to eight million un- 
employed young Americans and that NYA work- 
study jobs were too few to assist most low income 
students, the Youth Congress in 1935 wrote the 
American Youth Act as an alternative to the NYA. 
Unlike the NYA, the Youth Act would have helped 
all unemployed youth and needy students. But the 
Youth Act proved too expensive to ever get out of 
committee on Capitol Hill. Critics estimated that its 
annual cost would have been $3.5 billion, as op- 
posed to the $50 million allocated to the NYA. 

Even though the Youth Act never became law, 
the AYC's campaign for this legislation, which in- 
cluded a national march of some three thousand 
young people on Washington in 1937, helped to 
spotlight the problems of Depression-era youth, 
calling attention to the "youth crisis" — the lack of 
employment and educational opportunity that con- 
fronted millions of young Americans in the 1930s. 
By raising public awareness of the need for expand- 
ing federal aid to low income youth, the AYC 
helped to sustain a political climate friendly to the 
New Deal's youth program. Indeed, by 1938, the 
Youth Congress had dropped its advocacy of the 
American Youth Act and instead campaigned for an 
expanded NYA. This growing alliance with the 
New Deal emerged because the Youth Congress 
was concerned about Republican threats to cut the 
NYA and because the AYC's influential Communist 
faction — in accord with the new Comintern line ad- 
vocating liberal-radical unity against fascism — 
embraced Franklin Roosevelt and stressed the need 
to defend the New Deal from the forces of reaction. 
The high point of the AYC's alliance with the Roo- 
sevelt administration came in summer 1938 when 
Eleanor Roosevelt played a prominent role at the 
AYC-sponsored World Youth Congress meeting, 
which united young people from around the world 
on behalf of a progressive antifascist platform. 

The AYC's alliance with the Roosevelt adminis- 
tration collapsed in a very public way during the 
Youth Congress Citizenship Institute in February 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



u 



A M E R I N G E R 



OSCAR 



1940, sending the AYC into a tailspin from which 
it would never recover. Five thousand Youth Con- 
gress delegates had come to Washington for this 
Citizenship Institute, which was supposed to be a 
pro-New Deal event, teaching young people about 
government and involving them in lobbying for 
federal jobs and student aid programs. But the 
AYC's Communist faction — having dropped its an- 
tifascist! in the wake of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet 
Pact — converted the Institute into a demonstration 
against Roosevelt's foreign policies, especially his 
opposition to the Soviet invasion of Finland. Presi- 
dent Roosevelt, irritated that the Youth Congress 
had portrayed him as an imperialist war monger 
merely because he had criticized that invasion, re- 
sponded by delivering an angry speech to the Insti- 
tute delegates who had assembled on the White 
House lawn. Roosevelt told the delegates and a na- 
tional radio audience that the Youth Congress's 
charge that he was seeking war with Russia was 
"unadulterated twaddle." This and other criticisms 
that Roosevelt made of the Youth Congress and of 
the Soviet Union provoked the Communists in the 
crowd to raucous booing, and a similar response 
followed when Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the 
delegates. This public relations disaster, the Youth 
Congress's flipflop on antifascism, and the organi- 
zation's refusal to criticize Soviet policy, led young 
people to abandon what once had been Depression 
America's most dynamic youth lobby. With the col- 
lapse of the AYC both the American Left and the 
younger generation lost an invaluable political 
asset, for the Youth Congress had represented one 
of the most diverse movements of young Ameri- 
cans — uniting black and white, rural and urban, 
student and nonstudent, religious and secular, 
lower and middle -class, immigrant and old stock, 
liberal and radical — ever to organize on behalf of 
egalitarian social change. 

See Also: COMMUNIST PARTY; NATIONAL YOUTH 
ADMINISTRATION (NYA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cohen, Robert. When the Old Left Was Young: Student 
Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 
1929-1941. 1993. 

Cohen, Robert. "Revolt of the Depression Generation: 
America's First Mass Student Protest Movement, 



1929-1940." Ph.D. diss. University of California, 
Berkeley, 1987. 

Cohen, Robert, and Thomas Lhurston. "Student Activ- 
ism in the 1930s." New Deal Network. 
www.newdeal.feri.org/students/index.htm 

Draper, Hal. "Lhe Student Movement of the Lhirties: A 
Political History." In As We Saw the Thirties: Essays 
on Social and Political Movements of a Decade, edited 
by Rita James Simon. 1969. 

Eagan, Eileen. Class, Culture, and the Classroom: The Stu- 
dent Peace Movement of the 1930s. 1982. 

Lash, Joseph, P. Eleanor: A Friend's Memoir. 1964. 

Rawick, George. "The New Deal and Youth: The Civilian 
Conservation Corps, the National Youth Adminis- 
tration, and the American Youth Congress." Ph.D. 
diss. University of Wisconsin, 1957. 

Robert Cohen 



AMERINGER, OSCAR 

Oscar Ameringer (August 4, 1870-November 5, 
1943) was a Socialist labor organizer, journalist, and 
architect of the Socialist Party in Oklahoma. Born 
in Germany, Ameringer immigrated to Cincinnati, 
Ohio, as a teenager, furthering his education at 
public libraries. He made unsuccessful bids for the 
Ohio legislature and mayoralty of Columbus. Mar- 
ried to Lulu Woods, he fathered three sons and 
supported his family by selling insurance. In 1901, 
Ameringer joined the Socialist Party and embarked 
on full-time labor activism. 

In 1934 and 1935, H. L. Mitchell and Clay East, 
founders of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, 
turned to Ameringer's organizing tactics and writ- 
ings for guidance. Ameringer had organized pover- 
ty-stricken Oklahoma tenant farmers by blending 
Jeffersonian theories, Socialist positions, Marxist 
philosophy, and homespun humor into a unique 
agrarian socialism. Ameringer reached rural people 
through speaker encampments and numerous pub- 
lications. Although Ameringer lost the 1911 race to 
become mayor of Oklahoma City by a narrow mar- 
gin, by 1914 he had so broadened the appeal of the 
Socialist Party that it won six seats in the state legis- 
lature. Rebuilding after World War I, Ameringer 
merged socialists with progressives in the Farmer- 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



AMES 



JESSE 



D A N I E L 



Labor Reconstruction League to win the Oklahoma 
governorship for the Democrat fusion candidate, 
John Walton. 

Throughout the 1930s, Ameringer, with his 
second wife, Freda Hogan, published a variety of 
newspapers, including the influential weekly The 
American Guardian. His acclaimed columns, written 
under the cryptic pseudonym Adam Coaldigger, 
reached across the United States. Ameringer sup- 
ported Frank Farrington over John L. Lewis for con- 
trol of the United Mine Workers, losing an Illinois 
publication because of the schism. Ameringer cam- 
paigned extensively for Socialist candidates in other 
states, and he testified about the desperation of 
labor before the House Subcommittee on Unem- 
ployment in 1932. Borrowing $55,000, he launched 
an agricultural relocation project in Louisiana on 
behalf of destitute miners and farmers. The enter- 
prise succeeded without endorsement from the 
New Deal Resettlement Administration. By the end 
of the 1930s, Ameringer had completed his mem- 
oirs, If You Don't Weaken, found rapprochement 
with John L. Lewis's leadership, and expressed in- 
terest in the War Resisters League. 

See Also: SOCIALIST PARTY; UNITED MINE 
WORKERS OF AMERICA (UMWA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ameringer, Oscar. If You Don't Weaken: The Autobiogra- 
phy of Oscar Ameringer. 1940. Reprint, 1983. 

Bissett, Jim. Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, 
and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920. 
1999. 

Green, James R. Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements 
in the Southwest, 1895-1943. 1978. 

Thompson, John. Closing the Trontier: Radical Response in 
Oklahoma, 1889-1923. 1986. 

Linda Reese 



AMES, JESSE DANIEL 

Jesse Daniel Ames (November 2, 1883-February 21, 
1972) was a southern progressive, suffragist, and 
proponent of rights for African Americans. Ames 
rose to national prominence as an anti-lynching 



advocate during the 1930s. She was born in Pales- 
tine, Texas, the third of James and Laura Daniel's 
four children. Three years after graduating from the 
"ladies annex" of the local college in 1902, she mar- 
ried army surgeon Roger Post Ames. When Roger 
died in 1914, Ames entered into a life of social re- 
form, eventually holding a leadership position in 
the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC). 
In 1930, Ames founded the Association of Southern 
Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). 
As historian Jacquelyn Hall explains, Ames believed 
that lynchers justified their crimes on cultural as- 
sumptions that degraded white women as well as 
black men. A women's campaign to end lynching, 
Ames contended, could be particularly effective in 
exposing the myths that gave rise to "lynch law" in 
the South. 

Historian Christopher Waldrep notes that 
Ames's narrow definition of the crime was central 
to her efforts to achieve a lynchless year in the Unit- 
ed States. She held to the popular view that a mur- 
der could be considered a lynching only if it re- 
ceived community sanction. Her reform tactics thus 
centered on efforts to deprive lynchers of a support- 
ive environment in which to operate. Ames be- 
lieved that whites would cease to lynch if they 
thought they no longer had the community's back- 
ing. A strict definition ensured that newspaper ac- 
counts of lynching would be rare, suggesting that 
most southern whites did not consider the practice 
normal or routine. Stripped of a supportive envi- 
ronment, whites would hesitate to lynch, according 
to Ames. The ASWPL's goal of a lynchless year, as 
Waldrep notes, demanded this narrow definition. 

Ames's insistence on a strict definition of 
lynching increasingly put her at odds with other 
anti-lynching activists. The National Association 
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 
for example, pushed for a broadened definition as 
it vied for members with rival organizations on the 
left that sought to eclipse it as the premier anti- 
lynching organization and defender of African- 
American rights. The NAACP eventually aban- 
doned the established view of lynching, arguing in- 
stead that race-based murders perpetrated by indi- 
viduals who operated without community support 
should be considered lynchings. The dispute be- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



1.5 



AMOS 



ANDY 



tween ASWPL and the NAACP revealed a funda- 
mental difference in the way in which the two orga- 
nizations understood the nature of the crisis 
confronting the New South. Ames and the ASWPL 
saw lynching as a blight on an otherwise healthy 
southern society, whereas the NAACP regarded the 
crime as merely symptomatic of a larger problem. 
The NAACP recognized that the abolition of lynch- 
ing would not necessarily signal an end to the per- 
vasive and intractable racism that plagued the 
South. Ames's definition, however, proved the 
more persuasive. 

On May 9, 1940, Ames announced that for the 
first time in the history of the New South a year had 
passed without a single lynching. Defenders of the 
more expansive definition, however, argued that 
Ames's pronouncement was premature. As Wal- 
drep suggests, the debate has endured. 

Ames's 1940 announcement that the ASWPL 
had reached its goal signaled the beginning of the 
end of the organization. Ames returned to her work 
in the CIC but felt increasingly at odds with those 
directing the course of modern liberalism. Ames, 
forced to retreat from the national political scene, 
turned her attention to local reform and to the 
strained relationship with her family. She died in an 
Austin, Texas, nursing home in 1972. 

See Also: ANTI-LYNCHING LEGISLATION; 

LYNCHINGS; NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR 
THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE 
(NAACP). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South: Geor- 
gia and Virginia, 1880-1930. 1993. 

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Dan- 
iel Ames and the Women's Campaign against Lynching. 
1979. 

Miller, Kathleen Atkinson. "The Ladies and the Lynch- 
ers: A Look at the Association of Southern Women 
for the Prevention of Lynching." Southern Studies 17 
(1978): 221-240. 

Waldrep, Christopher. "War of Words: Lhe Controversy 
over the Definition of Lynching, 1899-1940." Journal 
of Southern History 66 (2000): 75-100. 

Sarah E. Gardner 



AMOS 'N' ANDY 



Amos 'n' Andy, the first and most popular daily se- 
ries in the history of radio, made its debut on the 
NBC Blue network in August 1929, some ten weeks 
before the stock market crash. The comedy series, 
in which two white actors played a pair of African- 
American migrants to the big city, sometimes com- 
mented on the Great Depression. The program's 
characters occasionally talked about the need for 
citizens to spend money to boost the economy, and 
some of their adventures in the mid-1930s revolved 
around a fictional New Deal-era model town called 
Weber City. Andy's self-important but incompetent 
performance as "president" of the pair's perennially 
cash-strapped one-car Fresh Air Taxicab Company 
seemed to satirize the pretensions of business exec- 
utives who had promised the moon in the 1920s 
and then helped lead the country into economic di- 
saster. 

Amos 'n' Andy's creators developed their major 
themes and characterizations and built the show 
into a national sensation before it reached NBC, 
and before the Depression began. Though some 
historians identify the series as the quintessential 
Depression comedy, the mid and latter 1930s actu- 
ally saw the show's nightly audience of forty million 
dwindle. 

Amos 'n' Andy's history began when Freeman 
Gosden and Charles Correll, former professional 
directors of minstrel shows, created a series called 
Sam 'n' Henry for a Chicago radio station in 1926. 
They changed stations and renamed the show Amos 
'n' Andy in 1928, and moved to the network the fol- 
lowing year. The pair adopted many comic stereo- 
types of African Americans from minstrel shows 
and vaudeville. But Gosden and Correll also used 
their continuing storyline to develop vivid charac- 
ters with universal human traits; they won listeners 
ranging from ultra-racists to outspoken racial egali- 
tarians such as Eleanor Roosevelt. Amos 'n' Andy's 
creators were also the first popular artists to depict, 
however distortedly, characters experiencing the 
era's most profound change in African -American 
life — the great migration to northern cities, which 
had begun during World War I and renewed itself 
in the 1930s. 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ANDERSON, MARIAN 




Freeman Gosden (left) and Charles Correll perform as Amos V Andy for a radio broadcast in 1935. Bettmann/CORBIS 



The responses of African Americans to the se- 
ries likewise reflected Depression-era tensions that 
had deeper roots. Many eagerly tuned in to Amos 
'n' Andy, hearing in it elements of genuine African- 
American humor, while other black individuals and 
institutions protested that the series slandered Afri- 
can Americans' intelligence and economic strivings. 
That debate, like Amos 'n' Andy itself, outlived the 
Great Depression; the show remained on radio in 
one form or another until 1960 and spawned a tele- 
vised version, and a new black protest, in the early 
1950s. 

See Also: RADIO. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an Ameri- 
can fester. 1986. 



Ely, Melvin Patrick. The Adventures of Amos V Andy: A 
Social History of an American Phenomenon. 1991, rev. 
edition, 2001. 

Gosden-Correll Papers. Cinema-Television Library and 
Archives of Performing Arts. University of Southern 
California, Los Angeles. 

Wertheim, Arthur Frank. Radio Comedy. 1979. 

Melvin Patrick Ely 



ANDERSON, MARIAN 



Marian Anderson (February 27, 189 7- April 8, 
1993), best known as an opera singer, broke the 
color barrier when she performed on Easter Sunday 
in 1939 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF T H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



u 



N D E R S N 



MARIAN 




Marian Anderson, 1937. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division, New York World -Telegram and the Sun 
Newspaper Photograph Collection 



D.C., marking the symbolic beginning of the civil 
rights movement. Born in Philadelphia, Anderson 
began her singing career in church, where her con- 
gregation dubbed her the "baby contralto." She 
gained public recognition in 1924 after winning a 
New York Philharmonic voice competition. Racism, 
however, forced her to study and perform in Eu- 
rope, where she met the impresario Sol Hurok, who 
became her manager. While she was performing at 
the Salzburg Festival in 1935, conductor Arturo 
Toscanini, impressed by her voice, said, "A voice 
like yours is heard once in a hundred years." That 
year, Hurok brought her back to the United States 
for a successful New York concert. Thereafter, she 
toured the United States, singing at the White 
House in 1936 and performing seventy recitals in 
1938. 

Although Anderson had become an interna- 
tionally famous recitalist and opera singer, racism 



denied her many opportunities. Hurok tried to 
shelter her from mounting racial hostilities by only 
booking her in certain cities. In 1939, the Daughters 
of the American Revolution refused to allow her to 
perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., 
claiming that the venue was for "white artists only." 
The incident created such a surge of protest that 
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt publicly resigned from 
the organization. The National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), along 
with African-American leaders at Howard Univer- 
sity and Mrs. Roosevelt, worked to find Anderson 
another setting for her concert. In the end, Secre- 
tary of Interior Harold L. Ickes invited Anderson to 
perform at the Lincoln Memorial. On Easter Sun- 
day, April 9, 1939, Anderson sang before a crowd 
of 75,000. The performance was broadcast over na- 
tional radio, making it one of the most noteworthy 
concerts in American history. In addition to inspir- 
ing a generation of African -American artists and 
activists, Anderson's performance at the Lincoln 
Memorial caught the attention of Hollywood. 
Twentieth Century Fox, which was producing John 
Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln starring Henry Fonda, in- 
vited her to sing at the film's premiere in Spring- 
field, Illinois, on May 30, 1939. On July 2, at the 
NAACP conference in Richmond, Virginia, Ander- 
son was reunited with Mrs. Roosevelt, who pres- 
ented her with the Spingarn Medal to celebrate her 
accomplishments as a singer. 

After World War II, Anderson resumed touring 
abroad and in 1952 made her television debut on 
the Ed Sullivan Show. In 1955 she sang the role of 
Ulrica in Verdi's A Masked Ball, making her the first 
African American to perform with New York's Met- 
ropolitan Opera. In 1957, she traveled throughout 
Asia as a goodwill cultural ambassador for the U.S. 
Department of State. She also performed at the in- 
augurations of presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower 
and John F. Kennedy. In 1963, Anderson returned 
to the Lincoln Memorial to sing at the March on 
Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which Martin 
Luther King, Jr., delivered his "I Have a Dream" 
speech. That same year, she won the presidential 
Medal of Freedom. She died from congestive heart 
failure in 1993. 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



ANDERSON 



SHERWOOD 



See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; ELLINGTON, DUKE; 
HOLIDAY, BILLIE; MUSIC. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Anderson, Marian. My Lord, What a Morning: An Autobi- 
ography. 1956. 

Keiler, Allan. Marian Anderson: A Singer's Journey. 2000. 

Sims, Janet L., ed. Marian Anderson: An Annotated Bibli- 
ography and Discography. 1981. 

Mary L. Nash 



ANDERSON, SHERWOOD 

A business man turned writer, Sherwood Anderson 
(September 13, 1876-March 8 1941) was called by 
H. L. Mencken, "America's most distinctive novel- 
ist." Anderson grew up in a series of Ohio towns, 
the second of seven children of an unsuccessful 
harness maker and itinerant house painter and a 
long-suffering mother. His spotty education ended 
when at age twenty-three he graduated from Wit- 
tenberg Academy. He sought his fortune in adver- 
tising and then the mail-order business, and found 
it with an Ohio company that manufactured roof 
repair materials. By 1907 he was its president. 

In fiction that he wrote at night, Anderson 
sought to transcend the world in which he worked 
by day. The worlds clashed in 1912 when he walked 
out of his office in a fugue state and wandered for 
days, ending up in a Cleveland hospital, not know- 
ing who he was. When he recovered he dedicated 
his life to writing. His midlife crisis became legend- 
ary. Anderson was heralded as proof that America 
was growing out of its infatuation with material 
prosperity. 

Anderson wrote seven novels, several autobi- 
ographies and plays, and innumerable prose pieces. 
He was at his best in his four volumes of short sto- 
ries, the most famous of which is Winesburg, Ohio 
(1919). In the late 1920s he bought and edited two 
rival weeklies in southwestern Virginia. 

It was there that he met Eleanor Copenhaver, 
a social worker in the Industrial Division of the 



YWCA. He accompanied her in her travels to textile 
and steel mills, union halls, and workers' homes 
throughout the South. In 1933, Eleanor joined him 
in a happy marriage (his fourth) that lasted until his 
death. Although drawn to radical causes and meet- 
ings, he was too much the artist to toe any party 
line; instead he wrote about workers' conditions 
and the governmental and company policies that 
improved or worsened them. In Perhaps Women 
(1931) Anderson glossed his accounts of the dislo- 
cations southern workers were experiencing with 
the theory that men were being emasculated by 
their machines and needed to turn to women for 
their salvation. In Puzzled America (1935) he was 
content to let those workers, the unemployed, 
preachers, and the down-and-out speak for them- 
selves. He discovered no prospect of revolution, no 
danger of fascism, but instead "a hunger for belief," 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



(.9 



A N L C 



a determination to find and follow the leadership 
"we are likely to get out of democracy." The result, 
according to Irving Howe, was "one of the few 
books that convey a sense of what it meant to live 
in depression America." In the years that followed, 
he wrote Kit Brandon (1936), a novel about a female 
bootlegger, and several plays. He died en route to 
South America, where he had hoped to learn and 
write about communal life in a version of his fa- 
mous Winesburg. 

See Also: LITERATURE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Howe, Irving. Sherwood Anderson. 1951. 

Sutton, William A. The Road to Winesburg: A Mosaic of the 
Imaginative Life of Sherwood Anderson. 1972. 

Townsend, Kim. Sherwood Anderson. 1987. 

Kim Townsend 



ANLC. See AMERICAN NEGRO LABOR 
CONGRESS. 



ANTICOMMUNISM 



Domestic anticommunism — fear of "red" subver- 
sion — had once reflected the apprehensions of eco- 
nomic and political elites of an insurrection from 
below, but in the aftermath of the Russian Revolu- 
tion and between the two world wars the red men- 
ace was redefined. The threat now seemed to lie 
less in class revolt than in conspiracy, directed from 
Moscow and using infiltration and ideological se- 
duction. This image of an invisible red menace un- 
derlined the need for systems of surveillance, 
whether by government agencies or by patriotic 
groups. With the communist movement apparently 
controlled by a hostile power, the issue increasingly 
became one of national security, and hence of com- 
pelling interest to politicians and bureaucrats. From 
the 1930s, party competition became a primary en- 
gine of anticommunist politics, but an array of in- 
terest groups — the American Legion, the United 
States Chamber of Commerce, the American Fed- 
eration of Labor, among others — also urged action 
against the dangers of domestic communism. 



During the Depression the Soviet experiment 
won some sympathetic interest among U. S. intel- 
lectuals, and the American Communist Party itself 
enjoyed a new vitality. At the same time the New 
Deal's expansion of government and its closeness 
to the labor movement evoked right-wing accusa- 
tions that it was subject to communist influence. 
The Republican platform in the 1936 election 
claimed that American liberties were for the first 
time "threatened by government itself." Labor ac- 
tivists and political dissidents had long been de- 
nounced for their alleged communist proclivities, 
but now the federal government itself was being 
targeted. Such charges had little effect in that elec- 
tion, which Franklin Roosevelt resoundingly won, 
but the course of events soon enhanced their plau- 
sibility. U. S. communists were associating them- 
selves with the Democratic Party and its allies, and 
popular front formations (in which liberals, radicals, 
and communists made common cause) appeared in 
some states and among industrial union, farmer- 
labor, and welfare groups. By 1938 a conservative 
reaction was underway against the New Deal, 
whose popular front associations rendered it vul- 
nerable to red-baiting tactics. What is sometimes 
known as "the little red scare" focused largely on 
these popular front alignments, and was promoted 
by conservative Republicans and Democrats and 
right-wing patriotic and fringe groups. The scare 
was aided in 1939 by the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the 
outbreak of war in Europe, when U. S. communists 
suddenly seemed to be the accessories of Nazi ag- 
gression. While the pact devastated the popular 
front formations, it left U. S. communists isolated 
and encouraged the development of a liberal (as 
well as conservative) anticommunism. The Roose- 
velt administration itself began to act against do- 
mestic communists (Communist Party leader Earl 
Browder was arrested on a passport charge) and 
liberal leaders of the Congress of Industrial Organi- 
zations (CIO) began exploring ways of easing com- 
munists out of CIO positions. As it turned out, the 
gathering anticommunist momentum was stalled 
by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 
1941; when the United States joined the war in De- 
cember it found itself an ally of the Soviet Union, 
and U. S. communists enthusiastically joined the 
war effort. But the varieties of anticommunism — 



50 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A N T I - L V N C H I N 6 LEGISLATION 



corporate, patriotic, liberal, labor, Catholic, and 
others — did not disappear, and anticommunist pol- 
itics were to emerge more strongly than ever with 
the coming of the Cold War. 

See Also: COMMUNIST PARTY; HOUSE UN- 
AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE (HUAC). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Heale, M. J. American Anticommunism: Combating the 
Enemy Within, 1830-1970. 1990. 

Latham, Earl. The Communist Controversy in Washington: 
From the New Deal to McCarthy. 1966. 

Miles, Michael. The Odyssey of the American Right. 1980. 

Powers, Richard Gid. Not without Honor: The History of 
American Anticommunism. 1995. 

Rogin, Michael Paul. "Political Repression in the United 
States." In Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Epi- 
sodes in Political Demonology . 1987. 

M. J. Heale 



ANTI-LYNCHING LEGISLATION 

Because certain white people in the United States 
chose mob terrorism as a means of interracial social 
control, 3,445 of the 4,742 lynching deaths reported 
between 1882 and 1964 were black men and 
women. Local and state governments might have 
provided some protection, but Jim Crow laws had 
stripped African Americans of basic citizenship 
rights, especially the right to vote. Consequently, 
white officials felt no political obligation to defend 
a beleaguered minority or prosecute lynchers. 

Often less concerned about black rights than 
about the harm that violence could do to a state's 
reputation nationally and to its citizens' respect for 
the law, forty states from the 1890s to the early 
1930s adopted codes to deal with lynching and race 
riots. Not uniform by any means, some addressed 
the protection of prisoners once in custody, some 
held sheriffs liable if a lynching occurred, and some 
established dependents' rights to sue the town or 
county for damages or specified grounds for invok- 
ing state militia help against an impending mob. 
Especially in the South, these laws proved largely 



ineffectual. Officials too often condoned mob ac- 
tion; whites pretended that the victim had not been 
in police custody, thereby absolving the county and 
its leaders; coroners' juries compliantly ruled that 
death had come "at the hands of parties unknown"; 
and in the 1930s lynchers increasingly utilized small 
death squads to avoid public detection. Since the 
states had failed to halt lynching, the National As- 
sociation for the Advancement of Colored People 
(NAACP) launched its own crusade for a federal 
anti-lynching statute. 

Founded in 1909, the NAACP gathered evi- 
dence to inform the public of racist inequities, lob- 
bied legislators, and initiated litigation in pursuit of 
liberal reforms. In 1919, the association held a na- 
tional conference on lynching and published its fa- 
mous Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 
1889-1918, which was followed by annual supple- 
ments into the mid-1940s. 

Under James Weldon Johnson's leadership, the 
NAACP helped to formulate a model anti-lynching 
bill that Republican Congressman Leonidas Dyer 
from Missouri sponsored throughout the 1920s. 
These NAACP-Dyer bills provided fines and im- 
prisonment for local officials who allowed a lynch- 
ing or failed to prosecute mob members, and they 
set a fine of up to $10,000 on the county in question. 
In January 1922 the Dyer bill passed the House of 
Representatives but died under threat of a lengthy 
filibuster in the Senate. House passage, nonethe- 
less, indicated the growing strength of black voters 
in northern and midwestern districts, brought 
about by the heavy migrations of blacks from the 
South during the preceding three decades. 

With their emphasis on federal remedies, the 
New Deal and Fair Deal eras seemed a suitable time 
to renew the drive for a federal anti-lynching law, 
and the NAACP, then headed by Walter F. White, 
did so vigorously in the years from 1933 to 1950. 
The chief House sponsor in the 1930s was Demo- 
crat Joseph Gavagan from New York, while Robert 
F. Wagner, also a New York Democrat, headed the 
Senate effort. The NAACP mobilized impressive 
support among ethnic minorities, labor unions, 
women, liberal churches, and civil rights and civil 
liberties groups, a coalition that effectively set in 
motion the mid-century civil rights movement. Al- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



51 



A N T I - L Y N C H I N 6 LEGISLATION 




Anti-lynching activists demonstrate in Washington, D.C., in 1934 to draw attention to the failure of the U.S. government to 
include lynching in the -program of the national crime conference. Bettmann/CORBIS 



though opposed to lynching, the Communist 
Party-USA distanced itself from the anti-lynching 
bills because of ideological differences with the 
NAACP. The Association of Southern Women for 
the Prevention of Lynching also stood apart from 
the NAACP bills for fear of federal intervention in 
southern life. Eleanor Roosevelt, however, lent the 
NAACP her open support and consulted regularly 
with Walter White about strategies in the Capital. 
She urged her husband and his White House advis- 
ers to back the cause, but the administration gave 
only tacit encouragement rather than offend south- 
ern Democrats who largely controlled both houses 
of Congress through committee chairmanships. 



The NAACP bill passed the House in 1937 and in 
1940, but the customary alliance of northern con- 
servative Republicans and southern segregationist 
Democrats stopped its progress in the Senate. They 
protested that a federal law would violate states 
rights prerogatives, but they really worried that ex- 
pansions of federal authority would undermine the 
economic and social controls that their various sup- 
porters had long enjoyed. 

NAACP anti-lynching bills suffered the same 
obstructions after World War II, despite being part 
of President Harry S. Truman's civil rights packages 
from 1947 to 1952. Nevertheless, the threat of a fed- 
eral law had put the South on notice and helped to 



52 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A N T I 



S E M I T I S M 



hasten lynching's decline after the mid-1930s. In 
the expansive social justice climate of the 1960s, 
Congress enacted a section of the 1968 Civil Rights 
Law that established some federal protections 
against lynching. 

See Also: AMES, JESSE DANIEL; LYNCHINGS; 
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE 
ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE 
(NAACP). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Chadbourn, James Harmon. Lynching and the Law. 1933. 

Huthmacher, J. Joseph. Senator Robert F. Wagner and the 
Rise of Urban Liberalism. 1968. 

Lash, Joseph P. Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their 
Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Pa- 
pers. 1971. 

Levy, Eugene. ]ames Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black 
Voice. 1973. 

White, Walter. A Man Called White. 1948. 

White, Walter. Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge 
Lynch. 1929. 

Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade against Lynch- 
ing, 1909-1950. 1980. 

Robert L. Zangrando 



ANTI-SEMITISM 



Anti-Semitism during the Depression and into 
World War II reached levels that had not been seen 
before in the United States and have not been seen 
since. The fear and insecurity that accompanied the 
severe economic downturn exposed and fueled a 
hostility and distrust of Jews that escalated as the 
economy tumbled. Moreover, the hatred in the 
United States was intensified by Adolf Hitler's as- 
sumption of power in Germany in 1933. The vi- 
ciousness of hate mongering on both sides of the 
Atlantic grew throughout the 1930s, only to abate 
in the United States well after the fall of Hitler and 
the end of the World War II. 

Anti-Semitism in the United States was not a 
new phenomenon. Immigrant Americans had not 
been immune to the prejudices of Christian Europe 



that saw the Jews as perverse and stubborn in their 
rejection of Christ and ultimately responsible for his 
death. These notions had led over the generations 
to all manner of discrimination, persecution, and 
outright violence. Yet the United States was differ- 
ent. Ancient prejudices had been submerged in the 
business of nation building. Although negative reli- 
gious images had persisted, the promise of Ameri- 
can democracy and opportunity had lured Jews and 
so many other immigrants to its shores. However, 
the levels of anti-Semitism escalated in the last two 
decades of the nineteenth century and the early 
decades of the twentieth century as several million 
Jews from Eastern Europe came to the United 
States fleeing Russian persecution. Americans of 
various stripes, including Henry Ford, had raised 
their voices against Jews, who were increasingly 
seen as unassimilable and even a threat to the Unit- 
ed States. 

Yet the anti-Semitism of the 1920s was to pale 
in comparison to its shrillness in the 1930s. The De- 
pression set the stage for the search for scapegoats 
and for extensive Jew baiting by a variety of dema- 
gogues, such as William Pelley, the leader of the 
Silver Shirts, who fancied himself the American 
counterpart of Hitler. Gerald B. Winrod headed up 
the Defenders of the Christian Faith, another of 
more than one hundred anti-Semitic organizations 
formed mostly after 1933. One of these organiza- 
tions, the German American Bund, was directly fi- 
nanced by the Nazis. An expose by Look magazine 
in 1939 indicated that there were sixty-two offices 
in the United States that were distributing material 
coming from Hitler's propaganda ministry in Ger- 
many. 

The most popular anti-Jewish preacher of the 
era however, was a homegrown product, Father 
Charles Coughlin. Through his weekly radio pro- 
gram and his publication Social Justice, Coughlin 
reached millions of people. By 1938 he was attack- 
ing Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and 
claiming that the United States and Christianity 
were being threatened by a vast conspiracy of 
bankers and Communists whom he increasingly 
identified as Jews. His Christian Front organization 
urged sympathizers to "buy Christian," and his fol- 
lowers on occasion attacked Jews on the streets of 



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Marchers parade through Cleveland, Ohio, on May 16, 1933, to protest Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany. National Archives 
and Records Administration, Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives 



several cities and desecrated synagogues. Since 
Coughlin was not silenced by his Church superiors 
until after the war started, his words carried weight, 
particularly among many Catholics. 

Jew baiting was not just a phenomenon of the 
streets; it was a practice in upper-class circles, in the 
halls of Congress, and in American political dis- 
course in general. Anti-Roosevelt partisans, in their 
attack on the New Deal, blasted it as the "Jew 
Deal." Moreover, in what they deemed a smear on 
Roosevelt, they claimed he was of Jewish origin 
(which he was not). The 1936 presidential election 
and particularly the 1940 election were rife with al- 
legations of a Jewish conspiracy and untold Jewish 



power endangering the United States. Charles 
Lindbergh and other members of the America First 
organization accused Jews, along with the British 
and the Roosevelt administration, of trying to push 
the United States into an unnecessary and ill- 
advised war against Hitler. 

Although card carrying anti-Semites numbered 
in the thousands rather than in the millions, their 
hate literature was widely disseminated in the Unit- 
ed States. Jews were likened to octopuses control- 
ling much of American government, industry, and 
public opinion. They were seen as Communist con- 
spirators bent on takeover. The so-called "Jewish 
problem" became a topic in the general press. The 



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level of anti-Semitism reached such proportions 
that Fortune magazine in 1936 investigated the ex- 
tent of "Jewish control." They found that, to the 
contrary, Jews had virtually no control in major 
manufacturing and banking sectors, and they rep- 
resented no more than 15 percent of the members 
of the Communist Party. In fact, Jews faced dis- 
crimination in getting jobs in corporate America 
and there were quotas limiting the number of Jews 
in many institutions of higher learning. 

But despite the reality of American Jewish life, 
suspicions persisted. In a public opinion poll in 
March 1938, 41 percent of Americans believed that 
Jews had too much power in the United States. 
When asked what to do about it, 18 percent were 
in favor of restricting Jews in business, 24 percent 
believed Jews should be kept out of government 
and politics, and 20 percent were ready to drive 
Jews out of the United States. By April 1940, the 
percentage of those in favor of restricting Jews in 
business had risen to 31 percent. In August 1940 
the question was "what nationality, religious, or ra- 
cial groups in this country are a menace to Ameri- 
ca?" Jews were cited by 17 percent of the respon- 
dents, whereas Germans were cited by 14 percent 
and the Japanese by 6 percent. Ironically even at the 
end of the war, after six million European Jews had 
been brutally murdered, 20 percent of Americans 
still believed that Jews in the United States had too 
much power. 

For the 4.5 million American Jews, many of 
whom were immigrants or second-generation 
Americans struggling like other Americans to earn 
a living during hard times, the anti-Semitism that 
accompanied the Depression and the rise of the 
Nazis in Germany provoked profound anxiety. 
How different was the United States after all? 
Could the persecution evidenced in Europe take 
hold here? What did the future hold? How much 
would pushing for the cause of Jews overseas sub- 
ject American Jews to charges of disloyalty and pro- 
voke an even greater anti-Semitic backlash in the 
United States? 

The Jewish community in the United States 
faced serious challenges as it sought not only to re- 
spond to anti-Semitism at home, but to events 
overseas as the number of Jewish refugees desper- 




A Nazi storm trooper stands at the entrance of the Jewish- 
owned Tietz department store in Berlin, Germany, in April 
1933. The sign beside him urges German citizens to boycott 
Jewish stores. National Archives and Records Administration, 
Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo 
Archives 



ately trying to escape Hitler and find a new home 
dramatically escalated. Over a decade earlier, in re- 
sponse to what was perceived as unwanted hordes 
of Jews and Catholics coming in from Southern and 
Eastern Europe, Congress had passed the Johnson- 
Reed Immigration Act, which not only had sharply 
curtailed the total numbers of immigrants allowed 
into to the United States, but had specified where 
they had to come from. Countries from Eastern Eu- 
rope were only allotted several thousand immi- 
grants each, while the total German-Austria quota 
was about 27,000 places. There was no special al- 
lowance for refugees fleeing persecution. During 
the 1930s, when refugee advocates wanted to urge 



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Congress to liberalize the immigration law, they 
were warned that if anything, an unsympathetic 
Congress would act to cut the numbers, not in- 
crease them. Neither Congress nor the American 
public had an interest in increasing immigration 
into the United States, particularly if some of those 
immigrants would be Jews. Thus, the indifference, 
suspicion, and outright anti-Semitism palpable to 
so many American Jews in the 1930s had an impact 
on the country's response to Hitler and the Holo- 
caust. Ultimately, American Jews were stymied in 
this cause by their own fears and impotence, and by 
the determined opposition of the American public 
to offering any more Jews a refuge in the United 
States. 

See Also: CASTE AND CLASS; COUGHLIN, CHARLES; 
RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dinnerstein, Leonard. Antisemitism in America. 1994. 

"Jews in America." Fortune (February 1936): 79-144. 

Mueller, William A. "Hitler Speaks and the Bund 
Obeys." Look (October 10, 1939). 

Scholnick, Myron I. The New Deal and Anti-Semitism in 
America. 1990. 

Shapiro, Edward S. "The Approach of War: Congressio- 
nal Isolationism and Anti-Semitism, 1939-1941. 
American Jewish History 74, no. 1 (1984): 45-65. 

Strong, Donald S. Organized Anti-Semitism in America: 
The Rise of Group Prejudice During the Decade, 
1930-40. 1941. Reprint, 1979. 

Barbara S. Burstin 



APPALACHIA, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON 

The Great Depression came early in Appalachia, a 
mountainous region of the southeastern United 
States. The lumber industry faded soon after World 
War I, and two other major regional employers — 
textiles and coal — struggled with overproduction, 
low wages, and rising unemployment throughout 
the 1920s when most industries were enjoying 
prosperity. Moreover, subsistence-oriented moun- 
tain agriculture ceased to provide a viable livelihood 



for large numbers of people well before the stock 
market crash of 1929. Fifty years of industrial abuse 
of the environment and the lack of a scientific ap- 
proach to agriculture and forestry had left much 
Appalachian land exhausted. 

Mountain farm families struggled to survive on 
subsistence family farms that produced food but lit- 
tle cash. Often the burdens of tending the farm fell 
upon women and children as men worked else- 
where to earn needed cash. By the 1920s, many 
families had abandoned the farms for work in coal 
or textiles (in mills both within Appalachia and be- 
yond the southeastern periphery). The coal industry 
excluded women but employed African Americans 
and immigrants, broadening the racial and ethnic 
mix in the region. The textile industry employed 
white men and women, but excluded African 
Americans. Both industries faced bitter interregion- 
al competition, and management in both insisted 
that survival required non-union operations. Sym- 
pathetic state and local governments supported the 
anti-union efforts. 

As industrial employment both inside and out- 
side the region collapsed in the late 1920s, workers 
who had earlier abandoned farming returned, in- 
creasing pressure on land already unproductive and 
overpopulated. The great southern drought of 1930 
hit Appalachia especially hard, adding to the woes 
of mountain farmers and stranded refugees from 
the region's faltering industries. 

In 1929, violent strikes erupted in mill towns of 
the Appalachian foothills like Gastonia, Elizabeth- 
ton, Marion, and Danville. Young mountain 
women emerged as prominent leaders among the 
strikers. Embittered by the low wages, long hours, 
poor working conditions, and demanding produc- 
tion goals (the "stretch-out"), many workers wel- 
comed organizers of the American Federation of 
Labor's United Textile Workers (UTW) and the 
Communist-led National Textile Workers. The coal 
fields also stirred as the National Miners Union and 
the West Virginia Mineworkers Union sought to 
steal the march on the United Mine Workers of 
America (UMW), which was left virtually moribund 
by its falling membership and failed organization 
drives of the 1920s. 

The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 
and the coming of the New Deal had immediate 



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A family pose with their hoes on the porch of their farmhouse in Knox county, Kentucky, in 1940. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



political consequences as Democrats ousted an en- 
trenched Republican regime in West Virginia, and 
Democrats generally prevailed in other parts of the 
traditionally Republican region. While congressio- 
nal Democrats usually supported the New Deal, 
such conservative state governors as Guy Kump of 
West Virginia and Ruby Laffoon of Kentucky 
clashed bitterly with federal relief administrators. 

Before 1933, organizing efforts in both coal and 
textiles failed. The New Deal's National Industrial 
Recovery Act affirmed labor's right to organize and 
to bargain collectively. Soon after passage, the 
UMW conducted a successful organizing drive 
throughout the region. On September 21, 1933, 
union and industry representatives signed an 
agreement that set the eight-hour workday as stan- 



dard and ended mandatory payment in scrip and 
the requirements that employees live in company 
houses and trade at company stores. Soon thereaf- 
ter, West Virginia ended its practice of deputizing 
mine guards. 

Coal operators in Bell, Harlan, and Whitley 
counties in eastern Kentucky remained defiant of 
public opinion and pressures from the state and 
federal government. Violent clashes characterized 
labor-management relations as operators crushed 
organizing drives of both the National Miners 
Union and the UMW. Not until 1941 did the coal 
operators of "Bloody Harlan" accept UMW con- 
tracts. Despite a vigorous effort in 1934, neither the 
UTW nor, later, the Congress of Industrial Organi- 
zation's Textile Workers Organizing Committee 



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This young son of a poor Appalachian miner steals coal from rail cars for use at his family's home in Chaplin, West Virginia, in 
1938. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



had much enduring success in breaking the anti- 
union tradition in textiles. 

By 1930 both agricultural and industrial coun- 
ties reported growing unemployment and distress. 
Local governments and community agencies 
sought to fill their traditional roles as relief provid- 
ers, but agents of President Herbert Hoover's un- 
employment committee found the efforts inade- 
quate. Hoover, hoping to avoid direct federal 
action, enlisted the Red Cross and the American 
Friends Service Committee to provide emergency 
relief, especially food for children, in the hardest-hit 
Appalachian counties. In 1932, federal loans 
through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation 
moved the states to establish relief agencies for the 
first time. 

Relief workers were shocked to discover the ex- 
tent of need in Appalachia. Unemployment rates in 



some counties reached as high as 80 percent. Even 
with moderate economic recovery, welfare depen- 
dence became an intractable problem. New Deal 
programs provided much needed help through 
both work relief and direct payments, and, with So- 
cial Security, these programs sounded the death 
knells of the orphanage and the poor house. In 
generating work relief, the federal government also 
invested heavily to help upgrade roads, bridges, 
and public buildings. In addition, relief agencies 
took care to see to work relief for women. African 
Americans, although suffering discrimination from 
some agencies, received desperately needed work 
relief from the Works Projects Administration. The 
effort to build a modern welfare system, however, 
was compromised by the persistence of spoils poli- 
tics and the reluctance of states to adequately fund 
welfare agencies. 



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This farmer living near Barbourville, Kentucky, built this new barn in 1940 with assistance from the Farm Security 
Administration and the Southern Appalachian Project. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



New Deal policy toward Appalachian agricul- 
ture reflected New Deal economic ambivalence, 
tending at first to favor planning ideas, and later 
seeking a suitable setting for capitalist enterprise to 
flourish. Some tobacco growers benefited, but most 
Appalachian farmers found the early New Deal's 
main agricultural legislation, the Agricultural Ad- 
justment Act, irrelevant to their needs. Resettle- 
ment ideas flourished for a time, but subsistence 
community experiments, such as Sublimity Farms 
in Kentucky, which relocated farmers from poor 
lands, and Arthurdale in West Virginia, which relo- 
cated stranded miners, aroused much conservative 
opposition. Beginning in 1937 with the Farm Secur- 
ity Administration, the focus shifted to rehabilitat- 
ing poor farms rather than moving farmers. The 



planning concept reemerged in the later New Deal 
years in combination with the idea of organizing 
farmers for land-use planning and the removal of 
land with excessive slopes from agricultural uses. 
Federal and state parks absorbed some lands 
judged agriculturally submarginal. New Deal poli- 
cies helped some mountain farmers and promoted 
erosion prevention and soil conservation, but the 
long-term decline of mountain agriculture contin- 
ued. 

Another New Deal program that profoundly 
affected a large part of Appalachia was the Tennes- 
see Valley Authority (TV A), authorized by Congress 
in the early days of the New Deal. TVA built dams 
to control floods, encouraged farmers to combat 
soil erosion, promoted reforestation, and sought to 



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remove submarginal lands from agriculture. Most 
important, the TVA provided hydroelectric power, 
despite the philosophical opposition of some in 
Congress and the opposition of private utility com- 
panies. TVA's many useful improvements came 
with a substantial cost. Thousands of rural residents 
were compelled to sell and relocate as TVA dams 
inundated their homes and farms. Paradoxically, 
TVA, whose purpose was largely conservation, also 
became in time a major consumer of strip-mined 
coal to generate power, contributing to the princi- 
pal source of environmental degradation in the re- 
gion. 

The Depression years brought great trials to the 
people of Appalachia. The New Deal provided re- 
lief, but only the coming of World War II brought 
a business recovery. Mountain agriculture contin- 
ued to fade, however, and for many, migration to 
wartime industrial plants outside the region provid- 
ed the best hope of a better future. 

See Also: ARTHURDALE, WEST VIRGINIA; GUFFEY- 
SNYDER ACT OF 1935; GUFFEY -VINSON ACT OF 
1937; HARLAN COUNTY; LEWIS, JOHN L.; RURAL 
LIFE; TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY (TVA); 
UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA (UMWA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Blakey, George T. Hard Times and New Deal in Kentucky, 
1929-1939. 1986. 

Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands and Mountaineers: In- 
dustrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930. 
1982. 

Hall, Jaquelyn Dowd. "Disorderly Women: Gender and 
Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South." Journal 
of American History 73 (1986): 354-382. 

Heavener, John W. Which Side Are You On: The Harlan 
County Coal Miners, 1931-1939. 1978. 

Kirby, Jack Temple. Rural Worlds Lost: The American 
South, 1920-1960. 1987. 

Lewis, Ronald L. Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class 
and Community Conflict, 1780-1980. 1987. 

McDonald, Michael J., and John Muldowny. TVA and the 
Dispossessed: The Resettlement of Population in the 
Norris Dam Area. 1982. 

Salstrom, Paul. Appalachia's Path to Dependency: Rethink- 
ing a Region's Economic History, 1730-1940. 1994. 

Taylor, Paul F. Bloody Harlan: The United Mine Workers 
of America in Harlan County, Kentucky, 1931-1941. 
1990. 



Thomas, Jerry Bruce. An Appalachian New Deal: West Vir- 
ginia in the Great Depression. 1998. 

Trotter, Joe William, Jr. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in 
Southern West Virginia, 1915-32. 1990. 

Walker, Melissa. All We Knew Was to Tarm: Rural Women 
in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941. 2000. 

Jerry Bruce Thomas 



ARCHITECTURE 

The economic crisis in the 1930s upstaged but did 
not alleviate the upheaval within the architectural 
profession. A new austere, ahistoric architectural 
language, imported from Europe, won fiery adher- 
ents who proclaimed that tradition had no place in 
the production of contemporary architecture. The 
term modernism is used to denote this new style. 
Despite the zeal of the converts, others, with equal 
passion, rejected the new vocabulary. The debate 
over modernism polarized the architectural com- 
munity as a new generation of architects not only 
rebelled against historic styles but also challenged 
the privileged place held by prominent and estab- 
lished practitioners. Patronage patterns also shifted 
as the federal government, responding to the eco- 
nomic distress, commissioned an unprecedented 
body of work. While the production of architecture 
for the private sector did not entirely cease, the fed- 
eral government gave new prominence to specific 
building types and activities. Federal and civic 
buildings, as well as regional planning and its at- 
tendant architecture, constituted important arenas 
for New Deal design. The 1930s reshaped American 
architecture and the national landscape. By the end 
of World War II, modernism had triumphed, a new 
elite occupied the pinnacle of the architectural pro- 
fession, and the federal government had blanketed 
the country with emblems of the federal presence. 

STYLES AND THE ARCHITECTURAL 
PROFESSION 

Formally, the most striking characteristic of the 
architecture of the period was the diversity of ex- 
pressions competing for the label modern. Three 
styles dominated. Classicism remained a viable ar- 
chitectural language throughout the decade. John 



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Russell Pope's National Gallery of Art (1935-1941), 
on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., reaf- 
firmed the time-honored notion that American 
public architecture should be classical. Pope's clas- 
sicism, however, was restrained and sober rather 
than lavish and opulent. He simplified and reduced 
the classical apparatus. Orders were suggested by 
slightly projecting planes, and the whole was 
bound together by sleek horizontals and delicately 
scaled moldings. Despite the austerity of Pope's 
classicism, proponents of modernism labeled his 
continued commitment to the past as reactionary. 
The style most often associated with the period was 
an even more restrained, spartan interpretation de- 
scribed as modernized classicism. Paul Cret's Folger 
Shakespeare Library (1928-1932), also in the na- 
tional capital, was a seminal work. The library was 
a simple rectangular mass of taut, thin planes. The 
orders, reduced to a series of fluted piers, were de- 
tailed in a stripped, simplified manner. Twin entry 
pavilions flank the screen of piers, which distill to 
a minimal essence the image of a classical colon- 
nade. Cret's modernized classicism served as the 
model for many federal buildings in the New Deal 
period. 

In the commercial realm, the comparatively re- 
served streamlined moderne tempered and replaced 
the flamboyant Art Deco of the 1920s. Exuberant 
flourishes, such as the telescoping spire of semicir- 
cular aluminum panels articulated with radiating 
lines and punched triangular openings of William 
Van Alen's Chrysler Building (1926-1930) in New 
York City, seemed out of place in the bleak eco- 
nomic climate. Streamlined moderne originated in 
the work of industrial designers such as Norman 
Bel Geddes and Walter Dorwin Teague. For design- 
ers of the period, the characteristic flat planar wall 
surfaces, rounded corners, banded windows, thin 
decorative horizontal stripes, and flat roofs gave 
built form to the idea of speed. Streamlined mod- 
erne appeared on buildings ranging from vernacu- 
lar roadside diners to Frank Lloyd Wright's high- 
style Johnson Wax Building (1936-1939) in Racine, 
Wisconsin. Like Art Deco, streamlined moderne 
represented an attempt to create a language appro- 
priate for the machine age. 

Unlike the promoters of revival architecture or 
Art Deco, proponents of modernism insisted that 



all connections to the past be broken. As a style, 
modernism burst onto the architectural scene in the 
United States through Henry-Russell Hitchcock 
and Philip Johnson's exhibition on "Modern Archi- 
tecture" at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 
1932. Photographs, models, and drawings of recent 
buildings, primarily by European architects, sup- 
ported Hitchcock and Johnson's claim that a new 
language, which they named the International Style, 
had emerged. The new vocabulary, characterized 
by exposed structural framing, non-load-bearing 
walls, and absence of applied ornament, constitut- 
ed a self-conscious rejection of tradition. In addi- 
tion to the architecture of the Europeans, the two 
curators identified George Howe and William Les- 
caze's Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building 
(1929-1932) in Philadelphia as a seminal work. The 
first American skyscraper inspired by European 
modernism pointedly turned its back on the aes- 
thetics that had guided the design of the relatively 
new building type. The architects gave the Philadel- 
phia Savings Fund Society Building's functional 
components distinct expressions on the exterior. 
The base, containing shops and the banking hall, 
the shaft for the offices, and the service tower were 
each distinguished by different materials and win- 
dow treatments. The building was defiantly asym- 
metrical. The presence of the structural frame was 
clearly expressed on the exterior. There was no tra- 
ditional ornament or detailing at door and window 
openings. The building and others included in the 
exhibition redirected American architecture in the 
subsequent decades. The influence of modernism 
was broad as well as deep. 

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (1936-1937) 
at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, was an idiosyncratic 
blend of romantic rusticity and influences from the 
International Style. Eliel and Eero Saarinen and 
Robert F. Swanson's 1939 competition-winning but 
ultimately unrealized design for the Smithsonian 
Gallery would have defiantly placed a fully modern 
building directly opposite Pope's National Gallery 
on the Mall in the federal capital. Supplanting the 
stylistic diversity of the 1930s, modernism tri- 
umphed as the appropriate language for high-style 
buildings following World War II. 

Within the architectural profession, the ascen- 
dance of modernism represented more than the tri- 



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umph of a novel architectural language. Aesthetic 
allegiances polarized the profession along genera- 
tional lines. The economic distress of the 1930s ex- 
acerbated the breach, as architects, like much of the 
country's workforce, faced the bleak lack of em- 
ployment opportunities. Older, established archi- 
tects, who were also most likely to receive commis- 
sions for prominent buildings, clung to traditional 
modes of expression. Aspiring architects, eager to 
make a mark in the field, championed modernism 
as they also challenged the privileged place that 
their established colleagues held. At the convention 
of the American Institute of Architects held in 
Washington, D.C., in 1939, the Smithsonian Gal- 
lery design served as the rallying point for the 
younger architects eager to overturn professional as 
well as aesthetic hierarchies. At stake was the de- 
sign of buildings not only in the private sector but 
also for the architecturally activist federal govern- 
ment. 

PATRONAGE AND BUILDING TYPES 

To stimulate the depressed economy, the feder- 
al government emerged as the primary architectural 
patron of the period. Government agencies com- 
missioned and produced a staggering body of work 
during the Depression decade. The most well- 
known fruit of government patronage was the fed- 
eral building program that placed thousands of post 
offices and courthouses in cities and towns across 
the country. The Office of the Supervising Architect 
of the Treasury Department oversaw the vast build- 
ing program. The style most often associated with 
the Supervising Architect in the 1930s was modern- 
ized classicism. Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon's post 
office (1931-1932) for Chattanooga, Tennessee, 
was one of many reinterpretations of Cret's facade 
composition for the Folger. However, the Office of 
the Supervising Architect produced federal build- 
ings in a range of revival styles. Reginald Johnson's 
post office (1936-1937) for Santa Barbara, Califor- 
nia, was a moderne Spanish colonial revival. Don- 
ald G. Anderson's Petersburg, Virginia, post office 
(1934-1936) was a federal reinterpretation of a fan- 
ciful, contemporary reconstruction. The facade 
drew heavily from the rebuilding of the colonial 
capitol (1928-1934) at nearby Williamsburg, Virgin- 
ia. Federal architects and their collaborators made 



revival architecture the language of New Deal fed- 
eral buildings. 

Where Hitchcock and Johnson's International 
Style was a purely aesthetic language divorced from 
ideology and social purpose, a Utopian tradition 
that extended from the English garden city move- 
ment to twentieth-century Radburn, New Jersey, 
inspired the New Deal's suburban town program. 
The project brought together a talented group of 
landscape architects, planners, and architects, in- 
cluding Henry Wright, Clarence Stein, and Cather- 
ine Bauer. The goal was to use architecture as a tool 
of both economic and social reform. While the work 
did provide models for city design, ultimately, the 
numbers diminished the influence of the idealistic 
experiment. Of the several satellite cities planned, 
only Greenbelt, Maryland; Greendale, Wisconsin; 
and Greenhills, Ohio, were built. 

The boldest act of New Deal planning was the 
creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TV A) in 
1933. Treating the entire 900-mile river valley that 
cuts through seven states as a single unit, the gov- 
ernment corporation planned and erected a string 
of dams to control flooding, create inexpensive 
electricity, repair adjacent damaged forest and agri- 
cultural lands, and stimulate industry. The goals of 
the ambitious and visionary project were to bring 
the backward and blighted region into the twenti- 
eth century and to demonstrate the power and ben- 
efits of coordinated regional planning. At Norris 
Dam, Roland Wank, the authority's first chief archi- 
tect, played off architecture treated as severe rec- 
tangular masses against the dynamism of water in 
the massive spillway beyond. Wank's grave, simple 
buildings of textured concrete ornamented only 
with crisply cut rectangular openings containing 
bands of windows or integral sans-serif lettering 
created an architectural image that vividly ex- 
pressed strength, efficiency, and faith in the power 
of technology to produce change. 

The period of the Great Depression witnessed 
the transformation of the architectural profession. 
On the other side of the decade, modernism 
emerged as the style of choice for high-style Ameri- 
can buildings. A new group of talented designers, 
promoters of modernism, replaced the masters of 
academic architecture as the new leaders of the 



62 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



ARMSTRONG 



LOUIS 



profession. The Depression-driven Roosevelt ad- 
ministration had commissioned an extensive body 
of architecture that also attested to the expanded 
presence of the federal government in the daily 
lives of its citizens. 

See Also: ART; PUBLIC WORKS ADMINISTRATION 
(PWA); TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY (TV A). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bedford, Steven McLeod. John Russell Pope: Architect of 
Empire. 1998. 

Butler, Sara Amelia. "Constructing New Deal America: 
Public Art and Architecture and Institutional Legiti- 
macy." Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2001. 

Craig, Lois, and the staff of the Federal Architecture Proj- 
ect. The Federal Presence: Architecture, Politics, and 
National Design. 1984. 

Cutler, Phoebe. The Public Landscape of the New Deal. 
1985. 

Grossman, Elizabeth Greenwell. The Civic Architecture of 
Paul Cret. 1996. 

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, and Philip Johnson. The Inter- 
national Style: Architecture since 1922. 1932. 

Lee, Antoinette J. Architects to the Nation: The Rise and 
Decline of the Supervising Architect's Office. 2000. 

Reitzes, Lisa Beth. "Moderately Modern: Interpreting the 
Architecture of the Public Works Administration." 
Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1989. 

Short, C. W., and R. Stanley-Brown. Public Buildings: A 
Survey of Architecture of Projects Constructed by Federal 
and Other Governmental Bodies between the Years 1933 
and 1939 with the Assistance of the Public Works Ad- 
ministration. 1939. Reprint, Public Buildings: Architec- 
ture under the Public Works Administration 1933-39, 
Vol. 1. 1986. 

Weber, Eva. Art Deco in America. 1985. 

Wilson, Richard Guy, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran 
Tashjian. The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941. 
1986. 

Wilson, Richard Guy. "Modernized Classicism and 
Washington, D.C." In American Public Architecture: 
European Roots and Native Expressions, edited by 
Craig Zabel and Susan Scott Munshower. 1989. 

Sara A. Butler 



ARMSTRONG, LOUIS 

Louis Armstrong (August 4, 1901-July 6, 1971), also 
known as Pops and Satchmo, pioneered jazz music 



as both a trumpet player and vocalist. Armstrong 
created a musical style and image that reflected his 
times and served as a catalyst for cultural change. 
His early life was characterized by a struggle to 
overcome poverty and racism. Growing up penni- 
less in New Orleans' red light district, Armstrong 
received his first formal musical training at the Col- 
ored Waifs' Home. By 1918, he was playing cornet 
in the Ory Creole Orchestra, replacing King Oliver, 
who had moved to Chicago. Before long, Arm- 
strong began playing on steamboats that sailed 
north up the Mississippi River. He followed Oliver 
to Chicago in 1922 and played second trumpet in 
his band. Armstrong made his recording debut dur- 
ing his tenure with Oliver. Legend has it that Arm- 
strong was instructed to stand twenty feet behind 
the band during recording sessions because of the 
magnitude of his sound. 

Armstrong developed an unerring sense of 
swing and a virtuoso range. By 1925, he was leading 
his own groups, which showcased his melodious- 
ness, edgy rhythms, and breathtaking harmonic 
leaps. These influential smaller ensembles became 
known as the Hot Fives and the Hot Sevens. In 
1929 Armstrong traveled to New York, where he 
began to experiment with singing. His vocal work 
included a rendition of Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbe- 
havin'" that was featured in the 1929 Broadway 
revue Hot Chocolates. 

During the Great Depression, jazz helped to lift 
the spirits of the country and created a popular cul- 
ture that broke down many social barriers. At the 
beginning of this era, Armstrong faced one of the 
problems that threatened the nation — warring 
gangster factions. Now a hot musical commodity, 
Armstrong was courted by several potential man- 
agers, including representatives from key crime 
families in New York and Chicago. In order to avoid 
the conflict, and guarantee his own safety, Arm- 
strong toured the United States in 1930, carefully 
side-stepping New York and Chicago. In 1933 he 
embarked on the first of what would be many Euro- 
pean tours. By 1935, the dispute was resolved when 
he began a long association with manager Joe Gla- 
ser. But Armstrong's challenges were far from over. 
Years of touring had injured his lip and hampered 
his recording career, leaving him without a record- 
ing contract. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



63 



ARNOLD 



T H U R M 



Under the management of Glaser, a nightclub 
manager associated with the gangster Al Capone, 
Armstrong began to brand himself as an entertain- 
er. Armstrong's musical style changed as he began 
leading larger bands, which would back him on 
popular songs. In 1936 he became the first jazz mu- 
sician regularly featured in Hollywood movies, ap- 
pearing with Bing Crosby in Pennies from Heaven. 
Although he often performed for segregated audi- 
ences and played movie roles that perpetuated ra- 
cial stereotypes, his music transcended racism and 
appealed to audiences of all races. Armstrong's hit 
1932 version of "All of Me" became closely associ- 
ated with the trials and losses that Americans faced 
during the Great Depression, and his noble spirit 
and dignity became a model for facing these chal- 
lenges. 

Critic Stanley Crouch argues that Armstrong 
intensified the "central ethos of American cul- 
ture" — be yourself and do it well. After the Depres- 
sion, Armstrong expanded his audience through 
world tours, and he served as a spokesperson for 
racial equality during the civil rights era. His popu- 
larity was such that in 1964 he even replaced the 
Beatles atop the Billboard charts with a recording of 
the song "Hello Dolly." By the time of Armstrong's 
death in 1971, he had served as musical innovator, 
cultural ambassador, and entertainer. 

See Also: JAZZ; MUSIC. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Armstrong, Louis, and Richard Meryman. Louis Arm- 
strong: A Self-Portrait. 1996. 

Armstrong, Louis. The Complete RCA Victor Recordings 
(sound recording). 1997. 

Armstrong, Louis. The Complete Hot Tive and Hot Seven 
Recordings (sound recording). 2000. 

Collier, James Lincoln. Louis Armstrong: An American Ge- 
nius. 1983. 

Giddins, Gary. Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong. 
2001. 

Miller, March H., ed. Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy. 
1994. 

William R. Bettler 



ARNOLD, THURMAN 



Thurman Wesley Arnold (June 2, 1891-November 
7, 1969), lawyer, social theorist, and government of- 
ficial, was born in Laramie, Wyoming. After earning 
a bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1911 and a 
law degree from Harvard in 1914, Arnold took up 
the practice of law in Chicago. Following military 
service in Europe, he returned to Laramie and en- 
tered local politics. He won election to the Wyo- 
ming House of Representatives in 1921, and served 
as its sole Democratic member. He later served as 
the mayor of Laramie. In 1927, he was appointed 
Dean of the University of West Virginia Law 
School. From this post, he launched an ambitious 
program of procedural reforms in the state's courts. 
Arnold was called to a professorship at the Yale 
Law School in 1930. His activities there included 
the publication of two books — Symbols of Govern- 
ment (1935) and The Folklore of Capitalism (1937) — 
that gained a national audience. 

Arnold emerged on the Washington scene in 
1938 when he was appointed to head the antitrust 
division at the Department of Justice. His qualifica- 
tions for this post were not immediately evident; in 
The Folklore of Capitalism he had ridiculed antitrust 
laws as largely symbolic exercises in "economic 
meaninglessness" that enabled politicians to 
mount "crusades, which were utterly futile but 
enormously picturesque, and which paid big divi- 
dends in personal prestige." Once in office, howev- 
er, he embarked on a vigorous campaign of anti- 
trust enforcement. During his five-year tenure, he 
initiated nearly half of the proceedings brought 
under the Sherman Act during the first fifty-three 
years of its existence and he increased the division's 
professional staff nearly five-fold. Far more than 
had any of his predecessors, Arnold brought crimi- 
nal indictments against perceived antitrust viola- 
tors, but was prepared to drop them in favor of con- 
sent decrees when alleged offenders agreed to 
change their behavior. Arnold was convinced that 
his attacks on market power in price-making con- 
tributed to increased production and employment. 
In 1941, when economic mobilization for war was 
pending, he maintained that antitrust enforcement 
was essential "to prevent restrictions of production, 



64 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A R T 



particularly conspiracies which are blocking the de- 
fense effort." 

Arnold was never part of President Roosevelt's 
inner circle of policy advisers. He was brought to 
Washington when the Temporary National Eco- 
nomic Committee's investigations into business 
practices were underway, and senior members of 
Roosevelt's economic team were uncertain about 
the future direction of industrial policy. For a time, 
Arnold was allowed to operate with a relatively free 
hand. However, longstanding veterans of the New 
Deal's economic bureaucracy, such as Leon Hen- 
derson, became increasingly dissatisfied with Ar- 
nold's publicity-seeking and with the economic 
perspective that informed his decisions. After the 
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, 
when policy makers were attempting to promote 
business-government cooperation, little welcome 
was left for Arnold's approach. In 1943, he was ef- 
fectively kicked upstairs with an appointment to the 
U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, 
a position from which he resigned in 1945. 

Arnold then returned to the private practice of 
law. In the early 1950s, he again came into national 
prominence when representing a number of per- 
sons whose loyalty had been challenged during the 
McCarthy period. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Arnold, Thurman. The Bottlenecks of Business. 1940. 

Arnold, Thurman. Fair Fights and Foul: A Dissenting Law- 
yer's Life. 1965. 

Hawley, Ellis W. The New Deal and the Problem of Monop- 
oly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence. 1966. 

Kearney, Edward M. Thurman Arnold, Social Critic: The 
Satirical Challenge to Orthodoxy. 1970. 

William J. Barber 



ART 

The character and value of art produced in the Unit- 
ed States during the 1930s has been the subject of 
continuing controversy within the discipline of art 
history since the 1960s. Though it is true that all art 
is necessarily accounted for retrospectively, in par- 



tial and selective histories, it is especially significant 
that art from the Depression continues to present 
a range of intellectual, political, ideological, and 
aesthetic problems for historians and critics. 

In orthodox survey histories, 1930s U. S. art is 
represented as realist or documentary in form and 
intention, highly parochial in relation to develop- 
ments in European modern art, and mostly con- 
taminated by left-wing political motivations. The 
artists Andrew Wyeth, Ben Shahn, and Edward 
Hopper are claimed to be the most significant in the 
period, producing paintings, drawings and photo- 
graphs that supposedly transcend the specific so- 
ciopolitical circumstances of their production. But 
many others who worked in various neoabstract, 
expressionist, naturalist, realist, social-realist, or so- 
cialist-realist styles, motivated by an equally wide 
set of artistic and sociopolitical interests and values, 
have little, if any, presence in post-1945 art-history 
accounts of the so-called "dirty decade." William 
Gropper, Lucienne Bloch, Jerome Klein, William 
Zorach, Raphael Soyer, and Berenice Abbott, for 
example, were all artists with reputations already 
established by the mid-1930s, and their exhibitions 
and views were discussed and advertised in con- 
temporary mainstream art magazines such as The 
American Magazine of Art and Art Digest, but they 
virtually dropped out of history as work of the 1930s 
was repressed or villified in the Cold War climate 
of the later 1940s and 1950s. 

By the mid-1960s there was a reappraisal, for a 
variety of complex and interrelated reasons. Presi- 
dent Lyndon B. Johnson's creation of the National 
Endowment for the Arts evoked Franklin D. Roose- 
velt's subvention of the arts in the United States as 
part of the New Deal. The emergence of the New 
Left, organized around civil rights for minorities 
and women and opposition to U. S. involvement in 
the Vietnam War, sparked interest again in the left 
politics and debates of the 1930s in which artists, 
through such organizations as the Artists' Union 
(AU) and the American Artists' Committee Against 
Racism and Fascism (AACARF), played an impor- 
tant part. The high modernism of U. S. art in the 
1950s, symbolized by abstract expressionism, had 
begun to give way to a wide range of styles and an 
interpenetration of art forms and practices that, in 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



65 



R T 




31 in 



I 




Tfo's Arf Center in Gold Beach, Oregon, was established during the 1930s by the WPA. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



turn, led to a less, or at least differently, prejudicial 
reassessment of 1930s art and art debates. 

Unsurprisingly, when scholars turned back to 
the 1930s they found aspects that linked art practice 
then to developments in the post-World War II pe- 
riod. These included the art of the proto-abstract 
expressionists, many of whom had used relatively 
realist styles during the Depression, often as em- 
ployees of the WPA's Federal Art Project (for exam- 
ple, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de 
Kooning). Other 1930s artists who produced rela- 
tively abstract paintings, prints, and drawings, such 
as Stuart Davis, Balcombe Greene, Hans Hofmann, 
and Georgia O'Keeffe, also found their latter-day 
champions, though for Stuart Davis the cost of this 
revival in his artistic reputation was substantial ne- 
glect of his pivotal role in left-wing art politics in 
New York in the late 1930s. Francis V. O'Connor's 
research into art in the Depression, conducted in 
the later 1960s and published in the early 1970s, 



highlighted the sociology and demography of U. S. 
artists, and reconfirmed the significance of New 
York City as the home and inspiration of perhaps 
a third of all professional or aspiring professional 
artists in the country. Study of black and women 
artists active in the 1930s, including Vertis Hayes, 
Aaron Douglas, Marion Greenwood, and Minna 
Citron, reflected the growth of 1960s civil rights and 
feminism as political and scholarly movements for 
radical social change. What the 1930s meant in art- 
historical terms had changed dramatically by the 
end of the 1970s, though the determinants within 
this process of reassessment were broadly social 
and political. 

No other decade in the last century attracts 
such questions or analytic problems, nor com- 
mands such putative coherence. To be called a 
1930s artist is no mere chronological label: The 
term implies that artist and his or her paintings or 
sculptures somehow reflect or embody the combi- 



66 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A R T 




The New Deal, a mural in the auditorium of the Leonardo Da Vinci Art School in New York City, was painted as a WPA 
project in the mid 1930s by Conrad Albrizio, who dedicated the work to President Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



nation of realist intent, style, and socialist or Marx- 
ist political motivation associated with the Depres- 
sion and the New Deal. Edward Hopper, then, 
though active in the 1930s, is not a 1930s artist and 
his painting Early Sunday Morning (1930) is not in 
any significant way a piece of art of the 1930s. 
Georgia O'Keeffe, similarly, though productive in 
the decade, created works such as Ram's Skull with 
Brown Leaves (1936) whose value escapes the ideo- 
logical posturings and political machinations of the 



1930s. In contrast, Stuart Davis, socialist chairman 
of both the AU and the AACARF (but always highly 
skeptical of the U. S. Communist Party doctrine on 
art and political matters), will never escape his as- 
sociation with the 1930s. His Swing Landscape (c. 
1938), for instance, is far more in debt to Piet Mon- 
drian and Fernand Leger than to any indigenous 
social art influence, but it remains a permanent 
prisoner, too, of the "art of the 1930s." The 1930s, 
then, means the Great Depression, the optimism 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



67 



R T 




" 






This relief at the Forest Hills Station post office in New York 
was completed by Sten Jacobsson in 1937 as part of the 
Federal Art Project. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



(or naivete, depending on one's perspective) of the 
New Deal, the moral disaster of the U. S. left's 
alignment with Soviet communism, and the early 
moves toward disengagement from ideological 
commitment toward what Arthur Schlesinger 
influentially called "the vital center" (Schlesinger 
1962). 

Roosevelt's reorganization and direction of the 
Democratic Party and the federal government in 
the 1930s shaped significant aspects of both artistic 
production and major art institutions and agencies. 
The Federal Art Project (FAP, 1935-1943) and the 
Public Works of Art Project (1933-1934), run by two 
faithful New Dealers, Holger Cahill and Edward 
Bruce, respectively, are examples of sui generis New 
Deal activity. Bruce purchased art works for the na- 
tion throughout the decade within United States 
Treasury-funded programs, though he always 
claimed that acquiring masterpieces was his goal, 



rather than developing what more radical New 
Dealers called the "democratization of culture." 
The progressive and populist image of the New 
Deal attracted Thomas Hart Benton, one of the re- 
gionalist painters of the period (along with Grant 
Wood and John Steuart Curry). Benton's mural 
cycle America Today (1930-1931) describes and cel- 
ebrates small town American life. The Museum of 
Modern Art in New York City, though indebted to 
European artists and styles for its major exhibitions 
from the decade, supported aspects of New Deal 
arts policy with its 1936 show of federal art, New 
Horizons in American Art. The Whitney Museum of 
American Art was much more programmatic in its 
support of contemporary artists in the United 
States, and had initiated economic support for De- 
pression-hit artists before the federal government 
intervened in 1933. 

The FAP and other agencies that employed art- 
ists, designers, and photographers in the 1930s had 
considerable autonomy from federal government 
policy, perhaps because, on the whole, New Deal 
administrators had little or no interest in culture 
initiatives, which only ever received a minute pro- 
portion of federal money. Even this support was 
often cut off for a variety of political and budgetary 
reasons, undermining the efforts of artists and peo- 
ple in arts management who wished to see culture 
become a central element in what they believed 
was a genuine New Deal revolution. But this auton- 
omy/lack of interest meant that, for the most part, 
art created by federal employees was free of any re- 
quired propagandistic meaning. If anything, federal 
art was accused of left-wing bias. This was the case 
with August Henkel's Mural (1938) at Floyd Ben- 
nett Field in Brooklyn, New York, which was cen- 
sored by the FAP on the doubtful grounds that it 
contained communist symbolism, and with Diego 
Rivera's Man at the Crossroads (1933-1934) at 
Rockefeller Center in New York City, which also 
was embroiled in ideological controversy. 

By 1940, the network of organizations (over- 
whelmingly based in New York City) set up by art- 
ists to lobby for the extension of federal aid, or to 
support socialist and communist activities against 
fascism in Europe and capitalism in the United 
States, had begun to unravel under the weight of 



68 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A R T 




The Federal Art Project sponsored free art classes for children and adults in many cities, including these underway in 1941 at the 
WPA Art Center in Oklahoma City. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



state-supported anticommunism. But throughout 
the 1930s, the thriving of complex and intellectually 
rich debates formed what was arguably the most 
significant activity of these groups. This vitalization 
had never been entirely, or even mostly, dominated 
by the U. S. Communist Party; it involved indepen- 
dent thinkers and artists such as Meyer Schapiro 
and Stuart Davis, and it supported and sponsored 
diverse art forms, ranging from the highly abstract 
to the doctrinally socialist-realist. This creative plu- 
rality is the real legacy of the art of the 1930s. 



See Also: AMERICAN SCENE, THE; FEDERAL ART 
PROJECT (FAP). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brown, Milton. The Modern Spirit: American Painting, 
1908-1935. 1977. 

Doss, Erika. Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: 
From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. 1991. 

Harris, Jonathan. Federal Art and National Culture: The 
Politics of Identity in New Deal America. 1995. 

Hills, Patricia. Social Concern and Urban Realism: Ameri- 
can Painting of the 1930s. 1983. 

Marling, Karal A., and Helen A. Harrison. Seven Ameri- 
can Women: The Depression Decade. 1982. 

Mathey, Francois. American Realism: A Pictorial Survey 
from the Early Eighteenth Century to the Nineteen Sev- 
enties. 1976. 

O'Connor, Francis V. Federal Support for the Visual Arts: 
The New Deal and Now. 1969. 

Rose, Barbara. Readings in American Art since 1900. 1968. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



69 



A R T 



R D 



L E 



WEST V I R G I N I 




This homestead in West Virginia was built during the mid-1950s as -part of the Farm Security Administration's Arthurdale 
project. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



Schlesinger, Arthur. The Vital Center: The Politics of Free- 
dom. 1962. 

Schwartz, Lawrence. Marxism and Culture: The CPUSA 
and Aesthetics in the 1930s. 1980. 

Whiting, Cecile. Antifascism in American Art. 1989. 

Jonathan Harris 



ARTHURDALE, WEST VIRGINIA 

The groundbreaking for the small new town of Ar- 
thurdale, West Virginia, in late 1933 inaugurated 
one of the New Deal's most ambitious and eventu- 
ally most notorious projects in economic and social 
engineering. The project began with efforts led by 
Eleanor Roosevelt to expand American Friends Ser- 



vice Committee relief work in Scott's Run, a long- 
depressed coal mining area near Morgantown, 
West Virginia. Mrs. Roosevelt helped turn Arthur- 
dale into the showcase effort of the recently estab- 
lished Division of Subsistence Homesteads. Ar- 
thurdale was a prototype for a rural-urban 
synthesis in which destitute farmers and miners 
from the area were resettled into new homes with 
enough land to maintain a household subsistence, 
while planners also sought to provide homestead- 
ing families with newly decentralized industrial 
jobs. 

Beyond such economic schemes, Mrs. Roose- 
velt herself saw the new town as a "human experi- 
ment station." She led a coterie of social and cultur- 
al reformers aiming to build "community" among 
residents, particularly by enlisting them in an array 



70 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A R T H U R D A L E , WEST VIRGINIA 




Some Arthurdale residents, including these employees in a vacuum cleaner factory in 1937, were given the opportunity to combine 
farming with part-time work in local industries. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



of cooperative ventures that eventually included a 
health clinic, a general store, a cemetery, an inter- 
denominational church, a forge, a weaving room, 
and a furniture factory, along with various agricul- 
tural projects. But at the heart of the community's 
experimental first years lay the school, designed by 
educator Elsie Clapp around philosopher John 
Dewey's pragmatic pedagogy. The school mirrored 
the project by seeking to integrate a progressive so- 
cial and economic agenda with revivals of residents' 
"folkways," presumed lost over decades of industri- 
al expansion. This emphasis on cultural rehabilita- 
tion was abetted when planners acceded to local 
pressures to select families of largely Scotch-Irish 
descent, despite intense interest on the part of local 
non-native and African -American applicants. 

During the 1930s, Arthurdale's political reputa- 
tion, and to some extent its residents, suffered from 



confused and over-optimistic planning during the 
ongoing Depression. Clapp's experimental school 
closed in 1936 due to lack of private funding. 
Worse, homesteaders endured years without 
steady wage work after Congress denied plans to 
give federal manufacturing contracts to homestead- 
ers, citing unfair competition with private industry. 
Through the 1930s, Resettlement Administration 
and later Farm Security Administration officials 
struggled to maintain employment at Arthurdale, 
until the coming of the war effort brought lasting 
jobs. By then, the government had begun selling off 
the 165 homes and other properties built there, at 
a significant loss against its total outlay. 

In following decades, Arthurdale's families 
prospered in relative anonymity. Following its fifti- 
eth anniversary in 1984, however, residents created 
Arthurdale Heritage, Inc., a small nonprofit organi- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



71 



ASIA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



zation that maintains the town's remaining com- 
munity structures and offers a look back on its sto- 
ried past. 

See Also: APPALACHIA, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON; ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR; 
SUBSISTENCE HOMESTEADS DIVISION. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. Homepage at: www 
.arthurdaleheritage.org 

Cook, Blanche Weisen. Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2: 
1933-1938. 1992. 

Haid, Stephen Edward. "Arthurdale: An Experiment in 
Community Planning, 1933-1947." Ph.D. diss., 
West Virginia University, 1975. 

Ward, Bryan, ed. A New Deal for America (proceedings 
from the National Conference on 1930s, Arthurdale, 
and New Deal Homesteads, July 1994). 1995. 

Stuart Keith Patterson 



ASIA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 

All Asian countries were deeply affected by the 
steep fall of agrarian prices that began in 1930 and 
reached its lowest point around 1933. There was a 
slight upward trend in subsequent years, but in 
general, prices stagnated at a low level until they 
rose again during World War II. Wheat and cotton, 
which were widely traded in the world market, led 
the downward trend, and they were soon followed 
by other types of produce, such as millets, which 
were grown only for local consumption. Normally, 
prices reflect supply and demand; in the Depression 
years there were no major changes in this respect 
in Asia, but the prices were halved nevertheless. 
The contraction of credit was the main cause of this 
catastrophic decline. It upset forward trading, 
which otherwise served to stabilize prices. Panic 
sales spread like wildfire. Rural marketing was dis- 
rupted and it took years to overcome this upheaval. 

Economic historians have hardly taken note of 
this Asian crisis of the 1930s. Theoretical assump- 
tions caused this neglect: If a country did not expe- 
rience industrial unemployment and a balance of 
payments crisis, it was supposedly not affected by 



the Depression. Most Asian countries were only 
marginally industrialized at that time and the bal- 
ance of payments was settled by an outflow of gold, 
so on these two counts there was no depression in 
Asia. 

The fate of the Asian peasant has been disre- 
garded, too. If the peasants had only practiced sub- 
sistence agriculture, prices would have been irrele- 
vant, but most Asian peasants were forced to 
market much of their produce because they were 
indebted and had to pay taxes. Debt service and 
taxation were not adjusted to their reduced income 
There was widespread agrarian distress in Asia, but 
governments faced serious peasant revolts only in 
a few areas. Long-term political effects that were 
not immediately evident turned out to be more im- 
portant than these incidents of violent revolt. 



GOLD AND SILVER: THE FATE OF ASIAN 
CURRENCIES 

Before World War I the international gold stan- 
dard had maintained an automatic equilibrium in 
the world market, due to the powerful position of 
London, which controlled the flow of gold world- 
wide. After the war the United States emerged as 
the arbiter of the flow of gold, but instead of letting 
it flow, it hoarded it in the interest of internal price 
stability. In spite of this, there was a concerted ef- 
fort, led by London, to restore the international 
gold standard. Great Britain returned to it at the 
prewar parity in 1925 and had to abandon it again 
in 1931. Japan returned to it as late as 1930, only to 
abandon it again in 1932; its currency then experi- 
enced a dramatic devaluation. 

British India was completely at the mercy of the 
currency policy made by the secretary of state for 
India in London. India's silver currency had served 
its colonial rulers very well, because it absorbed a 
large amount of the silver that became redundant 
in Europe when most countries demonetized it and 
shifted to the gold standard. But the colonial gov- 
ernment of India collected taxes in depreciating sil- 
ver while it had to pay its "home charges" (such as 
debt service) in gold. When it could not make both 
ends meet any longer, the Indian mints were closed 
to the free coinage of silver in 1893. The silver rupee 
became a token currency that was managed by the 



7Z 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ASIA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



secretary of state. In 1927 a currency act was passed 
that pegged the rupee to the gold standard at a rate 
above the prewar parity. This feat had been accom- 
plished by a slow and steady deflation. Used silver 
coins were not replaced by new ones but melted 
down. The silver was quietly sold abroad by the 
British. When the Depression hit India, the ex- 
change rate of the overvalued rupee was defended 
by further deflationary measures. This finally led to 
an enormous outflow of "distress gold" (mostly 
gold coins and ornaments) that indebted peasants 
turned over to the moneylenders. Since the respec- 
tive colonial governments did not impose gold ex- 
port embargoes, this gold flowed freely to London 
and other centers. This export filled the gap caused 
by the decline of the value of commodity exports 
and thus cured India's balance of payments prob- 
lem with a vengeance. 

In the meantime, China was shielded against 
the initial impact of the Depression by its silver cur- 
rency, because the price of silver fell like that of all 
other commodities. Whereas some countries that 
were in full control of their respective currencies re- 
sorted to competitive devaluation, China's currency 
was devalued automatically. Overseas Chinese 
then converted their savings (in gold) into silver, 
which they invested in China in a big way. But this 
spree did not last long. President Roosevelt helped 
the U. S. silver interests by means of a silver pur- 
chasing policy that dramatically increased the price 
of silver in the world market. The silver that had 
poured into China around 1930 left it again in 1934, 
and the Depression hit China in a delayed but very 
dramatic action. 

Other Asian countries that were colonies of dif- 
ferent European powers were affected by the pecu- 
liarities of the currency policies of their respective 
masters. France had joined the gold standard only 
in 1928 — and at one-fifth of the prewar parity. It 
was thus in a more comfortable position than other 
countries and could stay on the gold standard until 
1936. In Indochina, the French maintained a colo- 
nial currency, the piastre, which they pegged to the 
French franc in 1931 in order to protect French in- 
vestments. This aggravated the impact of the De- 
pression on Indochina. In the Netherlands East In- 
dies (now Indonesia) there was no colonial 



currency. The Dutch currency circulated in the colo- 
ny, but here, too, a deflationary policy led to an out- 
flow of gold that benefited the colonial power. 

Most Asian countries suffered from the com- 
bined impact of deflationary policies and credit 
contraction. Both were caused by creditors in the 
central places of the world market who wanted to 
prevent the depreciation of Asian currencies so as 
to protect their investments, but also did not want 
to provide fresh credit. This depressed prices, and 
also subverted the old argument that access to colo- 
nial raw materials was essential for the European 
powers, and could only be secured by political con- 
trol. In a world where raw materials were available 
at very low prices, colonialism did not pay any lon- 
ger. Colonial control was required only to keep 
under control debtors who might cancel their debts. 
The deflationary policy was an integral part of this 
control of debtors. Its immediate effect was the 
sharp decline of prices of agricultural produce. 



WHEAT, RICE, AND SUGAR: THE FALL OF 
AGRARIAN PRICES 

All Asian crops were affected by the fall in 
prices in the 1930s, but wheat, rice, and sugar were 
by far the most important. Wheat was grown and 
traded globally. Its overproduction in the United 
States was one of the chief causes of the Depres- 
sion. For some time the storage of wheat in the 
United States had helped to keep prices at a com- 
fortable level, but when credit contracted in the 
United States due to the monetary policy of the 
Federal Reserve Board, wheat poured out of the 
storage houses in an avalanche of panic sales. Cred- 
it signals then reached India, Australia, and other 
wheat-producing regions very quickly. 

Rice was not immediately affected by these 
events. Wheat could not be easily substituted for 
Rice: This was not just a matter of taste, but also of 
the skills and implements required for preparing 
the respective foods. Thus the rice price remained 
high everywhere in Asia in the summer of 1930. 
Moreover, rice was only marginally traded in the 
world market. It was almost exclusively an Asian 
crop, produced and consumed locally. Japan was a 
crucial exception, and it played a decisive role in 
triggering the global fall of the rice price. After 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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ASIA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



World War I, Japan was a rice-deficit country. Rice 
riots had shaken the government and arrange- 
ments were made for a timely import of rice. In 
Japan rice is harvested at the end of summer, 
whereas in monsoon Asia (South and Southeast 
Asia) the main harvest reaches the market in Janu- 
ary. Rice from Burma (now Myanmar) and, to a 
lesser extent, from Thailand and Indochina, would 
reach Japan in March when it was needed most. But 
by 1928 Japan had achieved self-sufficiency and im- 
posed an import embargo on rice. In 1930 Japan 
had a very plentiful rice harvest. At that time the 
Japanese government was pursuing a deflationary 
policy in order to support the yen, which had just 
been pegged to the gold standard. The double im- 
pact of deflation and the rich harvest caused the rice 
price to fall by about one-third in October 1930. 
This should have been a purely domestic concern 
since Japan did not export or import rice, but grain 
traders all over the world interpreted this as a signal 
that the rice price would now share the fate of the 
wheat price. In November 1930 the rice price in 
Liverpool was reduced by half, and Calcutta fol- 
lowed the Liverpool precedent in January 1931. At 
that point, the rice price experienced a free fall, and 
by 1933 rice was cheaper than wheat in India. Actu- 
ally, the production, consumption, and export vol- 
ume of rice did not decline very much in this peri- 
od — only the price remained low, and so did the 
income of the producers. 

In 1930 in lower Burma, the world's major rice 
export region at that time, the peasants rose in a vi- 
olent revolt led by the charismatic Saya San. Bur- 
mese peasants had to pay both poll tax and land 
revenue. The poll tax was collected before the win- 
ter harvest, forcing the peasants to market their 
rice. Moneylenders and grain dealers usually eager- 
ly provided credit for the tax payment against the 
coming harvest, but in late 1930 they knew that the 
price of rice would fall in January and thus they did 
not provide any credit when the tax collector 
pounced on the peasants. In response, Saya San, 
who had earlier petitioned the government on be- 
half of the peasants, led the peasants in a violent re- 
bellion that took the British two years to suppress. 
Other rice-growing provinces of British India re- 
mained quiet during the period because peasants 
did not have to pay poll tax or even land revenue, 



but only rent to landlords. A peasant could get 
away with paying no rent for some time, but then 
the landlord could sue him and he would forfeit his 
occupancy right. This produced an atmosphere of 
smoldering discontent but no immediate revolt. 
Unrest was more pronounced in India's wheat- 
growing region, where peasants were in more di- 
rect contact with the revenue authorities. The Na- 
tional Congress, an Indian political party, had 
sponsored agrarian campaigns in this region in 
1930, and this contributed to the subsequent emer- 
gence of the Congress as a peasant party. 

Sugarcane was a major cash crop in several 
Asian countries, particularly in India, the Nether- 
lands East Indies, and the Philippines. Before the 
Depression, the Netherlands East Indies was the 
major exporter of refined white sugar. Much of this 
white sugar was exported to India, where sugarcane 
was mostly converted into brown sugar for rural 
consumption, and imported refined sugar was in 
demand in urban areas. In 1931 the British Indian 
government imposed a prohibitive tariff on sugar, 
thus greatly encouraging Indian sugar production. 
By 1937 India was ready to export sugar, but the In- 
ternational Sugar Agreement of that year classified 
India as a sugar importing country, so India was de- 
nied an export quota. The protective tariff of 1931 
did not affect British imperial interests. But if India 
had been permitted to export sugar in 1937, the 
(British) Caribbean sugar planters would have faced 
Indian competition. Thus the year 1937 marked a 
setback for India. On the other hand, sugar produc- 
tion expanded in the Philippines because of its free 
access to the U. S. market. 

ASIAN INDUSTRIES: LIMITED POSSIBILITIES 
OF IMPORT SUBSTITUTION 

Some scholars of Asian history have tried to 
prove that the Depression was a boon in disguise 
for Asian countries because they benefited from im- 
port substitution (the replacement of imported in- 
dustrial products such as cotton textiles by indige- 
nous production). Actually, the scope of import 
substitution was severely limited by the reduced 
buying power of the rural masses. The textile indus- 
try was the only major industry in Asia in the early 
twentieth century. Japan did make a major advance 
in the Depression years by buying cheap Indian 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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cotton and using the cheap labor of Japanese peas- 
ant girls to produce textiles. The devaluation of the 
Japanese yen by about 60 percent in 1932 gave Jap- 
anese products an enormous competitive advan- 
tage. The British in India responded to this by insti- 
tuting protective tariffs and securing preferential 
access to the Indian market for their own products. 
Under these arrangements the Indian textile indus- 
try progressed somewhat in the 1930s, but the main 
beneficiaries were the handloom weavers who got 
cheap food and cheap cotton and competed with 
the mills, which could not cut their costs easily. Ac- 
tually, the Depression remains the only period in 
which the real wages of labor increased in India. 
China experienced similar developments. The in- 
vestment spree of the early 1930s encouraged in- 
dustrial growth. Even the Japanese invested in Chi- 
nese mills. But all this was soon engulfed by the 
delayed impact of the Depression, and then by the 
ravages of war after the Japanese invasion of China. 
Other Asian countries had hardly any industry that 
could have profited from import substitution. 

See Also: AGRICULTURE; GOLD STANDARD; 
INTERNATIONAL IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Albert, Bill, and Adrian Graves, eds. The World Sugar In- 
dustry in War and Depression. 1988. 

Boomgaard, Peter, and Ian Brown, eds. Weathering the 
Storm: The Economies of Southeast Asia in the 1930s 
Depression. 2000. 

Brown, Ian, ed. The Economies of Asia and Africa in the 
Inter-War Depression. 1989. 

Feuerwerker, Albert. The Chinese Economy, 1912-1949. 
1968. 

Rothermund, Dietmar. India in the Great Depression, 
1929-1931. 1992. 

Rothermund, Dietmar. The Global Impact of the Great De- 
pression, 1929-1939. 1996. 

Rothermund, Dietmar. "Currencies, Taxes and Credit: 
Asian Peasants in the Great Depression, 
"1930-1939." In The Interwar Depression in an Inter- 
national Context, edited by Harold lames. 2001. 

Dietmar Rothermund 



ASIAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF 
THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON 

The Great Depression had important political, eco- 
nomic, and cultural implications for "Asian- 
American" communities. In the United States, the 
ethnic label Asian American encompasses groups of 
people with diverse geographical, cultural, and his- 
torical backgrounds, and ancestral roots in a num- 
ber of different countries. The earliest Asian immi- 
grants arrived in the United States from China, with 
the first massive wave coming in the mid- 
nineteenth century. As with other ethnic minori- 
ties, the Chinese — and later the Japanese, Filipinos, 
Asian Indians, Koreans, and a host of other 
groups — emigrated to the United States to serve 
primarily as a source of cheap labor. These migra- 
tion patterns were related to larger global transfor- 
mations initiated by industrial capitalism and Euro- 
American colonialism. By the beginning of the 
Great Depression, these groups formed the largest 
Asian populations in the country. According to U.S. 
census data and other published reports, there were 
close to 75,000 Chinese, 140,000 Japanese, 56,000 
Filipinos, and several thousand Asian Indians and 
Koreans living in America in 1930, most residing on 
the West Coast. 

Like most other Americans, Asian Americans 
endured hardships related to and caused by the 
economic fallout of the late 1920s, with its effects 
lasting well into the 1930s. Stories of massive un- 
employment, housing evictions, lost savings, star- 
vations, and in some cases suicide, were reported 
throughout Asian-American communities in the 
United States. In her autobiography, Quiet Odyssey: 
A Pioneer Korean Woman in America (1990), Mary 
Paik Lee, a Korean immigrant, describes the devas- 
tating impact of the Depression on her and her 
family. She recalls how her family's savings, gener- 
ated from over a decade of operating a fruit stand 
in southern California, were completely wiped out 
during those years, forcing the family to move from 
place to place in search of available land to support 
a minimal level of subsistence. Preexisting levels of 
racial hostility in most industries in California led 
many Asian immigrants, such as the family of Mary 
Paik Lee, to be disproportionately represented in 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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IMPACT 



f 



T H E 



GREAT DEPRESSION 



N 




3^§m^S^ : " " ^m^^^^^ 



Japanese-American agricultural workers, photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1937, pack broccoli near Guadalupe, California. 
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



agriculture as laborers, farmers, and small entrepre- 
neurs. Unfortunately, as the Depression dramati- 
cally reduced the demand for specialized agri- 
cultural goods (agricultural profits in California 
dropped by more than 50 percent from 1929 to 
1932), the economic fallout of the Depression led 
to particularly harsh consequences for Asian 
Americans in the region. The economic effects of 
the Depression were also felt by Asian Ameri- 
cans on the East Coast. Chinese hand laundry- 
men, operating more than three thousand such 
businesses in New York City, saw their earnings 
and wages decline by about one-half during the 
Depression. 



As the economic crisis of the early 1930s deep- 
ened, its impact, at least for Asian-American com- 
munities, was felt beyond the boundaries of Ameri- 
ca's borders. Many Asian immigrants, despite being 
separated by long distances and long periods be- 
tween visits, maintained close ties to their families 
and villages in their homelands. In particular, the 
Chinese, as a result of international migration, de- 
veloped what some historians have called "transna- 
tional communities." The combination of exclu- 
sionary immigration laws, cultural norms in China, 
and the prohibitive costs involved in the immigra- 
tion process created an immigration population 
overwhelmingly male, leading some observers to 



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mistakenly characterize the Chinese communities 
in America as "bachelor societies." Familial ties 
across vast physical spaces were sustained by let- 
ters, occasional visits, and scheduled remittances. 
These remittances went to building new homes, 
schools, hospitals, and orphanages for families and 
villages back in China. However, the Depression 
substantially reduced the funds that Chinese immi- 
grants were able to send home, undoubtedly wors- 
ening conditions for their families and villages in 
China, which had come increasingly to rely on 
these remittances. In short, for Asian immigrants, 
the impact of the Great Depression was experi- 
enced on both sides of the Pacific. 



THE IMPACT OF RACISM 

For Asian Americans, the debilitating effects of 
the economic crisis were compounded by the his- 
torical legacy of racism. During the latter half of the 
nineteenth century, the American public increas- 
ingly charged Asian immigrants, beginning with 
the Chinese, with being "unassimilable," "racially 
inferior," and a threat to the "American" way of life. 
These anti-Asiatic sentiments were eventually en- 
coded into American law. In 1882, the U.S. Con- 
gress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, making 
Chinese immigration to the United States illegal. By 
1924, Asians, which by law included peoples from 
countries stretching from Afghanistan to the South 
Pacific, were effectively excluded from the United 
States as immigrants (with the exception of Filipi- 
nos and certain exempt classes including mer- 
chants, diplomats and students), were deprived of 
the right to own land, and were denied the legal 
right to citizenship. This history of exclusion and 
oppression by racial and national proscription pro- 
foundly effected the way Asians Americans and 
their children experienced and responded to the 
Depression. For example, Asian Americans, along 
with other ethnic minorities, occupied the bottom 
of a racially stratified labor market, making them 
especially vulnerable during times of economic cri- 
sis. Community histories describing, for instance, 
New York City's Chinatown, have shown that the 
unemployment rate among the Chinese population 
was considerably higher than state and national av- 
erages during the peak years of the Depression. 
Furthermore, racist employment practices preclud- 




This Filipino -American man found work in the lettuce fields of 
California's Imperial Valley in 1939. Library of Congress, 
Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



ed many university educated Asian Americans from 
entering the professional and white-collar ranks. 
The comments of a certain college educated Nisei 
(the American-born children of Japanese immi- 
grants) reflected the frustrations of a generation of 
educated Asian Americans: "They go to college, 
learn a heterogeneous body of facts relating to any- 
thing from art to architecture and end their days in 
a fruit stand." 

As with previous periods of economic crisis in 
American history, racial antipathies toward Asian 
Americans were expressed more frequently and 
with greater intensity during the Depression. In the 
face of an ever-diminishing labor market, white 
Americans throughout the West Coast systemati- 
cally and violently drove out Asian-American la- 
borers, with Filipinos being the most frequent tar- 
gets. As colonial subjects, Filipinos were given the 
juridical status of U.S. nationals, which allowed 
them, unlike other Asian groups, to move freely 
back and forth from the Philippines to the United 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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ASIAN A M E R I C 



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IMPACT 



f 



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N 




. *>» 






"•f 









1: ff..*! 

Many Asian Americans earned a living as itinerant field hands during the Great Depression. This Chinese -American laborer 
worked in a -potato field near Walla Walla, Washington, in 1936. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI 
Collection 



States. However, Filipinos did not began to arrive 
on American shores in significant numbers until the 
1920s and 1930s. During this period, Filipinos expe- 
rienced the same pattern of treatment as previous 
generations of Asian immigrants; initially, they 
were frequent victims of physical violence, and 
eventually, they were excluded through govern- 
mental legislation. During the Depression, the U.S. 
government offered to repatriate Filipinos with the 
stipulation that they forfeit the right to reentry into 
the United States; not surprisingly, few Filipinos 
took up the offer, though there were reported cases 
of coerced repatriation. In 1935, Filipino immigra- 
tion to the United States was all but halted with the 



passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act. Economic 
uncertainty also produced similar efforts to discrim- 
inate against Asian Americans on the East Coast. 
For example, in 1933, a group of businessmen in 
New York City, in an attempt to eliminate Chinese 
competition from the industry, unsuccessfully ad- 
vocated for a city ordinance that would require U.S. 
citizenship to obtain a laundry license. 



ASIAN-AMERICAN RESPONSE TO THE 
DEPRESSION 

Asian-American communities responded to 
these difficult times in a variety of ways. Like many 
Mexican Americans, some Asian immigrants sim- 



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ply decided to return to their homelands; some re- 
turned with the hope of finding better prospects, 
and others returned as a temporary strategy, at least 
until the situation improved in the United States. A 
small number of Asian immigrants and their chil- 
dren relocated to Central and South America. The 
vast majority of Asian Americans, however, looked 
to ethnic institutions and organizations to survive 
the Depression. Long before the 1930s, mutual aid 
societies, welfare agencies, and business organiza- 
tions provided resources and services, such as relief, 
job placement services, and legal counsel. Such or- 
ganizations were generally located in ethnic en- 
claves in large cities — the most notable being in San 
Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle — 
where, due in part to racism in the housing and em- 
ployment markets, the highest concentration of 
Asian Americans resided. In addition, there were 
informal community networks through which fam- 
ilies and friends could mutually assist one another 
in times of emergency. These institutions and net- 
works worked to shelter Asian-American commu- 
nities from the most debilitating effects of the De- 
pression. In San Francisco's Chinatown, for 
example, the expanding tourist industry (which was 
facilitated by the repeal of prohibition laws in 1933), 
together with New Deal federal assistance, helped 
dramatically reduce Chinese unemployment in the 
city by the late 1930s. Growing numbers of Chinese 
men and women began finding jobs in newly reno- 
vated restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. Similarly, 
in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, Japanese merchants 
and community leaders organized the "buy in Lil' 
Tokio" campaign, through which they hoped to re- 
vive slumping Japanese-American businesses by 
appealing to the community's sense of ethnic 
loyalty. 

However, the depth of the Depression crisis se- 
verely tested the limits of ethnic institutions and 
networks, leaving them, in many instances, unable 
to adequately address the unprecedented levels of 
need to be found in their respective communities. 
As a result, Asian Americans, many for the first 
time, turned to the federal government for assis- 
tance. Government reports indicate that the rate at 
which Asian Americans participated in public assis- 
tance varied widely from city to city. For example, 
San Francisco's Chinatown had the highest per- 



centage of Chinese receiving relief benefits, nearly 
approaching the national average. On the other 
hand, in Chicago and New York, only 2 to 5 percent 
of the Chinese population was on relief. In general, 
Asian Americans were less likely to seek relief as- 
sistance for a number of reasons. First, as frequent 
victims of state powers in the past, Asian Americans 
understandably feared government authorities. 
Moreover, discriminatory federal policies excluded 
them from certain government programs and bene- 
fits. One clear example of this was the statutory re- 
quirement that an individual must be an American 
citizen to be eligible for a job through the Works 
Progress Administration (WPA). Consequently, 
Asian Americans, many of whom by law were ineli- 
gible for citizenship, composed a disproportionate- 
ly small percentage of people on WPA employment 
rolls. Based on the calculations of one historian, 
among the three largest Asian-American groups in 
California in 1940, less than 14 percent of their un- 
employed had jobs with the WPA as compared to 
more than 60 percent of unemployed black Ameri- 
cans. In addition to all of this, many Asian Ameri- 
cans were simply unaware that they were entitled 
to relief assistance, which also helps to explain their 
lower participation rates. 

Despite these shortcomings, the federal gov- 
ernment did make positive contributions to Asian- 
American communities during the Depression, and 
in doing so, may have helped to bring about a 
change in these groups' attitudes and perceptions 
of the state. In San Francisco's Chinatown, for ex- 
ample, New Deal legislation improved housing 
conditions, established public health clinics, and 
expanded educational and job-training programs, 
in addition to traditional public relief allowances. 
Furthermore, many of these federal programs pro- 
vided professional opportunities for Asian- 
American women in the fields of education and so- 
cial work in a time when few professional occupa- 
tions were considered suitable for women. 

The growing emergence of women profession- 
als was part of a larger trend in which Asian- 
American women were gradually to become more 
visible in the workplace and in the public more gen- 
erally. As a result of the Depression, many Asian- 
American women were forced to find employment 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



79 



ASSOCIATION 



GAINST 



PROHIBITION 



A M E N D M T N T 



A A P A 



outside of the home, mainly in low-wage, service- 
oriented industries. For some, this development 
only created additional work — wage labor during 
the day and household chores in the evening. 
Asian-American women, like many women across 
the country, had to work increasingly hard to keep 
the family together in these trying times. Yet, for 
other women, some of whom became household 
breadwinners, the Depression presented opportu- 
nities to challenge traditional gender roles. Indeed, 
some Asian-American women, albeit a limited 
number, actively participated in public affairs such 
as local politics, union organizing, and community 
reform. 

As all this suggests, Asian Americans were ac- 
tive participants in the unfolding drama that was 
the Great Depression. Certain everyday scenar- 
ios — Japanese-American families applying and re- 
ceiving federal aid, Chinese-American women 
walking to the garment factory to begin their work- 
day, and Filipino-American workers organizing in 
California's strawberry fields — reflected important 
social and cultural changes taking place within 
Asian-American communities at this time. Yet 
these developments, prompted by the Great De- 
pression, were only a prelude to even larger 
changes and struggles that lay ahead for Asian 
Americans. Nevertheless, the crisis of the 1930s 
prepared them for a future that included World War 
II, wartime internment, and the postwar struggle 
for equality. 

See Also: ASIA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; MIGRATORY 
WORKERS; RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the 
United States since 1850. 1988. 

Friday, Chris. Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacif- 
ic Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1870-1942. 1994. 

Fugita-Rony, Dorothy B. American Workers, Colonial 
Power: Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 
1919-1941. 2003. 

Haney-Lopez, Ian. White by Law: The Legal Construction 
of Race. 1996. 

Hsu, Madeline Yuan-yin. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of 
Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the 
United States and South China, 1882-1943. 2000. 

Ichioka, Yugi. Thelssei: The World of First Generation Japa- 
nese Immigrants, 1885-1924. 1988. 



Kurashige, Ron. Japanese American Celebration and Con- 
flict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 
1934-1990. 2002. 

Kwong, Peter. Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 
1930-1950, rev. edition. 2001. 

Lee, Mary Paik. Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman 
in America. 1990. 

Matsumoto, Valerie J. Farming the Home Place: A Japanese 
American Community in California, 1919-1982. 1993. 

McKeown, Adam. Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural 
Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936. 2001. 

Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the 
Anti-Chinese Movement in California, rev. edition. 
1995. 

Sayler, Lucy E. Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants 
and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law. 1995. 

Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in 
San Francisco's Chinatown. 2001. 

Yoo, David K. Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and 
Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 
1924-49. 2000. 

Yu, Renqui. To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese 
Hand Laundry Alliance of New York. 1992. 

Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese 
Women in San Francisco. 1995. 

Kornel S. Chang 



ASSOCIATION AGAINST THE 
PROHIBITION AMENDMENT 
(AAPA) 

The Association Against the Prohibition Amend- 
ment (AAPA) was the leading political pressure 
group helping to secure repeal of the Eighteenth 
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Historians 
credit the AAPA with fostering Republican- 
Democratic polarization on the issue, giving repeal 
greater respectability, and greatly speeding up the 
repeal process. 

Founded in 1918, the AAPA became the first 
anti-prohibition organization operating outside the 
affected industry. Its founder, William H. Stayton, 
was a former naval captain concerned about cen- 
tralized encroachment on state and local rights. Al- 
though unable to block the Eighteenth Amend- 
ment, he kept the organization alive, had it 



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incorporated, and by 1926 was claiming 700,000 
members. Initially, Stayton worked to secure voter 
pledges, but he soon began stressing quality over 
quantity and seeking members whose stature and 
resources could sway public opinion and enhance 
respectability. Among such recruits were John J. 
Raskob, James W. Wadsworth, Henry H. Curran, 
and Lammot, Pierre, and Irenee du Pont; in 1928 
these men restructured Stayton's association. Stay- 
ton became chair of a showcase board, while Cur- 
ran became president, and operating power went to 
a small committee headed by Pierre du Pont. 

Following its reorganization, AAPA influence 
grew, in part because Raskob became national 
chairman of the Democratic Party and worked to 
link the party with repeal. An outpouring of publici- 
ty, stressing prohibition's costs and tying repeal to 
economic recovery, also helped to change public 
opinion. In addition, cooperation with upper-class 
women, particularly the new Women's Organiza- 
tion for National Prohibition Reform, produced 
positive images of repeal's supporters. In 1932 the 
AAPA succeeded in getting repeal into the Demo- 
cratic platform, and subsequently Jouett Shouse, 
having moved from Democratic headquarters to 
become president of the AAPA, worked to make 
repeal a central campaign issue and took encour- 
agement from the sweeping Democratic victories. 
Lawyers associated with the AAPA helped to shape 
the Twenty-First Amendment and get it through 
Congress; state ratification, completed in December 
1933, proceeded largely according to AAPA guide- 
lines. 

Its mission achieved, the AAPA disbanded. Its 
leaders, however, later became the core of the 
American Liberty League, dedicated to fighting 
New Deal centralization. This time they soon be- 
came discredited, lending support to charges that 
repeal had come through undemocratic manipula- 
tion by selfish plutocrats. For a time this became the 
standard historical interpretation, but further study 
of the AAPA has brought greater appreciation of its 
anti-centralist philosophy and its effectiveness and 
influence in the context of changes being wrought 
by the Great Depression. 

See Also: AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE; 
PROHIBITION; RASKOB, JOHN J. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burk, Robert F. The Corporate State and the Broker State: 
The Du Fonts and American National Politics, 
1925-1940. 1990. 

Dobyns, Fletcher. The Amazing Story of Repeal: An Expose 
of the Power of Propaganda. 1940. 

Kyvig, David E. "Raskob, Roosevelt, and Repeal." Histo- 
rian 37 (1975): 469-487. 

Kyvig, David E. Repealing National Prohibition, 2nd edi- 
tion, 2000. 

Ellis W. Hawley 



AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND, 
GREAT DEPRESSION IN 

The Great Depression began in Australia and New 
Zealand with a collapse in demand for their primary 
products, which caused export prices to fall 40 per- 
cent from 1929 to 1932. The loss of earnings caused 
a severe liquidity crisis from mid-1929 in two coun- 
tries that relied heavily on foreign borrowing to fi- 
nance economic development, while disequilibri- 
um in the balance of payments forced a reduction 
of imports in 1930 to half their pre-Depression 
level. The gross domestic product, measured in 
constant prices, fell by nearly 10 percent between 
1929 and 1932 in Australia and 20 percent in New 
Zealand. 

Both countries had enjoyed prosperity as enter- 
prising and progressive colonies of British settle- 
ment. The United Kingdom was the principal mar- 
ket for Australian wheat, wool, and agricultural 
products, as well as for New Zealand meat, wool, 
and dairy products; these rural exports accounted 
for over 20 percent of their nations' production. Yet 
both countries were highly urbanized: The majority 
of wage earners lived in the four principal cities of 
New Zealand, while Sydney and Melbourne both 
had more than one million inhabitants. Australia, 
with a population of 6.5 million in 1930 (when the 
New Zealand population was 1.7 million) was the 
more ambitious in promotion of secondary industry 
by tariff protection and government assistance. 
Both sought to guarantee living standards through 
national tribunals that determined minimum wage 
levels. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



S T R A L I A AND NEW ZEALAND 



GREAT 



DEPRESSION 



I N 



A Labor government took office in Australia at 
the onset of the Depression and responded to the 
crisis by encouraging greater production of rural ex- 
ports and raising tariff levels to reduce imports. But 
the serious deterioration in the balance of payments 
caused difficulties in servicing the foreign debt, and 
the Bank of England sent Sir Otto Niemeyer to ad- 
vise on appropriate remedies. With the support of 
the Australian banks, he made the federal and state 
governments agree to reduce expenditures, balance 
their budgets, and curtail borrowing. The Arbitra- 
tion Court cut the minimum wage by 10 percent in 
January 1931, and the Australian currency was si- 
multaneously devalued against sterling by 30 per- 
cent. The federal Labor government suffered defec- 
tions and lost office at the end of 1931 to a 



reconstituted United Australia Party, which main- 
tained the retrenchments. The Labor premier of 
New South Wales, Jack Lang, who defied the finan- 
cial arrangements, was dismissed from office in 
1932. 

In New Zealand, two non-Labor parties with 
rural and urban bases of support, the United and 
the Reform parties, dominated the parliament and 
came together in a coalition in 1931, leaving Labor 
in opposition. The government followed deflation- 
ary policies similar to those in Australia, though 
New Zealand resisted devaluation until January 
1933, when a 25 percent cut in the exchange rate 
with sterling was made. The New Zealand Court of 
Arbitration imposed a 10 percent wage cut in May 
1931. 



82 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



S T R A L I A 



N D 



NEW ZEALAND 



GREAT 



DEPRESSION 



I N 



Recovery began in Australia and New Zealand 
by 1933, assisted by the increase in the volume of 
exports. The Ottawa Agreement of 1932, which 
gave preferential trade arrangements to the British 
Dominions, probably assisted Australian and New 
Zealand producers. Their Depression was less se- 
vere than in the United States. Estimates of unem- 
ployment vary, ranging from 20 to more than 30 
percent of the workforce in Australia; the New Zea- 
land economy had a smaller proportion of employ- 
ees, so its rate of unemployment was lower. There 
was less work rationing than in the United States 
and a high incidence of long-term unemployment. 
Relief measures in Australia were initially in the 
hands of local government and charities, and took 
the form of food handouts. From 1930 state govern- 
ments levied emergency income taxes to finance 
sustenance payments and enlist unemployed men 
in public works. The New Zealand government fol- 



lowed similar policies, with a strong emphasis on 
working for the "dole." 

These measures were barely sufficient. Eviction 
and homelessness became common. Shanty towns 
sprang up on the outskirts of cities, while many un- 
employed resorted to an itinerant existence in the 
rural interiors. Protest demonstrations erupted oc- 
casionally into violent city riots in 1931 and 1932, 
and encouraged governments to provide public 
works. The requirement that married men work for 
the dole on such projects, often far from home, im- 
posed strains on marriages, and younger men were 
especially vulnerable to the social dislocation of 
prolonged hardship. Marriages were deferred, and 
the birthrate fell to an unprecedented low. Those 
indigenous peoples of the two countries, the Ab- 
originals and Maori, who were in the paid work- 
force were mostly rural, casual workers, and were 
hit hard. There were some cases of antagonism to 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



83 



S T R A L I A AND NEW ZEALAND 



GREAT 



DEPRESSION 



I N 



foreign workers, mostly southern Europeans em- 
ployed in mining and agriculture, though the cessa- 
tion of migration during the Depression defused 
such animosities. In societies that had valorized the 
male breadwinner, there was also criticism of the 
displacement of men by female workers, but the 
trade unions were powerless to prevent such 
changes in employment policy. 

Several regional studies of the Depression sug- 
gest that the unequal sacrifices it imposed on differ- 
ent classes strained social cohesion and dented the 
egalitarian ethos of these new-world nations. Oral 
history and fictional treatments attest to the humili- 
ations the Depression inflicted as well as the re- 
sourcefulness of its victims. The failure of the Aus- 
tralian Labor Party allowed the previously 
ineffective Communist Party to channel discontent 
into its Unemployed Workers Movement. Commu- 
nism and the defiant radical populism of the pre- 
mier of New South Wales alarmed conservatives, 
who formed secret armies to defend God, king, and 
empire. That was unnecessary in New Zealand, 
where the Labour Party first gained office in 1935. 
Its extensive program of economic management 



and social welfare was heavily influenced by the 
lessons of the Depression. 

See Also: CANADA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; 
INTERNATIONAL IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bolton, G. C. A Fine Country to Starve In. 1972. 

Broomhill, Ray. Unemployed Workers: A Social History of 
the Depression in Adelaide. 1978. 

Gregory, R. G., and N. G. Butlin, eds. Recovery from the 
Depression: Australia and the World Economy in the 
1930s. 1988. 

Hawke, G. R. The Making of New Zealand: An Economic 
History. 1985. 

Lowenstein, Wendy, ed. Weevils in the Flour: An Oral Re- 
cord of the 1930s Depression in Australia, rev. edition. 
1989. 

Mackinolty, Tudy, ed. The Wasted Years?: Australia's Great 
Depression. 1981. 

Schedvin, C. B. Australia and the Great Depression. 1970. 

Simpson, Tony. The Slump: The Thirties Depression, Its Or- 
igins and Aftermath. 1990. 

Stuart Macintyre 



U 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 




BACK-TO-THE-LAND MOVEMENT 

The back-to-the-land, or back-to-the-soil, move- 
ment of the 1930s was a collection of relief and re- 
form projects that sought agrarian solutions to the 
decade's social and economic crises. A single basic 
goal united the various groups and schemes associ- 
ated with the movement: to open the nation's un- 
used lands to a new class of small producers. But 
this common theme found expression through ini- 
tiatives ranging greatly in practical scope and intel- 
lectual sophistication. 

In the broadest sense, movement back to the 
land in the United States began soon after the stock 
market crash of 1929, when the country saw a tem- 
porary but significant reversal of decades of urban- 
ward migration as city jobs dried up and millions 
sought what seemed simpler, cheaper living on old 
family farms or bits of unused, marginal land. The 
popular press fueled this widespread but largely 
unorganized upwelling of interest in subsistence 
gardening and small farming through a drumbeat 
of articles from such leading figures as longtime 
physical culture advocate Bernarr Macfadden. 

A more organized movement took shape as a 
variety of public and private initiatives to resettle 
and retrain families for small production on both 
individual and collective small farms. A number of 



such programs were mainly ad hoc efforts by states 
and municipalities to reduce relief rolls, reprising 
similar efforts during previous depressions to use 
open lands as a safely valve for urban overcrowding 
and unemployment. But some leaders envisioned 
more concerted, long-term land use planning, often 
seeking to combine industrial decentralization with 
workers' gardens in small new towns. Franklin 
Roosevelt proposed such a plan as governor of New 
York, as had industrialist Henry Ford in his 1926 
book Today and Tomorrow. 

Indeed, much of 1930s back-to-the-land activi- 
ty predated the Depression, though the crisis lent 
it new impetus. Sectarian groups like the American 
Friends Service Committee, the rural life sections of 
the Catholic church and various Protestant church- 
es, and the Jewish Agricultural Society brought an 
emphasis on economic and social cooperatives to 
their own long-standing efforts at communal rural 
rehabilitation. Newly mobilized county agricultural 
and domestic agents revived a program for rural 
improvements codified in 1908 by Theodore Roose- 
velt's Country Life Commission. But all of the fore- 
going strands of the movement had their culminat- 
ing expression in a series of resettlement colonies 
built by the New Deal's Division of Subsistence 
Homesteads beginning in late 1933, which joined 
plans for regional and cultural rehabilitation to a 



85 



K K E 



WIGHT 



new rural-urban synthesis of part-time farming and 
factory work in localized, cooperative settings. 

Beyond rural resettlement and rehabilitation 
projects, the movement offered intellectual updates 
to the tradition of Jeffersonian agrarianism. The 
movement's unifying ideological positions included 
ambitious calls for a general redistribution of prop- 
erty and a return to localized production and gov- 
ernment. These common themes found their most 
forceful expression through the Southern Agrari- 
ans, a group of intellectuals at Vanderbilt University 
in Nashville who argued for a return to the institu- 
tions and traditions of the landed Old South in their 
volume I'll Take My Stand (1930), and Ralph Bor- 
sodi, who had begun in the early 1920s to preach 
and practice household production as an alternative 
to unhealthy, wasteful mass consumerism. 

See Also: AGRICULTURE; SOUTHERN AGRARIANS. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Borsodi, Ralph. Flight from the City: An Experiment in Cre- 
ative Living on the Land. 1933. 

Carlson, Allan. The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement to- 
ward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century 
America. 2000. 

Conkin, Paul K. Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal 
Community Program. 1959. 

Lord, Russell, and Paul H. Johnstone. A Place on Earth: 
A Critical Appraisal of Subsistence Homesteads. 1942. 

Stuart Keith Patterson 



BAKKE, E. WIGHT 

Edward Wight Bakke (November 18, 1903-Novem- 
ber 22, 1971) was a sociologist and professor of eco- 
nomics at Yale University. Bakke is best known for 
his investigations of long-term unemployment in 
the Great Depression, published in the two-volume 
1940 study The Unemployed Worker and Citizens 
without Work. He played an important role in shap- 
ing the fields of industrial relations, human re- 
source management, and labor economics as they 
were emerging in the 1930s through the post World 
War II decades. As director of Yale's Labor and 
Management Center, Bakke strove to bring an em- 



pirically grounded, "real world" perspective to 
union-management relations and labor market 
policy. Bakke held key advisory positions on the 
New Deal Social Security Board, the National War 
Labor Board, and in the Department of Labor, 
among other government appointments. Amidst 
this distinguished record, Bakke's study of Depres- 
sion-era unemployment remains his most influen- 
tial and far-reaching work. 

Conducted while he was director of Unemploy- 
ment Studies at Yale's interdisciplinary Institute for 
Human Relations, Bakke's eight-year study ex- 
plored the social psychological, cultural, and eco- 
nomic impact of joblessness on unemployed men 
in New Haven, Connecticut. The study combined 
methods of survey research, case study, ethno- 
graphic observation, and personal interview, 
through which Bakke tracked how workers who 
fully embraced broader cultural values of work and 
self-reliance coped with "the task of making a living 
without a job." While capturing their frustration, 
loss of dignity, fear, and, eventually, despair as the 
Depression lingered on, Bakke also emphasized the 
resourcefulness with which workers and their fami- 
lies made "adjustments" to long-term joblessness. 
Especially striking to contemporary readers was the 
degree to which traditionally male providers would 
exhaust every possible alternative — turning to sav- 
ings, credit, cutting back on necessities, and finally 
to the earnings of their wives and children — before 
accepting public assistance, or "the dole." While 
frequently invoked to shatter the stereotyped imag- 
ery of the unemployed "welfare chiseller," for 
Bakke this pattern was also a sign of something 
more troubling: the unemployed worker's tendency 
to blame himself for a situation over which he had 
little control. 

In its time and for future generations, Bakke's 
study stood as a powerful statement of the impor- 
tance of stable, adequately-paying work opportuni- 
ties for individual well-being, as well as broader so- 
cial well-being. For Bakke himself, it was also a 
statement of the need for a strong and lasting pub- 
lic sector commitment to making those opportuni- 
ties available and protecting workers' rights to 
achieve them. 



86 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



BANK 



E A D 



JONES 



f A R M 



TENANT 



C T 



f 



19 3 7 



See Also: SOCIAL SCIENCE; UNEMPLOYMENT, 
LEVELS OF. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bakke, E. Wight. The Unemployed Worker: A Study of the 
Task of Making a Living without a fob. 1940. 

Bakke, E. Wight. Citizens without Work: A Study of the Ef- 
fects of Unemployment upon the Workers' Social Rela- 
tions and Practices. 1940. 

Alice O'Connor 



"BALLAD OF PRETTY BOY FLOYD" 

Dust Bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie wrote the 
"Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd" in March of 1939. 
Guthrie, best known for singing and composing 
songs about the plight of people dislocated from 
their homes by poverty and the Dust Bowl, wrote 
a series of ballads about outlaws, celebrating them 
as populist heroes, poor people who preyed on the 
rich. He composed songs about the Dalton gang, 
the brazen female outlaw Belle Starr, and most fa- 
mously, Charles Arthur Floyd, a bank robber and 
killer known as Pretty Boy Floyd. 

Born in Bartow County, Georgia, in 1904, Floyd 
began his life of crime in the 1920s as a bootlegger 
and petty gambler, but his criminal activities had 
escalated to armed robbery and murder by the 
1930s. During the Great Depression, poor individu- 
als frequently lost their homes and property to 
banks, and criminals like Pretty Boy Floyd, who 
robbed the banks that foreclosed on their homes 
and farms, became popular figures of the era. Even 
before Guthrie immortalized Floyd in song, he was 
already known as "the Sagebush Robin Hood." 

When Guthrie first composed the "Ballad of 
Pretty Boy Floyd," the song was intended to mock 
the government, banks, and wealthy people. Guth- 
rie's Pretty Boy was transformed into a heroic fig- 
ure, a victim of circumstance who killed a deputy 
sheriff in a fair fight, and then had to seek refuge 
in the backwoods and live as an outcast because 
"every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name." 
Although the police considered Pretty Boy Floyd to 
be a criminal, he was a hero to the poor farmers, 



who gave him food and shelter and, in return for 
their hospitality, often discovered, according to the 
song, that their mortgage had been paid off or a 
thousand- dollar bill had been left on the dinner 
table. 

Guthrie's song describes a hero who, like an 
American Robin Hood, sent a truckload of groceries 
to provide Christmas dinner for all the families on 
relief in Oklahoma City. The last lines of the song 
made Guthrie's message clear: "And as through 
your life you travel/Yes, as through your life you 
roam/You won't never see an outlaw/Drive a family 
from their home." Songs such as the "Ballad of 
Pretty Boy Floyd" helped victims of the Great De- 
pression vocalize their anger against banks, while 
reinforcing growing class tensions. In a time of ab- 
ject poverty, this song offered hope, as well as a ca- 
thartic release of indignation. 

See Also: GUTHRIE, WOODY; HEROES. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Guthrie, Woody. Dust Bowl Ballads (sound recording). 
1940. 

Klein, Joe. Woody Guthrie: A Life. 1981. 

Wallis, Michael. Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles 
Arthur Floyd. 1992. 

Mary L. Nash 



BANKHEAD-JONES FARM TENANT 
ACT OF 1937 

The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act was passed 
by Congress on July 22, 1937. It authorized a mod- 
est credit program to assist tenant farmers to pur- 
chase land, and it was the culmination of a long ef- 
fort to secure legislation for their benefit. The law 
was one part of the New Deal's program to address 
the massive problems of rural poverty and landless- 
ness, but its impact proved to be so limited that its 
importance was mainly symbolic. 

Federal financing of farm purchases by tenants 
was first considered in Congress as the Bankhead 
bill of 1935. That measure proposed a billion-dollar 
bond issue to enable the government to purchase 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



87 



A N K I N G ACT 



F 



19 3 3 



land, evaluate its suitability for cultivation, and re- 
sell it on easy terms to tenants and sharecroppers 
whose loans would be secured by mortgages and 
supervision of their farming. Although promotion 
of small farm ownership was hardly a radical con- 
cept, the bill received strong conservative opposi- 
tion. The Senate passed it in June 1935, but it died 
in the House of Representatives. 

By 1936 farm purchase lending was an admin- 
istration objective, advocated by the Resettlement 
Administration (RA) and supported by the presi- 
dent. But the Bankhead-Jones Act of 1937 was far 
short of what the RA desired. Instead of a large 
bond issue, it appropriated a token $10 million for 
loans for fiscal 1938, rising to a maximum of $50 
million per year by fiscal 1940. Provision for gov- 
ernment purchase and resale of land, regarded as 
crucial by the RA, was eliminated; instead, all loans 
and farms being financed required approval by 
committees of local farmers. No farms could be fi- 
nanced unless they were deemed viable family 
units by local standards. Credit preference went to 
an upper stratum of tenants who owned imple- 
ments and who could make down payments. Al- 
though not satisfied with such limited legislation, 
RA leaders considered it the best that could be ob- 
tained at the time. The new lending program was 
assigned to the RA, which was renamed the Farm 
Security Administration (FSA). 

The Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act was 
passed near the end of the New Deal, as conserva- 
tive opposition increased in Congress. Beginning in 
1941, Congress tied loans to average farm values in 
each county, a restriction that shut down the pro- 
gram in hundreds of poor counties. From 1938 until 
Congress terminated the FSA in 1946, the agency 
made only 44,300 purchase loans. Moreover, ana- 
lyzing the program in 1949, economist Edward 
Banfield concluded that many of the farms financed 
by the FSA had proved to be inadequate units as re- 
quirements for successful farming rapidly in- 
creased. 

See Also: FARM POLICY; FARM SECURITY 

ADMINISTRATION (FSA); RESETTLEMENT 
ADMINISTRATION (RA). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Baldwin, Sidney. Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline 
of the Farm Security Administration. 1968. 

Banfield, Edward C. "Ten Years of the Farm Tenant Pur- 
chase Program." journal of Farm Economics 31 (1949): 
469-486. 

Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act. U.S. Statutes at Large, 
50, Part 1(1937): 522-33. 

Dykeman, Wilma, and James Stokely. Seeds of Southern 
Change: The Life of Will Alexander. 1962. 

Maddox, James G. "The Farm Security Administration." 
Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1950. 

Mertz, Paul E. New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Pover- 
ty. 1978. 

Paul E. Mertz 



BANKING ACT OF 1933. See 

GLASS-STEAGALL ACT OF 1933. 



BANKING PANICS (1930-1933) 

More than nine thousand banks failed in the United 
States between 1930 and 1933, equal to some 30 
percent of the total number of banks in existence at 
the end of 1929. This statistic clearly represents the 
highest concentration of bank suspensions in the 
nation's history. The data reveal at least four sepa- 
rate intervals when there was a marked acceleration 
and deceleration in the number of bank failures: 
November 1930 to January 1931, April to August 
1931, September and October 1931, and February 
and March 1933. Milton Friedman and Anna 
Schwartz designated these four episodes as bank- 
ing panics, only one of which had causal macroeco- 
nomic significance. If the 3,400 banks that were not 
licensed by the Secretary of the Treasury to reopen 
in March 1933 are excluded, only two out of five 
bank suspensions occurred during banking panics. 
It is well to bear in mind that 60 percent of bank 
closings between 1930 and 1932 were not panic in- 
duced and that the problem of understanding why 
so many banks failed during the Great Depression 
goes beyond simply explaining what happened 
during banking panics. For example, one of the 
causes of the nonpanic-induced failures during the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



N K I N G PANICS (1930-1933) 



Great Depression may have been related in part to 
the over expansion of small, rural banks in the 
twenties as well as to the distressed state of Ameri- 
can agriculture following World War I. These fac- 
tors may have operated during banking panics as 
well but would have by no means been confined to 
panic episodes. 

Unlike previous banking panics of the national 
banking era, the banking panics of the Great De- 
pression occurred during the same cyclical contrac- 
tion from 1929 to 1933, each compounding the ef- 
fects generated in the previous panic. 



Table 1 

Number of Bank Suspensions, Domestic Hoarding, and 
Panic Severity 



(in Millions of Dollars) 












Domestic 


Panic 


Panic Dates 


Suspensions 


Hoarding 


Severity 


Nov. 1930-Jan. 1931 


806 


164 


3.4 


April -Aug. 1931 


573 


348 


2.95 


Sept.-Oct 1931 


827 


270 


4.27 


Feb.-Mar. 1933 


Bank Holidays 


1502 





DEFINITION AND CHARACTERISTICS OF 

BANKING PANICS 

A banking panic may be defined as a class of fi- 
nancial shocks whose origin can be found in any 
sudden and unanticipated revision of expectations 
of deposit loss and during which there is an at- 
tempt, usually unsuccessful, to convert checkable 
deposits into currency. There are two principal 
characteristics of banking panics: an increased 
number of bank runs and bank suspensions and 
currency hoarding as measured by the amount of 
Federal Reserve notes in circulation seasonally ad- 
justed. Table 1 shows the number of bank suspen- 
sions, amount of hoarding, and panic severity in 
each of the panics of the Great Depression, 1933 ex- 
cepted. Panic severity is measured by the number 
of bank suspensions in each panic divided by the 
total number of banks in existence. 



BANKING PANIC OF 1930 

During the banking panic of 1930, over eight 
hundred banks closed their doors between Novem- 
ber 1930 and January 1931, and Federal Reserve 
notes in circulation seasonally adjusted increased 
by $164 million, or 12 percent (see table). The larg- 
est number of bank closings was concentrated in 
the St. Louis Federal Reserve District with approxi- 
mately two suspensions out of every five banks. 
These closings were related to the failure of the 
largest regional investment banking house in the 
South, Caldwell and Co. of Nashville, Tennessee. 
The firm controlled the largest chain of banks in the 
South with assets in excess of $200 million and also 
the largest insurance group in the region with as- 



sets of $240 million. The failure of Caldwell and Co. 
had immediate repercussions in four states: Ten- 
nessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and North Carolina. 
The collapse of Caldwell's financial empire raised 
expectations of deposit loss throughout the sur- 
rounding region. The 1930 panic was region specif- 
ic, inasmuch as at least one-half of the twelve Fed- 
eral Reserve Districts had fewer than 10 percent of 
bank suspensions. Four Districts accounted for 80 
percent of total bank suspensions and slightly over 
one-half of the deposits of suspended banks. The 
consensus view in the early twenty-first century 
was that the 1930 banking crisis was a region spe- 
cific crisis without perceptible national economic 
effects. 



THE TWO BANKING PANICS OF 1931 

No more than two months elapsed between 
the end of the first banking crisis in January 1931 
and the onset of the second in April. The number 
of bank suspensions was lower (573), but the 
amount of hoarding doubled. One-third of the 
bank suspensions were in the Chicago Federal Re- 
serve District; there was a mini panic in Chicago in 
June and a full scale panic in Toledo, Ohio, in Au- 
gust. The Cleveland Federal Reserve District had 
two-thirds of the deposits of suspended banks. 
Nevertheless, in six Districts there was little or no 
change in currency hoarding. 

The onset of the third banking panic coincided 
with Britain's departure from the gold standard in 
September 1931. Bank failures, deposits of failed 
banks, and hoarding rapidly accelerated after the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



89 



A N K I N G PANICS (1930-1933 




Police stand guard outside the entrance to the closed World Exchange Bank in New York in March 1931. Herbert Hoover Library 



British announcement. The immediate response of 
the Federal Reserve was to raise the discount rate 
in October 1931; this action was followed by an in- 
crease in interest rates. The harmful effects of the 
increase may have been exaggerated since in- 
creased bank suspensions and hoarding had pre- 
ceded the increase. Mini panics in Pittsburgh, Phil- 
adelphia, and Chicago with their reverberating 
effects occurred between September 21 and Octo- 
ber 9, before the discount rate was increased. Sixty 
percent of the increase in hoarding occurred before 
the rate increase. The discount rate increase played 
no causal role in precipitating the panic. Nor did the 
Fed's failure to offset the decline in the money stock 
represent ineptitude. Knowledge of the role of the 



currency- deposit ratio as a determinant of the 
money stock was simply unavailable. In sum, 60 
percent of the 2,291 bank closings in 1931 occurred 
during the two separate banking panics. 



THE BANKING PANIC OF 1933 

The 1933 panic was idiosyncratic. In no other 
financial panic was there such a widespread use of 
the legal device of the "bank holiday," whereby a 
state official, usually the governor, closed all of the 
banks for a short time. In March 1933 one of the 
first acts of Franklin Roosevelt, the incoming presi- 
dent, was to announce a nationwide banking holi- 
day, an event without precedent in U.S. history. 
Prior to Roosevelt's action many states had de- 



90 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



N K I N G PANICS (1930-1933 




Worried depositors gather outside the Bank of the United States in New York after its failure in 1931. Library of Congress, Prints 
& Photographs Division. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection 



clared their own bank holidays. Such action was the 
mechanism through which depositor confidence 
was further eroded and was spread to contiguous 
states. Officials in the individual states panicked. 
Uncoordinated state initiatives led to a nationwide 
banking debacle. The use of statewide moratoria 
was not new. Five states had declared banking holi- 
days during the 1907 panic. What was new was its 
use by the president. 

The timing of the national banking holiday was 
dictated by two considerations simultaneously. 
First, a banking system had virtually collapsed 
without any prospects for recovery in the absence 
of national leadership. The outgoing president, 



Herbert Hoover, and the Federal Reserve had abdi- 
cated their responsibility for what was happening. 
Second, an external drain of gold allegedly threat- 
ened gold convertibility of the dollar. 



CAUSES OF BANKING PANICS 

The importance of banking panics for under- 
standing the Great Depression resides in determin- 
ing their causal significance. Did bank failures cause 
the decline in income and interest rates or did the 
decline in income and interest rates cause bank fail- 
ures? To have exerted a causal role, panic-induced 
bank suspensions would have had to be indepen- 
dent of interest rate and income changes. Friedman 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



91 



A N K I N 6 



PANICS 



(19 3 0-1933) 




Like many banks around the country that closed during the Great Depression, this small bank in Haverhill, Iowa, remained 
deserted when it was photographed by Arthur Rothstein in 1939. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI 
Collection 



and Schwartz assigned a causal role to bank sus- 
pensions in order to explain why the money stock 
fell; an autonomous increase in the currency- 
deposit ratio, a money stock determinant, provoked 
a rash of bank suspensions that caused the money 
stock to contract, income to decline, and the con- 
version of a mild recession into a major depression. 
James Boughton and Elmus Wicker, in 1979 and 
1984, showed that interest rates and income were, 
in fact, important determinants of the money stock. 
Their finding that the currency-deposit ratio was 
sensitive to interest rate and income changes is 
consistent with Peter Temin's view that causation 
went from income and interest rates to the money 



stock and not vice versa. As of the early twenty-first 
century, a consensus was slowly emerging that 
panic-induced bank suspensions were not causally 
significant. 

Why, people may ask, were there any banking 
panics at all? Had not the Federal Reserve been es- 
tablished to eliminate banking panics? Yet the 
worst banking panics in U.S. history occurred 
thereafter. How was that possible? Did the fault lie 
in imperfect legislation creating the Fed or was Fed 
leadership culpable? Friedman and Schwartz attri- 
buted panics to inept Fed leadership. But they re- 
jected a compelling alternative explanation that 



9Z 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A R U C 



E R N A R D 



deserves serious reconsideration. Structural weak- 
nesses in the original Federal Reserve Act can ex- 
plain equally well, if not better, why the Fed failed 
to prevent the panics of the Great Depression. 
There were at least three important structural 
weaknesses in the original Federal Reserve Act: 1) 
membership was not compulsory for state bank and 
trust companies, 2) paper eligible for discount by 
member banks was too narrowly defined and re- 
stricted access to the Fed, and 3) power was so de- 
centralized between the twelve Federal Reserve 
Banks and the Board in Washington that leadership 
was weak and ineffective. These combined struc- 
tural weaknesses contributed to the Fed's poor per- 
formance. 

EMERGENCY BANKING ACT OF 1933 

The Emergency Banking Act of March 9, 1933, 
granted the government the necessary powers to 
reopen the banks and to resolve the immediate 
banking crisis. Only one-half of the nation's banks 
with 90 percent of the total U.S. banking resources 
were judged capable of doing business on March 
15; these banks were presumably safe, meaning 
that they were solvent. The other half remained un- 
licensed. Forty-five percent of those were placed 
under the direction of "conservators" whose func- 
tion it was to reorganize the banks for the purpose 
of eventually returning to solvency. The remaining 
5 percent (about 1,000) would be closed perma- 
nently. The reopening of the banks on March 13 
witnessed a return flow of currency into the banks 
for first time since the banking panic of 1930. By 
April 12, some 12,817 banks had been licensed to 
open with $31 billion of deposits. 

See Also: FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM; GLASS- 

STEAGALL ACT OF 1933; MONETARY POLICY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Boughton, James, and Elmus Wicker. "The Behavior of 
the Currency-Deposit Ratio during the Great De- 
pression." Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking. L 1 
(1979): 405-418. 

Boughton, James, and Elmus Wicker. "A Reply to Tre- 
scott." Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking. 16 
(1984): 336-337. 

Friedman, Milton, and Anna Schwartz. A Monetary His- 
tory of the United States 1867-1960. 1963. 



Temin, Peter. Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depres- 
sion? 1976. 

Wicker, Elmus. The Banking Panics of the Great Depression. 
1996. 

Elmus Wicker 



BARUCH, BERNARD 

Bernard Mannes Baruch (August 19, 1870-June 20, 
1965) was a Wall Street financier and adviser to nu- 
merous presidents. He was born in 1870 in Cam- 
den, South Carolina, but moved to New York in 
1881. After graduating from the City College of 
New York, he began working on Wall Street as an 
office boy. By 1900 Baruch had become a millionaire 
through speculation and stock trading. 

Baruch financially supported Woodrow Wil- 
son's presidential campaign in 1912. During World 
War I, Baruch's developing relationship with Wil- 
son led to his becoming a member and, in 1918, 
chairman of the War Industries Board (WIB), the 
principal government agency involved in the war- 
time economic mobilization effort. Adept at self 
promotion, Baruch gained a lasting reputation as an 
effective public servant, though historians have 
raised questions about the WIB's performance. Ba- 
ruch advised Wilson on economic matters at the 
Paris Peace Conference in 1919. 

During the twenties, Baruch contributed heavi- 
ly to Democratic congressional candidates, gaining 
significant influence with such party leaders as Sen- 
ator Joseph Robinson. In response to the Great De- 
pression, Baruch quickly called for the establish- 
ment of a government agency modeled on the WIB 
to spearhead recovery efforts. He initially opposed 
Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic presidential 
nomination in 1932, but when Roosevelt initiated 
the New Deal, two men closely associated with Ba- 
ruch, Hugh Johnson and George Peek, were ap- 
pointed to head the National Recovery Administra- 
tion and Agricultural Adjustment Administration, 
respectively. Both men had worked on the WIB and 
had business ties to Baruch during the 1920s, but 
Baruch had little to do with either man's appoint- 
ment and did not approve many of their actions in 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



93 



S I E 



COUNT" 



office. Although Baruch's position in the Democrat- 
ic Party made him too important for Roosevelt to 
ignore, the two men never had a close relationship 
and Baruch's influence over the New Deal was 
often exaggerated in press accounts. 

After 1938, Baruch hoped to play a central role 
in the nation's mobilization for war. He had influ- 
ence in the War Department and in the various mo- 
bilization agencies that were established, but the 
only official position he held during World War II 
was as head of a 1942 committee to make recom- 
mendations for dealing with a critical rubber short- 
age. Following the war, President Harry Truman 
entrusted Baruch with developing a plan to present 
to the United Nations for controlling all forms of 
atomic energy. Failure to reach agreement with the 
Soviet Union over the Baruch Plan contributed to 
the emergence of the Cold War. Baruch retained 
the status of elder statesman until his death in 1965, 
but his influence in Washington was minimal dur- 
ing the last fifteen years of his life. 

See Also: BUSINESSMEN; JOHNSON, HUGH; NEW 
DEAL. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Baruch, Bernard M. Papers. Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript 
Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jer- 
sey. 

Baruch, Bernard M. Baruch: My Own Story. 1957. 

Baruch, Bernard M. Baruch: The Public Years. 1960. 

Grant, lames. Bernard M. Baruch: The Adventures of a 
Wall Street Legend. 1983. 

Schwarz, lordan A. The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in 
Washington, 1917-1965. 1981. 

Larry G. Gerber 



BASIE, "COUNT." See BIG BAND MUSIC. 



BAUER, CATHERINE 



Author of the acclaimed Modern Housing (1934), a 
renowned "Houser" and urban planner, during the 
mid-1930s Catherine Bauer (May 11, 1905- 



November 22, 1964) served as the activist executive 
secretary of the Labor Housing Conference. She 
was the driving force behind passage of the 1937 
Wagner- St eagall Housing Act, which established 
public housing in America. 

Born in 1905 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Bauer 
traveled extensively in Europe after graduating 
from Vassar in 1926, writing articles for Vogue, La- 
dies Home Journal, and the New York Times. Her fas- 
cination with Europe's modern housing drew her 
abroad again in 1930 and 1932, the second time 
with author-intellectual Lewis Mumford (then her 
lover), whom she met while working at the pub- 
lishing company Harcourt-Brace and who enlisted 
her in the Regional Planning Association of Ameri- 
ca (RPAA). Bauer's 1934 book Modern Housing ex- 
tolled Europe's experiment with government-aided 
shelter, much of which, like Romerstadt in Frank- 
furt, Germany, and Vienna's Karl Marx Hoff, fea- 
tured the streamlined, functionalist Bauhaus archi- 
tecture of the period. The United States, exhorted 
Bauer, must, like Europe, make housing a right and 
a "public utility." 

Mass evictions and mortgage foreclosures dur- 
ing the early Great Depression vindicated Bauer's 
fears about the inadequacy of American housing. 
Although President Herbert Hoover's 1931 Recon- 
struction Finance Corporation (RFC) and President 
Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933 Public Works Admin- 
istration (PWA) Housing Division both included 
monies for low-income housing, Bauer believed 
that impetus for a real modern housing program 
must come from workers themselves. Her model 
became Philadelphia's 184-unit Carl Mackley 
Homes, a hosiery-worker-sponsored RFC project 
completed in 1935 by the PWA. With Bauhaus de- 
sign, it epitomized her ideal of "modern housing," 
although few hosiery workers could afford the 
rents. 

In 1934 Bauer took the executive secretary post 
of the Labor Housing Conference and toured the 
United States promoting a permanent, state-aided 
low-cost housing program modeled on Mackley. 
But Bauer's plan, embodied in the 1935 Robert 
Wagner-Henry Ellenbogen bill, failed. The public 
housing legislation that emerged — and Bauer sup- 
ported — lacked the working-class stamp of the 



9 4 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



E R K E L E Y 



1935 bill. Introduced by Wagner but cosponsored 
instead by Alabama's hard-line conservative con- 
gressman Henry Steagall, it emphasized slum 
clearance for the very poor, not the working class. 
Bauer campaigned vigorously for Wagner- Steagall, 
and it was passed in 1937. The projects built by the 
new United States Housing Authority (USHA) 
evinced much of "modern housing," but stripped of 
frills, they bore a stark, institutional appearance. 
Bauer briefly (1938-1939) administered the USHA's 
Division of Research and Information, which as a 
New Deal insider she had founded to be the re- 
search and public relations arm of the new federal 
housing agency. 

After World War II she married the architect 
William Wurster and took a professorship at the 
University of California at Berkeley. She became ac- 
tive in regional planning and an incisive critic of 
1950s public housing policy. Bauer died in 1964 
while hiking the rugged hills near her home north 
of San Francisco. 

See Also: HOUSING; MUMFORD, LEWIS; REGIONAL 
PLANNING ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA (RPAA); 
UNITED STATES HOUSING AUTHORITY (USHA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bauer, Catherine. Modern Housing. 1934. 

Oberlander, Peter H., and Eva Newbrun. Houser: The Life 
and Work of Catherine Bauer. 1999. 

Radford, Gail. Modern Housing for America: Policy Strug- 



ies in the New Deal Era. 1996. 



Iohn F. Bauman 



BENNY, JACK. See HUMOR; RADIO. 



BENTON, THOMAS HART. See AMERICAN 
SCENE, THE. 



BERKELEY, BUSBY 



Busby Berkeley (November 29, 1895-March 14, 
1976), innovative stage and film choreographer and 



director, was born William Berkeley Enos in Los 
Angeles into a theatrical family (his father was a di- 
rector; his mother an actress). After graduating in 
1914 from Mohegan Lake Military Academy, 
Berkeley worked at various jobs, and during World 
War I he became an "entertainment officer" with 
the U.S. military in France. During the 1920s he be- 
came a successful, well-known stage dance direc- 
tor, working on over twenty musicals. 

In 1930 Berkeley went to Hollywood at the be- 
hest of independent film producer Sam Goldwyn 
for whom he successfully choreographed various 
musicals. He also worked for other producers. Be- 
tween 1933 and 1939 Berkeley was employed by 
Warner Brothers, primarily as a dance director 
whose efforts were strikingly innovative and excit- 
ing, and in the main deservedly well received. He 
also directed various features, some of them not 
musicals, such as the melodrama They Made Me a 
Criminal (1938), for which he garnered a mixed re- 
ception. 

Berkeley, especially in his Warner's musicals, 
which benefited much from the studio's technical 
excellence, produced an exciting, intriguing blend 
of sophistication, precision, and vulgarity. For film 
critic David Thomson, Berkeley's dance sequences 
in films such as Footlight Parade (1933), Dames 
(1934), and Gold Diggers in Paris (1938) demonstrat- 
ed that he was "a lyricist of eroticism." Bevies of 
beautiful, scantily clad girls performing in military 
precision in lavish settings resulted in beguiling al- 
most shameless images. His work must be seen to 
be appreciated. Berkeley developed exciting new 
techniques of filming in order to achieve the effects 
that he wanted: his cameras operated directly above 
the action. What became known as "the Berkeley 
top shot" allowed daring angled shots and stunning 
rhythmic patterns. His films understandably ap- 
pealed to weary Depression-era audiences. He was 
also capable of injecting social realism into his 
dance fantasies as in the biting "Forgotten Men" 
sequence in Gold Diggers of 1933. 

Berkeley moved to MGM in 1939, his initial 
stay there ending in 1943 with the camp classic The 
Gang's All Here. Subsequently he picked up occa- 
sional feature film directing jobs, the last being 
MGM's Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), and 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



95 



E R L E 



ADOLF 



J R 



continued to stage musical numbers until the mid- 
1950s. His last significant contributions were spec- 
tacular water ballets in two MGM films of Esther 
Williams, the swimmer/actress. He died in Palm 
Springs, California, in 1976. 

See Also: GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933; HOLLYWOOD 
AND THE FILM INDUSTRY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Pike, Bob, and Dave Martin. The Genius of Busby Berkeley. 
1973. 

Thomas, Tony, and Jim Terry. The Busby Berkeley Book. 
1984. 

Thompson, David. Biographical Dictionary of Film. 1994. 

Daniel J. Leab 



BERLE, ADOLF A., JR. 



Adolf Augustus Berle, Jr., (January 29, 1895-Febru- 
ary 17, 1971) was a member of the "Brains Trust" 
that advised Franklin D. Roosevelt from March 
1932 until his inauguration. Berle was born in Bos- 
ton, Massachusetts, in 1895. His father was a cler- 
gyman and an educational reformer. Berle was a 
child prodigy, entering Harvard University at the 
age of fourteen and graduating at eighteen. A cor- 
poration lawyer and foreign policy specialist, Berle 
served in the Dominican Republic and in the Rus- 
sian section in Paris during his army service in 1918 
and 1919. While pursuing a career in law during the 
1920s, he developed an interest in social reform. He 
had connections with Lillian D. Wald's Henry 
Street Settlement in New York City and John Col- 
lier's American Indian Defense Association. In 1927 
Berle became a professor of law at Columbia Uni- 
versity in New York. 

In 1932, Berle and the economist Gardiner C. 
Means published The Modern Corporation and Pri- 
vate Property. The book had a major impact on con- 
temporary thinking about the structure and philos- 
ophy of American capitalism. Not only did Berle 
and Means reveal the separation between owner- 
ship and control of America's largest firms, but they 
documented the power and influence of large cor- 



porations in the modern economy. The book chal- 
lenged the assumption that competitive principles 
underlie economic activity and emphasized the 
power that corporate executives had gained as a re- 
sult of the diffusion of stock ownership. Berle asso- 
ciated scale with stability and public service, but he 
looked to corporate executives to develop a greater 
sense of social responsibility, and to the state to ex- 
ercise economic management. 

In 1932, when he joined the Brains Trust at the 
suggestion of Raymond Moley, Berle was commit- 
ted to vigorous federal intervention to initiate na- 
tional planning and, in particular, he favored the re- 
vision of antitrust law, the coordination and 
rationalization of transportation, and an expansion 
of credit. He supported Roosevelt's campaign by 
writing position papers, speeches, and articles. His 
most notable contribution was Roosevelt's Septem- 
ber 1932 Commonwealth Club address in San 
Francisco, which was based on a draft written by 
Berle. Unlike other Roosevelt advisors, Berle did not 
seek a permanent appointment after Roosevelt's 
election, but served as general counsel of the Re- 
construction Finance Corporation and advised the 
president on an ad hoc basis. In 1933, New York 
mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed Berle to the 
post of city chamberlain. In 1938, Berle became as- 
sistant secretary of state, a post that he held until 
1944. In this capacity Berle supported hemispheric 
defense and economic development and attended 
the Pan-American conferences of the 1930s. Berle 
served as U.S. ambassador to Brazil in 1945 and 
1946. He also vigorously pursued American inter- 
ests in the development of postwar aviation agree- 
ments, and he chaired the International Conference 
on Civil Aviation in Chicago in 1944. 

Despite his support for Roosevelt, Berle re- 
mained politically independent. In 1947, he became 
chair of New York City's Liberal Party, which he 
had helped establish, and, beginning in 1951, he 
chaired the Board of Trustees of the Twentieth Cen- 
tury Fund. Berle was a strident critic of British impe- 
rialism and Soviet expansionism, a view he ex- 
pressed through his membership in the National 
Committee for a Free Europe during the 1950s and, 
later, through his support of America's involvement 
in Vietnam. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy ap- 



96 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF IDE GREAT DEPRESSION 



E E 



N E 



MARY 



MCLEOD 



pointed Berle chair of an interdepartmental task 
force on Latin America, which became associated 
with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. 

See Also: BRAIN(S) TRUST; ROOSEVELT, 
FRANKLIN D. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Berle, Beatrice Bishop, and Travis Beal Jacobs. Navigating 

the Rapids, 1918-1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. 

Berle. 1973. 
Kirkendall, Richard S. "A. A. Berle, Jr.: Student of the 

Corporation, 1917-1932." Business History Review 

35, no. 1 (1961): 43-58. 
Moley, Raymond. After Seven Years: A Political Analysis 

of the New Deal. 1939. 
Rosen, Elliot A. Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust: 

From Depression to New Deal. 1977. 
Schwarz, Jordan A. Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision 

of an American Era. 1987. 
Tugwell, Rexford G. The Brains Trust. 1968. 

Stuart Kidd 



BETHUNE, MARY MCLEOD 

Born to former slaves on a rice and cotton farm near 
Mayesville, South Carolina, Mary Jane McLeod 
(July 10, 1875-May 18, 1955) was the fifteenth of 
seventeen children. Instilled with the belief that 
God did not discriminate and that she could 
"achieve whatever was worth achieving," she prog- 
ressed through various Christian schools and, 
choosing to be a missionary, enrolled in Dwight 
Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions, 
graduating in 1895. 

When her application for a missionary post was 
rejected, McLeod returned to the South to teach. In 
Sumter, South Carolina, in 1898, she met and mar- 
ried Albertus Bethune, and bore a son, Albert, in 
1899. Five years later, with "a dollar and a half, and 
faith in God," she started the Daytona Educational 
and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in 
Florida. Stressing vocational education, the school 
grew gradually, and in 1923 Bethune agreed to 
merge her 315 students and twenty-five faculty and 
staff members with Cookman Institute, a Methodist 
school for African -American boys, creating the 
Bethune-Cookman College. 




Mary McLeod Bethune, photographed by Gordon Parks in her 
office at Bethune-Cookman College in 1943. Library of 
Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI 
Collection 



Bethune gained national acclaim as an educa- 
tor, and served on presidential commissions for 
Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. She also 
served two terms as president of the National Asso- 
ciation of Colored Women (1924-1928), and, in 
1935, founded and became president of the Nation- 
al Council of Negro Women — a broad coalition of 
organizations that she headed until 1949. Dedicat- 
ed to developing female black leaders and to the in- 
tegration of African Americans in all walks of life, 
the National Council of Negro Women campaigned 
against lynching and the poll tax, pushed for the in- 
clusion of African-American history in public 
school curriculums, and protested racial discrimi- 
nation in the armed forces and defense industry 
during World War II. Bethune made a special effort 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



97 



I D D L E 



FRANCIS 



to get African-American officers into the Women's 
Army Auxiliary Corps. 

A personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who 
supported her reform agenda, Bethune was ap- 
pointed to the National Advisory Committee of the 
newly formed National Youth Administration 
(NYA) in 1935. The following year she became ad- 
ministrative assistant in charge of Negro affairs of 
the NYA, and in 1939 the director of the NYA's Di- 
vision of Negro Affairs. As such, she was the first 
African-American woman to head a federal agency. 
Her goal was to gain African Americans equal par- 
ticipation, and equal pay, in NYA programs. Only 
partially successful, Bethune did get the NYA to 
eventually enroll black youths in numbers approxi- 
mating their proportion of the national population, 
but not in proportion to their need for assistance. 

At the same time, Bethune helped organize the 
Federal Council on Negro Affairs, an informal 
group of African-American federal officials popu- 
larly known as the Black Cabinet. It sought to se- 
cure increased benefits for African Americans from 
the federal government, as well as to increase the 
number of blacks serving in New Deal agencies. 
While she publicly acknowledged the benefits that 
the New Deal brought to blacks, Bethune often met 
privately with President Franklin Roosevelt to criti- 
cize the administration for not doing enough to aid 
African Americans. 

After World War II, President Harry Truman 
appointed Bethune as a consultant to the U.S. dele- 
gation to the United Nations, and as his personal 
representative at the presidential inauguration of 
William Tubman in Liberia in 1952. Bethune died 
of a heart attack at her home in Daytona Beach, 
Florida, in 1955. The recipient of many awards and 
tributes, including a dozen honorary degrees and 
the Spingarn Medal of the National Association for 
the Advancement of Colored People, Bethune be- 
came the first woman and the first African Ameri- 
can to be honored with a statue in a public park in 
Washington, D.C. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; BLACK CABINET; 
NATIONAL YOUTH ADMINISTRATION (NYA). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Holt, Rackham. Mary McLeod Bethune: A Biography. 1964. 

Peare, Catherine Owens. Mary McLeod Bethune. 1951. 

Ross, B. loyce. "Mary McLeod Bethune and the National 
Youth Administration: A Case Study of Power Rela- 
tionships in the Black Cabinet of Franklin D. Roose- 
velt." In Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, edited 
by John Hope Franklin and August Meier. 1982. 

Smith, Elaine M. "Mary McLeod Bethune." In Black 
Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, edited 
by Darlene Clark Hine. 1993. 

Harvard Sitkoff 



BIDDLE, FRANCIS 

Francis Biddle (May 9, 1886-October 4, 1968) was 
a leading New Deal lawyer and labor reform propo- 
nent who served during the 1940s as attorney gen- 
eral under Franklin Roosevelt. Biddle was descend- 
ed from the prominent Randolph family, with roots 
in seventeenth-century Virginia. He was educated 
at Groton School and Harvard University in Massa- 
chusetts. Like Roosevelt, Biddle was the model of 
a distinctive New Deal type: the son of privilege 
turned social reformer. Biddle's transformation was 
especially sharp. As a prominent Philadelphia at- 
torney in the 1910s and 1920s, he was a registered 
Republican and counsel to various corporate cli- 
ents. But the onset of the Depression led to his dis- 
illusionment with his earlier political commitments. 
Biddle was particularly frustrated with President 
Herbert Hoover's failure to support the cause of 
workers' rights, an issue to which Biddle would be- 
come increasingly committed in the coming years. 
Biddle's support for Roosevelt and labor advo- 
cacy led to his 1934 appointment as chairman of the 
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Working 
with tools ill-suited to the task, Biddle nonetheless 
did an admirable job of employing the limited pow- 
ers of the NLRB to establish critical federal labor 
law precedents. Although his tenure on the com- 
mittee was brief (he served for less than a year), 
Biddle was a consistent and forceful defender of the 
important role served by the Board. His testimony 
before Congress influenced the shaping of the Na- 
tional Labor Relations Act of 1935, which included 
a strengthened NLRB. 



98 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



B I G 



BAND 



MUSIC 



After leaving the NLRB, Biddle returned to pri- 
vate practice in Philadelphia, but by 1938 he was 
back in Washington, serving as chief counsel in 
congressional hearings investigating accusations of 
mismanagement of the Tennessee Valley Authority 
(TV A). The hearings cleared the TVA of wrongdo- 
ing, an accomplishment Biddle would later recall as 
one of his most satisfying of the New Deal era. Bid- 
dle went on to serve on the Federal Reserve Bank 
for a brief period before being appointed to the U.S. 
Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, based in 
Philadelphia. But almost as soon as he settled into 
his new job, he was again moving back to Washing- 
ton, this time to serve as the nation's solicitor gen- 
eral. In 1941 he became U.S. attorney general, a job 
he held until 1945. As attorney general, Biddle con- 
tinued to support New Deal reform, although he is 
most remembered for his role in coordinating the 
internment of Japanese Americans during World 
War II. Following his service in the Department of 
Justice, Biddle went on to serve on the international 
war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg and to author 
numerous books. 

See Also: NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT OF 
1935 (WAGNER ACT); NATIONAL LABOR 
RELATIONS BOARD (NLRB); TENNESSEE VALLEY 
AUTHORITY (TVA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Biddle, Francis. A Casual Past. 1961. 

Biddle, Francis. In Brief Authority . 1962. 

Christopher W. Schmidt 



BIG BAND MUSIC 

The 1920s may have been the "Jazz Age," but the 
1930s was the era of "The Big Band." Big band jazz 
provided the soundtrack for a generation coming of 
age in hard times. And from the big bands came 
swing, a phenomenon that briefly made jazz the 
most popular music in America and the first to truly 
define a mass youth culture. 

Already popular by the late 1920s, big bands 
usually included at least ten musicians and empha- 



sized written arrangements with consistent melo- 
dies over spontaneous soloing and improvisation, 
although band leaders like Duke Ellington, the 
most innovative composer-arranger of his time, 
often constructed such arrangements around the 
strengths of soloists. While the stock market crash 
of 1929 precipitated a drastic fall in record sales and 
rising unemployment among musicians, the De- 
pression actually proved to be a catalyst for big 
band music. An excess of musicians looking for 
work brought down wages and made it easier for 
leaders to hire bands of a dozen or more. Increas- 
ingly accessible radio broadcasts from venues like 
the Cotton Club in Harlem helped to popularize the 
big band sound and made stars of bandleaders like 
Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Cab Calloway. 
Thousands of musicians spent the decade traveling 
by any means available to dance halls and clubs in 
virtually every city, town, and county in the nation. 

Jazz musicians used the term swing as early as 
the 1920s, and in 1932 Ellington's band had a hit 
with "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That 
Swing." But the birth of the popular swing era came 
on the night of August 21, 1935, when teenage fans 
at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles burst into 
dancing excitement during the performance of the 
band led by twenty-six -year-old clarinetist Benny 
Goodman. While the definition of swing itself re- 
mained elusive, performers and fans could recog- 
nize it when they heard it in the rhythm and when 
it moved them to the dance floor. From the loose 
jam-session-inspired performances of Count 
Basie's band in Kansas City to the polished pop 
sound of Glenn Miller's globetrotting orchestra, 
swing became the most popular music in America 
during the later Depression and World War II years. 

Swing appealed to both genders and across 
class lines. It transcended racial divisions, but failed 
to bridge them. The music introduced millions of 
young whites to African-American music and led 
them to appropriate the slang, or "jive talk," of 
black musicians. But segregation remained the rule 
in both the bands and the dance halls, although ex- 
ceptions did occur, such as Goodman's hiring of the 
black vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and Billie Holi- 
day's singing performances with the white Artie 
Shaw band. White bandleaders and musicians gen- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



99 



I L 



E D R E 



erally enjoyed better working conditions and great- 
er public acclaim than their black peers, who often 
found themselves playing to all-white audiences. 
And despite the deep roots of jazz in African- 
American culture, the public and press still crowned 
a white man, Benny Goodman, "the King of 
Swing." 

See Also: ELLINGTON, DUKE; GOODMAN, BENNY; 
HOLIDAY, BILLIE; JAZZ; MUSIC. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Firestone, Ross. Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times 
of Benny Goodman. 1993. 

Schuller, Gunther. The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 
1930-1945. 1989. 

Stewart, Rex W. Jazz Masters of the Thirties. 1972. 

Stowe, David W. Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New 
Deal America. 1994. 

Tucker, Mark, ed. The Duke Ellington Reader. 1993. 

Bradford W. Wright 



BILBO, THEODORE 



Theodore G. Bilbo (October 13, 1877-August 21, 
1947), a major figure in twentieth-century Missis- 
sippi politics, was an ardent and notorious advocate 
of both white supremacy and white economic de- 
mocracy. A native of south Mississippi's Piney 
Woods, he rose to political prominence as the 
champion of the state's poor farmers and laborers. 
With white supremacy a settled issue, Bilbo consid- 
ered racial politics a sham that obscured the real 
struggle for power between his poor white constit- 
uency and the planter-business elite who had ruled 
the state since the overthrow of Reconstrution. 
Consciously subordinating race to economics, he 
sought to recast Mississippi politics as a battle be- 
tween "the classes and the masses." 

The youngest of ten children in a farm family 
of modest means, Bilbo graduated from Poplarville 
High School in Pearl River County, not far from 
New Orleans. He attended Peabody College and 
Vanderbilt University Law School, but earned a de- 
gree from neither. After several years of teaching 



school, he made a successful bid for the state legis- 
lature in 1907, beginning a spectacular political rise 
that carried him to the lieutenant governorship 
(1912-1916) and two terms as chief executive 
(1916-1920, 1928-1932). 

The dramatic difference between his two gu- 
bernatorial administrations underscores the impact 
of the Depression on Mississippi and its politics. 
Bilbo's first term was, as even his most severe critics 
conceded, a resounding success, the culmination of 
two decades of rising agrarian progressivism. His 
second administration was a disaster. Thwarted by 
a hostile legislature, he achieved none of his pro- 
gressive goals and bequeathed to his successor an 
empty treasury and a devastated economy. 

Local impotence in the face of economic disas- 
ter converted many Mississippians into advocates 
of what they had long considered anathema — 
federal intervention. Bilbo led the way, embracing 
a doctrine of New Deal liberalism that strained the 
sensibilities of some other southern progressives. 
Elected to the United States Senate in 1934, he be- 
came arguably the most dependable New Dealer 
among southern Democrats. He eagerly followed 
the president's lead, not only on agriculture, relief 
spending, and social security, but also on public 
housing and labor legislation. He was one of only 
twenty Democratic die-hards who backed Roose- 
velt's court-packing scheme to the bitter end, and 
in 1940 he became Mississippi's self-proclaimed 
"original third-termer" in favor of Roosevelt's un- 
precedented re-election. 

By the time of Bilbo's 1946 re-election cam- 
paign, however, Harry Truman was edging Roose- 
velt's refashioned Democratic Party inexorably to- 
ward civil rights for black Americans. The tension 
between Bilbo's commitment to economic equality 
for whites and his increasingly virulent opposition 
to political equality for blacks became unbearable. 
In the end Bilbo succumbed to the very racial poli- 
tics he had long sought to exorcise from public de- 
bate in Mississippi. He won his own third term not 
as an economic liberal but as the "archangel of 
white supremacy." His enduring infamy for racist 
bigotry ironically obscures a remarkably consistent 
record as a loyal, if undistinguished, New Dealer. 



100 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



LACK 



U G 



See Also: NEW DEAL; SOUTH, GREAT DEPRESSION 
IN THE. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Doler, Thurston E. "Theodore G. Bilbo's Rhetoric of Ra- 
cial Relations." Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 
1968. 

Fitzgerald, Michael W. '"We Have Found a Moses': The- 
odore Bilbo, Black Nationalism, and the Greater Li- 
beria Bill of 1939." The Journal of Southern History 63, 
no. 2 (May 1997): 293-320. 

Green, A. Wigfall. The Man Bilbo. 1963. 

Morgan, Chester M. Redneck Liberal: Theodore G. Bilbo 
and the New Deal. 1985. 

Smith, Charles Pope. "Theodore G. Bilbo's Senatorial 
Career: The Final Years, 1941-1947." Ph.D. diss., 
University of Southern Mississippi, 1983. 

Chester M. Morgan 



BLACK, HUGO 



Hugo Lafayette Black (February 27, 1886-Septem- 
ber 25, 1971) was a U.S. Senator from 1926 to 1937 
and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court 
from 1937 to 1971. Raised in Alabama's hill country, 
Black handled personal injury suits and cases in- 
volving injuries to workers in his Birmingham law 
practice. He served briefly as a police court judge 
and county prosecutor. Black joined the Ku Klux 
Klan in 1923, resigning just before he began his 
1926 campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate, which 
he won with support from many Klan members. 

Black became one of the Senate's most promi- 
nent and vociferous defenders of the New Deal 
after his reelection in 1932. His principal legislative 
proposal sought the adoption of the thirty-hour 
work week, which many in Roosevelt's circle re- 
garded as irresponsible and radical. The Senate ap- 
proved Black's bill, but the administration's Na- 
tional Industrial Recovery Act superseded it. Black 
chaired two Senate committees to investigate what 
he regarded as corrupt ties between business and 
the government in awarding government contracts 
and in more general business lobbying. Black's 
methods, which included extensive searches of the 
personal files and papers of business leaders, were 



intrusive, provoking outrage among those he inves- 
tigated. Civil libertarians, however, had little to say 
against Black's investigations. Black was one of the 
most ardent defenders of Roosevelt's court-packing 
plan. 

Black's support of the New Deal made him an 
ideal nominee for the Supreme Court from Presi- 
dent Roosevelt's point of view after the court- 
packing plan collapsed and Senate majority leader 
Joseph Robinson, Roosevelt's first choice for the 
Supreme Court, died unexpectedly. Black's perfor- 
mance in the Senate generated substantial opposi- 
tion from the business community, but the Senate 
approved his nomination by a vote of sixty-three to 
sixteen. Newspaper reports of Black's Klan mem- 
bership were published after the Senate had ap- 
proved his appointment, and the revelation pro- 
voked a flurry of controversy, which died down 
soon after Black gave a radio speech confirming his 
former membership and pledging his fidelity to the 
Constitution. 

Black became one of the intellectual leaders of 
the Roosevelt court. His guiding principle was that 
the Constitution should be interpreted in light of its 
words' plain meaning and its authors' understand- 
ings. Black sometimes had idiosyncratic views on 
what those original understandings were. Compat- 
ible with the New Deal's economic focus, Black be- 
lieved that the Constitution's grant of power to reg- 
ulate interstate commerce gave Congress 
essentially unlimited power to develop national 
economic policy. Reacting against Supreme Court 
decisions finding economic regulations unconstitu- 
tional because they violated a liberty of contract 
protected by the due process clause, Black became 
an adamant opponent of those who concluded that 
the Constitution protected other unenumerated 
rights more readily described as civil liberties. Nev- 
ertheless, Black vigorously defended civil liberties 
that were listed in the Constitution. His insistence 
that " 'no law' means 'no law' " in the First Amend- 
ment's provision that "Congress shall make no law 
. . . abridging the freedom of speech" led Black to 
a rigid stance on free expression, which came under 
pressure early in his court career in cases involving 
labor picketing. 

One of Black's early opinions as a justice 
seemed addressed to those who thought his Klan 



I N C Y C L P E D I A OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



101 



LACK 



C A 



I N E T 



membership demonstrated hostility towards civil 
rights and civil liberties. Reversing a conviction 
based on a confession beaten out of an African- 
American suspect, Black wrote, the courts "stand 
against any winds that blow as havens of refuge for 
those who might otherwise suffer because they are 
helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are 
non-conforming victims of prejudice and public ex- 
citement" (Chambers v. Florida, 1940). 

See Also: BLACK THIRTY-HOUR BILL; SUPREME 
COURT; SUPREME COURT "PACKING" 
CONTROVERSY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Freyer, Tony. Hugo L. Black and the Dilemma of American 
Liberalism. 1990. 

Newman, Roger K. Hugo Black: A Biography. 1994. 

Williams, Charlotte. Hugo Black: A Study in the Judicial 
Process. 1950. 

Yarbrough, Tinsley E. Mr. Justice Black and His Critics. 
1988. 

Mark Tushnet 



BLACK CABINET 



Encouraged by African-American and interracial 
organizations at the start of the New Deal, the Roo- 
sevelt administration appointed over one hundred 
prominent blacks to race relations advisory posi- 
tions within federal departments and newly estab- 
lished agencies throughout the 1930s and the war 
years. Although some blacks had been given feder- 
al positions by Republican administrations follow- 
ing the Civil War, the Depression-era experience 
was unique. Although the increased importance of 
the black vote to the Democratic Party during the 
Roosevelt years certainly influenced the decision to 
bring racial advisers into the government, few 
blacks were actually chosen because of their in- 
volvement in partisan politics. An exception was 
the former Republican stalwart, Pittsburgh Courier 
editor and publisher Robert L. Vann, who became 
an assistant attorney general in the Department of 
Justice and whose selection was clearly aimed at 
producing a favorable political response. 



Most appointees, however, came from back- 
grounds that more closely resembled that of the 
black educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune 
or the Harvard educated economist Robert Clifton 
Weaver. Bethune, adviser to the National Youth 
Administration, and Weaver, first in the Depart- 
ment of Interior and Public Works Administration 
and later in the United States Housing Authority, 
were also key figures in the formation in 1936 of the 
Federal Council on Negro Affairs, also known as 
the Black Cabinet. An informal organization in 
which Bethune often served as chair and Weaver 
vice chair, the Black Cabinet met on an irregular 
basis, frequently at the home of individual mem- 
bers. Its primary purpose was to coordinate Afri- 
can-American opinion both in and outside the 
Roosevelt administration. Black advisers often 
shared information among themselves and kept 
close ties with certain black and interracial organi- 
zations. Some advisers, such as Forrester Washing- 
ton in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration 
and Eugene Kinckle Jones in the Department of 
Commerce, had held positions in the National 
Urban League. The majority of black advisers were 
middle -class and most were college graduates and 
trained professionals. The Black Cabinet provided 
them with the opportunity to communicate com- 
mon personal struggles in government as well as to 
develop strategies to ensure African-American par- 
ticipation in critical New Deal programs. 

The impact of these advisers on departmental 
and agency policies and in affecting conditions of 
black people during the 1930s depended upon a va- 
riety of factors. The ability to actually shape policy 
was determined frequently by whom they worked 
for and the willingness of their superiors to circum- 
vent bureaucratic restrictions and resist adverse 
public opinion. For many government administra- 
tors, the adviser's role was viewed simply as provid- 
ing information and serving as a public relations 
spokesperson for existing New Deal programs. 
Bethune's relationship to Aubrey Williams in the 
National Youth Administration and Weaver's with 
Clark Foreman and Harold Ickes in Interior were 
unique in terms of the support and authority that 
those white New Dealers gave to their black ap- 
pointees. In contrast, Attorney General Homer 
Cummings never even knew Robert Vann was in 



102 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



LACK LEGION 



the Justice Department, and Edgar Brown, who 
served with the Civilian Conservation Corps, 
worked out of a makeshift office at the end of a cor- 
ridor. Moreover, civil rights legislation and racial 
desegregation were never central to New Deal re- 
form in the 1930s. Instead, New Deal economic and 
class-oriented policies affirmed the ideal of equal 
opportunity through the inclusion of all groups and 
classes, and black advisers had to work within the 
restraints of that political and ideological frame- 
work. Few blacks were satisfied ultimately with 
those limits, and some left in frustration. Yet the 
Black Cabinet remained important as a symbol of 
the New Deal's special recognition of black needs, 
in the educating of white New Dealers on racial is- 
sues, and the precedent established for future black 
participation in the Democratic party and the na- 
tional government. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; BETHUNE, MARY 
MCLEOD; VANN, ROBERT; WEAVER ROBERT 
CLIFTON. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Green, Thomas Lee. "Black Cabinet Members in the 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration." Ph.D. 
diss., University of Colorado, 1981. 

Kirby, John B. Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liber- 
alism and Race. 1980. 

Motz, Jane R. "The Black Cabinet: Negroes in the Ad- 
ministration of Franklin D. Roosevelt." M.A. thesis, 
University of Delaware, 1964. 

Ross, B. Joyce. "Mary McLeod Bethune and the National 
Youth Administration: A Case Study of Power Rela- 
tionships in the Black Cabinet of Franklin D. Roose- 
velt." Journal of Negro History 60 (1975): 1-28. 



John B. Kirby 



BLACK LEGION 



Part of a native fascist movement that grew to men- 
acing proportions in the United States in the midst 
of the economic crisis occasioned by the Great De- 
pression, the Black Legion stood out as an Ameri- 
can counterpart to the rise of Nazism and fascism 



in Europe. Probably started in Ohio in 1931 by a 
group of former Ku Klux Klan members who dyed 
their robes black after their expulsion from that 
group, the organization experienced its greatest 
success in the industrialized regions of Ohio, Indi- 
ana, and Michigan. Its influence spread to a dozen 
or more other states. Though claiming as many as 
six million adherents, it is more likely that around 
forty thousand different individuals joined the 
Black Legion over time before legal investigations 
and prosecutions led to its collapse in 1939. 

Having attracted publicity for a series of flog- 
gings during 1935, the terrorist group became 
headline news after the ritual murder of a 32-year- 
old Detroit relief worker by a dozen of its members 
in May 1936. The Black Legion was an authoritari- 
an, quasi-military organization, which forced disci- 
pline upon its heavily-armed members by initiating 
them at the point of a gun and threatening death 
if they ever disclosed the secrets of the group to 
outsiders. To join the organization, a person had to 
swear that he was a white, native-born, Protestant 
American citizen and agree to take up arms, when 
called upon, against the group's enemies. 

Racial prejudice, religious bigotry, union- 
bashing, and red-baiting characterized the organi- 
zation. Murder, intimidation, and violence were its 
calling cards. Many of its members were former 
rural residents who felt alienated in unfamiliar con- 
ditions in northern cities. A typical member, ac- 
cording to one journalistic account, was a southern- 
born male, in his mid-thirties, and Anglo-Saxon in 
background. While composed mostly of poorer, 
marginalized, working-class whites, the Black Le- 
gion also attracted a considerable number of mid- 
dle-class businessmen and white-collar workers to 
its banner. Politicians and even law-enforcement 
officials sometimes became members. 

Like the Ku Klux Klan and other similar groups, 
which provided a fertile recruiting ground for the 
Black Legion, its members spouted anti-black, anti- 
Semitic, and anti-Catholic rhetoric. Religious sym- 
bolism stood out prominently, and members acted 
in authoritarian fashion to try to impose their mo- 
rality on others. Exposure of the organization in 
news articles, along with legal investigations and 
prosecutions, led to its precipitate decline during 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



103 



LACK 



METROPOLIS 



the late 1930s. The Black Legion's rapid demise re- 
sulted from its heavy dependence on violence, as 
opposed to voluntary support, to attract members. 
Afterwards, many of its adherents drifted into other 
similar native fascist groups. 

See Also: RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS; ANTI- 
SEMITISM. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Janowitz, Morris. "Black Legions on the March." In 
America in Crisis: Fourteen Crucial Episodes in Ameri- 
can History, edited by Daniel Aaron. 1952. 

Freedom of Information Act: Black Legion. Available at 
http://foia.fbi.gov/blackleg.htm 

John E. Miller 



BLACK METROPOLIS 

In 1945 social scientist St. Clair Drake and his re- 
search associate, Horace R. Cayton, published the 
two-volume Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life 
in a Northern City, which attempted to provide the 
empirical foundation for the notion of a "black me- 
tropolis." The term, as used by the public as well as 
by social scientists, referred to a large and diverse 
African-American social enclave composed princi- 
pally of professionals, small business owners, and 
a large working class of both unskilled and semi- 
skilled laborers. These enclaves emerged during the 
interwar years in large urban industrial areas in 
midwestern cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, 
Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee. The south side of Chi- 
cago, the site of Drake and Cayton's study, con- 
tained an elaborate institutional structure that rep- 
licated those of native-born whites, as well as those 
of recent immigrants from southern and eastern 
Europe, who occupied distinct ethnic enclaves in 
the city. 

Black metropolises were the direct product not 
only of residential segregation and other blatant 
forms of discrimination, but also of the hard work 
and ingenuity of their inhabitants. African Ameri- 
cans' overall prosperity during the 1920s was possi- 
ble primarily because of the dire need for their labor 
as unskilled workers in midwestern factories. 



With the onset of the Great Depression at the 
end of the 1920s, the notion of a black metropolis 
was transformed. In Chicago, for example, many 
working-class African Americans were discharged 
from unskilled jobs in factories in which many of 
them had been gainfully employed since World 
War I. Many African-American domestics also were 
fired, and banks in Chicago's south-side ghetto 
were closed. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies pro- 
vided public relief programs, employment, and 
housing. Furthermore, presidential support for ini- 
tiatives in collective bargaining between manage- 
ment and labor benefited unskilled African- 
American workers who had been able to retain em- 
ployment. Additionally, many African Americans 
left both the rural and urban South during the 
1930s — a direct result not only of the Agricultural 
Adjustment Administration (AAA) crop reduction 
policies, but also because African Americans in 
southern cities received less than their proportion- 
ate share of allocations of relief and emergency em- 
ployment. In short, the notion of a black metropolis 
was transformed from that of a community with a 
solid working class that had the potential to make 
advances in the mass-production industries and 
narrow the income gap between themselves and 
whites to one in which most of its members were 
on the dole or dependent on their working spouses 
for support. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; NATIONAL URBAN 
LEAGUE. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. Black Metropolis: 
A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. 1945. 

Gottlieb, Peter. Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' 
Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-30. 1987. 

Kusmer, Kenneth L. A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleve- 
land, 1870-1930. 1976. 

Trotter, Joe William, Jr. Black Milwaukee: The Making of 
an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45. 1985. 



Vernon J. Williams, Jr. 



104 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



N N I E AND CLYDE 



N N I E PARKER 



A N D 



CLYDE 



BARROW 



BLACK THIRTY-HOUR BILL 

The Black thirty-hour bill was introduced by Sena- 
tor Hugo L. Black, a Democrat from Alabama, in 
December 1932 to establish a thirty-hour maximum 
workweek. The bill had diverse origins. During the 
1920s some economists argued that the shorter 
workweek would improve the quality of life for 
working people and offset labor displacement re- 
sulting from technological change. The dramatic 
claims of the Technocracy movement, which 
emerged in 1932, reinforced concerns that technol- 
ogy contributed to unemployment. However, the 
shorter workweek was primarily viewed as a short- 
term expedient to ameliorate the Depression. Dur- 
ing the Hoover years, it was central to the strategies 
of the President's Emergency Committee for Em- 
ployment (1930-1931) and its successor, the Presi- 
dent's Organization for Unemployment Relief 
(1931-1932). These agencies popularized work- 
spreading on the basis of its voluntary implementa- 
tion by corporations to combat the unemployment 
emergency. 

Herbert Hoover's establishment of the Share- 
the-Work movement in September 1932 reflected 
the president's commitment to this strategy. While 
there were many dissenting voices who believed 
that work-sharing was tantamount to spreading 
misery rather than relieving it, others believed that 
to be effective, work-sharing would have to be 
mandatory. Black's bill would have prohibited the 
interstate or international shipment of products 
that had been manufactured in any establishment 
where workers were on the job more than five days 
per week or more than six hours per day. Black con- 
tended that the shorter workweek was an alterna- 
tive to public relief and a way of promoting eco- 
nomic recovery by spreading purchasing power. 

Despite widespread reservations, the Senate 
passed the Black bill on April 6, 1933. This action 
spurred the Roosevelt administration to formulate 
a more comprehensive industrial recovery bill. Roo- 
sevelt was particularly concerned that the hours 
provision was too rigid and he condemned the 
measure as a "one paragraph bill" that would not 
contribute to economic recovery. After the bill's 
passage by the Senate, Secretary of Labor Frances 



Perkins formulated a "substitute" bill that made 
provision for minimum wages, as well as maximum 
hours. Perkins's bill received widespread criticism 
from the business community, and business orga- 
nizations sought to further their own interests in 
antitrust reform and self-regulation through trade 
associations. In April Roosevelt established a plan- 
ning group that became the focus of intense lobby- 
ing by business groups seeking to promote in- 
dustrial self-regulation through cooperative agree- 
ments, subject to government approval in the pub- 
lic interest. Organized labor demanded a govern- 
ment guarantee of the right of workers to belong to 
unions and to bargain collectively through them. In 
addition, Roosevelt's planning group considered a 
number of schemes to "start up" the economy, in- 
cluding federal subsidies and public works. Ulti- 
mately, a comprehensive recovery program 
emerged out of the brainstorming and lobbying 
that the single-issue Black bill had provoked. Fed- 
eral regulation of working hours was one dimen- 
sion of the National Industrial Recovery Act signed 
by Roosevelt on June 16, 1933. 

See Also: BLACK, HUGO; NATLONAL INDUSTRLAL 
RECOVERY ACT (NIRA). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Farr, Grant N. The Origins of Recent Labor Policy. 1959. 

Himmelberg, Robert F. The Origins of the National Recov- 
ery Administration: Business, Government, and the 
Trade Association Issue, 1921-1933. 1976. 

Moley, Raymond. The First New Deal. 1966. 

Perkins, Frances. The Roosevelt I Knew, rev. edition, 1964. 

Stuart Kidd 



BONNIE AND CLYDE (BONNIE 
PARKER AND CLYDE BARROW) 

During an era when the exploits of gangsters such 
as Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, and the 
Karpis-Barker gang filled the pages of newspapers 
and provided plots for popular movies, Bonnie Par- 
ker (October 1, 1910-May 23, 1934) and Clyde Bar- 
row (March 24, 1909-May 23, 1934) stood out as 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



105 



N N I E 



N D 



CLYDE 



N N I E PARKER 



A N D 



CLYDE 



R R W 




Bonnie Parker jokingly points a shotgun at Clyde Barrow in 
1932. Bettmann/CORBIS 



icons. Between 1932 and 1934, when they drove 
through Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, 
Arkansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, commit- 
ting the crimes for which they became notorious — 
twelve murders, scores of robberies, and nearly a 
dozen incidents of hostage-taking — Bonnie and 
Clyde came to stand for a variety of sometimes con- 
flicting images. They were known as romantic lov- 
ers, and as a modern-day Robin Hood and Maid 
Marian who fought back against the predatory rich. 
Tabloid readers knew them as the "snake -eyed kill- 
er" and "cigar- smoking gun moll" (an image Bon- 
nie despised but helped create). The recipients of an 
enormous amount of publicity on the radio, in 
newspapers, and in crime magazines, they contrib- 
uted to their own legend through photographs they 
took of one another, poems written by Bonnie, sto- 
ries they sent to detective magazines, and even 
through a letter Clyde sent to the Ford Motor Com- 
pany, extolling the Ford as the car he always stole 
when he had the opportunity. 



Both Bonnie and Clyde came from poor fami- 
lies — Clyde, the son of tenant farmers, was born in 
Ellis County, Texas, and Bonnie was born in 
Rowena, Texas, and raised by a poor widow. They 
met in 1930, when Bonnie was working as a wait- 
ress in a Dallas cafe and Clyde was wanted by the 
police on burglary charges. During the time that 
they spent together, they became famous for their 
abilities as escape artists. They drove their stolen 
cars through the Texas countryside at speeds of up 
to seventy miles an hour, evading police traps while 
other gang members, including members of both 
their families, were caught. They even managed to 
smuggle weapons into the Texas prison system to 
free their confederates. 

Their crimes seemed to many emblematic both 
of the frontier spirit of the West, and of the new 
freedom made possible by the mass production of 
the automobile. Before meeting Bonnie, Clyde was 
just another two-bit crook — their romantic partner- 
ship elevated their criminal status. His love of his 
many guns, all of which he named, placed him 
squarely in the tradition of the western outlaw. 
However, as an armed woman during a period 
when marriage rates plummeted, male unemploy- 
ment rates were high, and pundits decried a crisis 
of masculinity, Bonnie Parker simultaneously in- 
habited the gun-toting role more familiar to men 
and played the role of the supportive girlfriend, 
highlighting the cultural contradictions of Ameri- 
can womanhood. 

Bonnie and Clyde were shot down by lawmen 
in an ambush on May 23, 1934, in rural northwest 
Louisiana. They died almost literally in one anoth- 
er's arms; their "death car," which was exhibited at 
public events for years thereafter, as well as their 
bodies, became targets for souvenir hunters. 
Clyde's funeral attracted thirty thousand spectators, 
and Bonnie's was mobbed, too — the largest wreath 
there was sent by an organization of Dallas news- 
paper boys, perhaps in thanks for the half million 
newspapers the account of the final ambush had 
helped them to sell. 

See Also: "BALLAD OF PRETTY BOY FLOYD"; CRIME; 
HEROES. 



106 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



ONUS 



A R M V / 



ONUS 



R C H 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Fortune, Jan. The Fugitives. 1934. 

Jones, W. D. "Riding with Bonnie and Clyde." Playboy 

15, no. 11 (November 1968): 151, 160-165. 
Milner, E. R. The Lives and Times of Bonnie and Clyde. 

1996. 
Phillips, John Neal. Running with Bonnie and Clyde: The 

Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults. 1996. 
Treherne, John. The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde. 

1984. 

Laura Browder 



There were those in Congress who wanted to 
do more. A growing bloc led by three House Dem- 
ocrats — William Connery of Massachusetts, John E. 
Rankin of Mississippi, and Wright Patman of 
Texas — campaigned for full and immediate cash 
payment. All had served as enlisted men during the 
war. Patman soon became the acknowledged lead- 
er of the bonus forces in Congress. The bills he and 
others introduced made the bonus a national issue 
and were a spur for most of those who came to 
Washington. 



BONUS ARMY/BONUS MARCH 

The veterans' bonus, more properly called "adjust- 
ed service compensation," was approved by Con- 
gress in both 1922 and 1924 and vetoed by presi- 
dents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. 
Harding's veto was upheld, but Coolidge's was 
overridden and the bonus bill became law. Its en- 
actment came after four years of agitation by veter- 
ans and veterans' groups. The law provided a cash 
payment equal to one dollar for each day of war- 
time military service, with an extra twenty-five 
cents for each day spent overseas. Certificates with 
varying face values were issued, but payment was 
deferred until 1945. An insurance provision provid- 
ed for full payment to heirs in case of death. The ac- 
crued interest made the maximum possible pay- 
ment some $1,800, a tidy sum at a time when the 
average annual earnings of non-farm workers came 
to just over $1,400. Other provisions allowed veter- 
ans to borrow limited amounts of the value of their 
bonus certificates at relatively high rates of interest. 

THE BONUS: A DEPRESSION ISSUE 

The payment deferral was widely accepted in 
1924, but the end of the prosperity of the 1920s and 
the onset of the Great Depression created wide- 
spread agitation for "immediate cash payment." 
The initial response of Congress during the Depres- 
sion winter of 1930 to 1931 was to pass a bill allow- 
ing veterans to borrow larger amounts on their cer- 
tificates at lower interest rates. President Herbert 
Hoover vetoed the bill, but a majority of the Repub- 
licans in each house joined almost all the Demo- 
crats to override Hoover's veto. 



MARCHING ON WASHINGTON 

As early as January 1931 a few veterans had 
demonstrated in the nation's capital for immediate 
cash payment, and a number of other demonstra- 
tions took place before May 1932, none of which 
had a significant impact. The one Washington 
demonstration that caused a stir was the "National 
Hunger March," a one-day affair on December 7, 
1931, which was sponsored by a Communist Party 
front, the Unemployed Councils. Early in May 1932 
the Communist press announced that another front 
organization, the Workers' Ex- Servicemen's 
League (WESL or Weasels), would lead a similar 
one -day March on June 8, 1932. But before that 
happened an unheralded group of veterans from 
Portland, Oregon, had crossed the nation in box- 
cars and trucks, captured national attention, and 
begun what would now be called a sit-in in the na- 
tion's capital. 

The Oregon veterans were led by an unem- 
ployed ex-sergeant, Walter W. Waters, who had 
spent almost eighteen months overseas with the 
medical detachment of the 146th Field Artillery 
until he was discharged in 1919. A handsome and 
glib six-footer who had drifted from job to job in the 
1920s, Waters inflated his resume in his 1933 mem- 
oir, B.E.F.: The Whole Story of the Bonus Army. Even 
there, however, he admitted that "my inability to 
take root in fertile soil may have been due to the 
unsettling effects of the war on me" and he referred 
to an unspecified post-discharge illness with the 
words "my health failed." 

Waters and fewer than three hundred other 
veterans set out riding in empty boxcars on March 
11 or 12, 1932. Their slow but peaceful passage east 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



107 



B N 



A R M Y / B N U S MARC 




Shacks built by members of the Bonus Army in Washington, D.C., burn after the battle with federal troops in 1932. National 
Archives and Records Administration 



was ignored by the national press until railroad offi- 
cials at Council Bluffs, Iowa, tried without success 
to stop them from reaching Saint Louis; the brief 
stand-off in the Iowa rail yards was news. Waters 
gave his first press conference on May 20 when the 
bonus seekers arrived in Saint Louis. He said that 
when they got to Washington they were going to 
stay until a bonus bill was passed "if it takes until 
1945." That statement, publicized nationally, acted 
as a signal for groups of veterans across the country 
to come to Washington. By the time the Orego- 
nians reached the capital on May 29, hundreds of 
other veterans were already there and thousands 
more were on their way. 

By mid-June some twenty thousand had come 
to participate in what the press called a "bonus 



march," although almost no one walked to Wash- 
ington. Some drove their own cars and trucks. The 
Washington, D.C., police force was commanded by 
Pelham D. Glassford, a West Point graduate who 
had been the youngest general in the American Ex- 
peditionary Force and had retired from the army in 
1931. Glassford sympathized with his fellow veter- 
ans but understood that their cause was all but 
hopeless. Interested in public order, he encouraged 
the men to organize as a Bonus Expeditionary Force 
(BEF), helped them obtain relief supplies, and got 
most of the veterans to set up an encampment on 
park land in Anacostia at the edge of the District of 
Columbia. Some also camped in partially demol- 
ished buildings on lower Pennsylvania Avenue 
near the Capitol. There were few arrests and no sig- 
nificant violence for almost two months. 



10! 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ONUS 



A R M V / 



ONUS 



R C H 



Patman's bonus bill had been locked up in 
committee, but after the veterans arrived it was easy 
to pry it out. On June 15 it passed in the House, 211 
to 176. The Senate leadership agreed to a quick 
vote, hoping that the men would go home once it 
was defeated. On the evening of June 17, with sev- 
eral thousand veterans massed in front of the Capi- 
tol, the Senate defeated the bill. Only twenty-eight 
of ninety-six senators favored it. Some feared that 
the massed veterans would riot in response. Instead 
they sang "America the Beautiful" and returned to 
their encampments. But large numbers of them 
stayed in Washington and some reinforcements ar- 
rived. 



THE BATTLE OF WASHINGTON 

Before adjourning on July 16, Congress offered 
railroad fare home plus a seventy-five cent per diem 
allowance to any veteran who left by July 25. Some 
five thousand veterans took advantage of this offer. 
The Red Cross, which had refused any aid to the 
veterans, financed the travel of nearly five hundred 
accompanying wives and children. Once the July 25 
deadline had passed, the Hoover administration, 
acting through its appointees, the District Commis- 
sioners, issued orders to force the now fewer than 
ten thousand veterans to leave Washington. The 
first step was ordering the police to remove the vet- 
erans camped on Pennsylvania Avenue. Glassford 
and his police commenced that task on July 28; two 
violent outbursts occurred as some men resisted 
eviction. The first, in the morning, caused no fatali- 
ties, but resulted in the commissioners asking the 
president for federal troops. Hoover obliged, order- 
ing that the veterans be taken into custody. A few 
minutes later, another fracas broke out and a po- 
liceman who had been attacked drew his pistol and 
fired several shots, which killed two veterans. 
Glassford restored order and shortly thereafter 
learned that the Army had been called out. 

About six hundred soldiers — some two hun- 
dred cavalry, three hundred infantry, and five 
tanks — under the personal command of Chief of 
Staff Douglas MacArthur, formed on the Ellipse be- 
hind the White House, and at 4:30 P.M. they moved 
up Pennsylvania Avenue at the height of the eve- 
ning rush hour. The resulting "Battle of Washing- 



ton" was no battle at all: Not a shot was fired by the 
troops or the veterans, although the latter threw a 
few bricks and a lot of curses and the former used 
the points of sabers, bayonets, and tear gas. The 
troops then moved toward Anacostia, positioned 
three tanks on the bridge, and took a break for sup- 
per. Those in the Anacostia encampment were 
given notice, and then the soldiers advanced, driv- 
ing the veterans and whoever was with them out of 
the district and into Maryland like so many refu- 
gees. MacArthur deliberately disobeyed Hoover's 
order to take the veterans prisoner. 

The Hoover administration claimed that most 
of the expelled bonus marchers were Communists 
and not really veterans, but such changes did not 
sit well with the public. Rexford Guy Tugwell wrote 
in The Brains Trust (1968) that he had an appoint- 
ment with Franklin Roosevelt on the morning of 
July 29. Entering the governor's Hyde Park, New 
York, bedroom about 7:30 A.M., Tugwell found Roo- 
sevelt, characteristically, in bed with the papers 
spread around him. He told Tugwell that the pic- 
tures of the troops driving the veterans from the na- 
tion's capital were like "scenes from a nightmare." 
Tugwell believed that from that point on Roosevelt 
felt assured of his election, which almost certainly 
would have come in any event. 

In a letter written a few days before the 1932 
election, Roosevelt, who, like Hoover, opposed a 
bonus prepayment, told a correspondent that he 
would have handled things differently. Roosevelt 
got that opportunity when a smaller and more radi- 
cal group of veterans came to Washington in May 
1933. The president had Harry Hopkins arrange for 
billets at underused military facilities outside the 
district, sent his wife to meet with the veterans, and 
changed the rules so that those who wished could 
enroll in special veterans' units of the newly created 
Civilian Conservation Corps. 

In 1936 Congress passed a bill to pay the bonus 
at once; Roosevelt vetoed it, but did not strenuously 
attempt to stop Congress from overriding his veto. 
Although the imaginative World War II programs 
for veterans commonly known as the G. I. Bill of 
Rights might have come about in any event, the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



109 



N D 6 6 L E 



bonus experience spurred planning for future veter- 
ans' benefits. 

See Also: HOOVER, HERBERT. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Best, Gary Dean. FDR 
1933-1935. 1992. 



and the Bonus Marchers, 



Daniels, Roger. The Bonus March: An Episode of the Great 
Depression. 1971. 

Glassford, Pelham D. Papers. University of California, 
Los Angeles. 

Hoover, Herbert C. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, Vol. 
3: The Great Depression, 1929-1941. 1952. 

Lisio, Donald J. The President and Protest: Hoover, Conspir- 
acy, and the Bonus Riot. 1974. 

Lisio, Donald J. The President and Protest: Hoover, MacAr- 
thur, and the Bonus Riot, 2nd edition. 1994. 

MacArthur, Douglas. Reminiscences. 1964. 

Roger Daniels 



BOONDOGGLE 

During the years of the New Deal, its critics used 
the term "boondoggle" to refer to various work re- 
lief programs that fell under the aegis of the Works 
Progress Administration (WPA), a federal agency 
created in 1935 and run by Roosevelt's federal relief 
administrator, Harry Hopkins. The word implied a 
politically motivated, trivial, wasteful, or impractical 
government project funded to gain political favor. 

The word originally meant a braided cord worn 
by Boy Scouts as a neckerchief or ornament, that is, 
a handmade article of simple utility and practical 
use. It may have been used earlier to refer to a de- 
vice rigged by Daniel Boone to carry his equipment 
across rivers so that his hands would be free to 
swim. Thus, the term can be used to refer to any- 
thing people created for themselves to help them 
work more easily and effectively. 

During the 1930s, however, boondoggle be- 
came a politically charged word expressing disdain 
for government programs that provided various 
types of work for the unemployed during the Great 
Depression. Hopkins's WPA work relief programs 



were especially vulnerable to criticism as "make- 
work," especially those that had to do with the arts. 
Although most WPA projects consisted of building 
or repairing roads and public buildings, parks, hos- 
pitals, and highways, one of its components, the 
Federal Arts Project (known as Federal One), paid 
thousands of unemployed artists, musicians, actors, 
and writers for working at their craft. 

Artists suffered inordinately during the Great 
Depression because the market for art works virtu- 
ally disappeared. In desperation, some artists 
would barter their work for food and rent while 
others tried selling on the street. The hard fact that 
the unemployment rate for artists was even greater 
than for the general population led the government 
to create jobs for them. When critics accused Hop- 
kins of giving boondoggling jobs to people commit- 
ted to the creative impulse, he defended Federal 
One as a way to keep the talents of millions of 
Americans alive. Art patronage, in Hopkins's opin- 
ion, was healthy and defined the artists' relation- 
ship to their society as an ultimately useful one. 
Government patronage made art accessible to the 
public and insured that the artist would have a cre- 
ative role in American society that would be de- 
mocratizing and culturally enriching for the entire 
nation. 

See Also: FEDERAL ONE; HOPKINS, HARRY; WORKS 
PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Hopkins, Harry L. "Boondoggling: It Is a Social Asset." 
The Christian Science Monitor (August 19, 1936): 4, 
14. 

Hopkins, June. Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Re- 
former. 1999. 

Mclimsey, George. Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor, De- 
fender of Democracy . 1987. 

Iune Hopkins 



BORAH, WILLIAM 



William Edgar Borah (June 29, 1865-January 19, 
1940) was a prominent Republican senator during 
the Great Depression. Known as the "Lion of 



110 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U L D E R 



D A M 



Idaho," he defended Jeffersonian principles, upheld 
civil libertarian doctrines, espoused constitutional- 
ism, and safeguarded the special interests of his 
home state. Despite his lengthy service in the upper 
chamber, Borah lacked an understanding of power 
plays in American politics. He remained a political 
maverick whose oratorical skills outweighed a plan 
of action, a characteristic that curtailed his effective- 
ness as a leader. Essentially he remained a loner. 
Yet for all his shortcomings, Borah possessed the 
ability to arouse people on public issues. 

Born in Jasper Township, Wayne County, Illi- 
nois, Borah attended Tom's Prairie Public School 
and Southern Illinois Academy but never complet- 
ed high school. He matriculated at the University of 
Kansas for a time in the 1880s. Thereafter Borah 
studied law in his brother-in-law's office, relocated 
to Idaho in 1890, earned a reputation as a good 
criminal lawyer, became interested in politics, 
chaired the Republican State Central Committee, 
attacked the trusts, and supported William Jen- 
nings Bryan, a Democrat, for president in the free 
silver crusade of 1896. In 1902 Borah led the pro- 
gressive Republican faction that defeated Idaho's 
Old Guard candidates. Five years later state legisla- 
tors elected him to the U.S. Senate, where he re- 
mained until his death. 

Borah was a reformer and individualist. He em- 
braced Theodore Roosevelt but declined to follow 
him in the Bull Moose campaign of 1912. Borah en- 
dorsed legislation for labor revision and backed 
constitutional amendments for a graduated income 
tax, the direct election of U.S. senators, and nation- 
al prohibition. He also belonged to the irreconcil- 
able wing of senators who opposed any version of 
a League of Nations. After World War I, Borah sur- 
faced as a major voice for progressivism, isolation- 
ism, and the outlawry of war. Although he whole- 
heartedly championed Herbert Hoover for 
president in 1928, Borah assailed the president's 
farm and tariff policies and berated him for not pur- 
suing more aggressive action to relieve the suffering 
in the nation. Borah demanded relief for the needy 
and unemployed. In a blistering Senate speech in 
1931, he challenged the administration to respond 
to the crisis. Borah's crusading voice against Hoo- 
ver's economic philosophy helped prepare the way 
for the New Deal. 



The severity of the Great Depression in the 
1930s convinced Borah of the necessity for govern- 
ment intervention to combat the economic catas- 
trophe, monitor the nation's financial condition, 
and protect the general interest. He accepted much 
of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal do- 
mestic program, especially legislation that aided 
farmers and arranged for work remedies and allevi- 
ation. The senator favored the Tennessee Valley 
Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commis- 
sion, Social Security, the National Labor Relations 
Act of 1935, the Revenue Act of 1935, and the Pub- 
lic Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935, but he 
remained steadfastly against the National Recovery 
Administration with measures designed to benefit 
the industrial segments of American society. He 
suggested currency expansion as a means to ame- 
liorate the Depression. Although the expansion of 
federal bureaucratic agencies and the possible dan- 
gers to individual rights worried Borah, he focused 
attention on the activist role of government in the 
1930s. 

By the end of the 1930s, Borah devoted his time 
primarily to foreign affairs and endeavors to avoid 
United States entanglement in case of war. He died 
at his home in Washington, D. C, three days after 
a cerebral hemorrhage. 

See Also: NEW DEAL. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Borah, William E. Papers. Manuscripts Division, Library 
of Congress, Washington, D. C. 

Borah, William E. Bedrock: Views on Basic National Prob- 
lems. 1936. 

Johnson, Claudius O. Borah of Idaho. 1936. 

McKenna, Marian C. Borah. 1961. 

Leonard Schlup 



BOULDER DAM 

Located in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River 
on the Arizona-Nevada state line, thirty-five miles 
southeast of Las Vegas, the Boulder Dam, known 
since 1947 as the Hoover Dam, stands as a monu- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



111 



U L D E R DAM 




Laborers install steel bar reinforcements at the mid-section of Boulder Dam during construction in 1934. Library of Congress, 
Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



ment to modern engineering. It is a concrete gravity 
arch dam that spans 1,244 feet across the canyon 
and rises to a height of 726 feet; its width ranges 
from 660 feet at the base to forty-five feet at the 
crest. By controlling unpredictable floods, providing 
water to drought-ridden areas, and generating 
electrical power, the dam transformed the West and 
encouraged settlement of the region. 

On December 21, 1928, following extensive de- 
bate over water rights and fiscal concerns, President 
Calvin Coolidge signed the Boulder Canyon Project 
bill, providing over $165 million to construct the 
dam. The Bureau of Reclamation awarded the con- 
tract to Six Companies, Inc., on March 11, 1931, en- 
suring employment for five thousand workers at 
the depths of the Depression. The government built 
Boulder City, complete with a school, a hospital, a 



general store, and a mess hall that served four thou- 
sand meals a day, to provide housing for single men 
and families. 

Work on the dam began in May 1931 with the 
excavation of two tunnels on each side of the can- 
yon to divert the river during construction. Workers 
then drained the site, stripped canyon walls of loose 
rock to provide a smooth surface for abutment, and 
drilled the canyon floor for the dam to rest on solid 
bedrock. In June 1933 workers started pouring con- 
crete blocks in a series of columns using bottom- 
drop buckets hoisted into position by a cableway 
that spanned the canyon. A U-shaped powerhouse, 
with two arms extending downstream on either 
side of the canyon and connected by an arm span- 
ning the face of the dam, housed generators that 
produced over 700,000 kilowatts of electricity, ren- 



112 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U R K E - W H I T E 



R G A R E E 



dering Boulder Dam the largest hydroelectric facili- 
ty in the world until the Grand Coulee Dam in 
Washington exceeded that level in 1949. Twin sets 
of intake towers controlled the flow of water to the 
powerhouse and reservoir outlets. 

On February 1, 1935, workers sealed the diver- 
sion tunnels and allowed water to rise behind the 
dam, creating Lake Mead reservoir, named for El- 
wood Mead, the former commissioner of the Bu- 
reau of Reclamation. President Franklin Roosevelt 
dedicated the dam on September 30, 1935, pro- 
claiming it "a twentieth-century marvel" that trans- 
formed the Colorado River "into a great national 
possession." Congress renamed the structure Hoo- 
ver Dam in 1947, ending a controversy that began 
in 1930 when supporters proposed naming the dam 
after President Herbert Hoover for his contribution 
to the project. However, as more Americans began 
blaming Hoover for the Depression, Roosevelt's 
Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, rejected the 
proposal and named the project Boulder Dam in 
1933. Once public opinion of Hoover softened, 
Congress restored his name to the project that he 
helped to initiate. 

The Boulder Dam harnessed the power of the 
Colorado River for the public good. It encouraged 
settlement and development of the West by thou- 
sands of farmers and businessmen who required a 
stable water supply, power generation, and protec- 
tion from unpredictable floods. Combined with its 
contributions to municipal and recreational needs, 
Boulder Dam eventually benefited millions of 
Americans. 

See Also: GE^AND COULEE PROJECT; PUBLEC POWER; 
WEST, GREAT DEPRESSEON EN THE AMERECAN. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dunar, Andrew J., and Dennis McBride. Building Hoover 
Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression. 1993. 

Kleinsorge, Paul L. Boulder Canyon Project: Historical and 
Economic Aspects. 1941. 

Records of the Bureau of Reclamation. Record Group No. 
115: Project Histories, Boulder Canyon Project. Na- 
tional Archives and Records Administration. Rocky 
Mountain Region, Denver, Colo. 

Simonds, William loe. The Boulder Canyon Project: 
Hoover Dam. Available at: www.usbr.gov/history/ 
hoover.htm 



Stevens, loseph E. Hoover Dam, An American Adventure. 
1988. 

United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Rec- 
lamation. Boulder Canyon Project: Final Reports, 
Part IV— Design and Construction. 1941-1949. 

Todd J. Pfannestiel 



BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET 

Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904-August 27, 
1971) was born in the Bronx, New York, the daugh- 
ter of Joseph White and Minnie Bourke, and grew 
up in New Jersey. She acquired a fascination for 
photography from her father and from a teacher, 
Clarence H. White, a member of Alfred Stieglitz's 
Photo- Secession movement. After briefly attending 
two colleges, and getting married and divorced, she 
enrolled in Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, 
and supported herself by selling photographs of the 
campus to students and alumni. She graduated in 
1927 with a degree in biology. Bourke-White then 
opened a photography studio in Cleveland, where 
her dramatic industrial photographs of foundries 
gained the attention of Henry Luce in 1929. Luce 
brought her to New York to become a photogra- 
pher for his new magazine, Fortune. Bourke- 
White's assignment to take pictures of industrial- 
ization in the Soviet Union in 1930 led to her first 
book, Eyes on Russia (1931). After completing cele- 
brated picture essays on the meatpacking plants of 
Chicago, glass blowing in upstate New York, and 
Indiana stone quarries, Bourke-White's emphasis 
changed from industry to the human condition 
while she photographed the Dust Bowl conditions 
of the Plains states in 1934. She collaborated with 
writer Erskine Caldwell, whom she would later 
marry and divorce, on a photo-documentary of the 
life of poor southern sharecroppers, You Have Seen 
Their Faces (1937). In 1936 she signed on as one of 
four photographers for Luce's new pictorial maga- 
zine, Life. Her photographs of the construction of 
Fort Peck Dam in Montana were chosen for the first 
cover illustration and lead article of Luce's new 
venture. 

As a Life correspondent during World War II, 
she was the only foreign photojournalist to be in 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E E H E 6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



113 



or AN 



6 I H L 



TRAMPS Of A M f H I C A 



the Soviet Union when the Germans invaded, the 
only woman to be accredited by the U. S. armed 
forces as a war photographer, the first female to ac- 
company and record an Army Air Force bombing 
mission, and the first to document the horrors of 
the German concentration camp at Buchenwald. 
After the war, she covered the Korean War, the 
miners of South Africa, and the independence of, 
and strife between, India and Pakistan. Discovering 
that she had Parkinson's disease in 1956, Bourke- 
White gradually turned from photography to writ- 
ing, producing an autobiography, Portrait of Myself 
(1963). She died in 1971 at the age of sixty-seven. 
A pioneer in photojournalism who thrived on ad- 
venture and craved a crisis, tirelessly and ruthlessly 
doing whatever it took to get the photograph she 
wanted, Bourke-White was widely hailed as a 
woman doing a man's job in a man's world. 

See Also: CALDWELL, ERSKINE; LANGE, DOROTHEA; 
PHOTOGRAPHY; SHAHN, BEN. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brown, Theodore M. Margaret Bourke-White: Photojour- 
nalist. 1972. 

Callahan, Sean, ed. The Photographs of Margaret Bourke- 
White. 1972. 

Goldberg, Vicki. Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography. 
1986. 

Silverman, Jonathan. For the World to See: The Life of Mar- 
garet Bourke-White. 1983. 

Harvard Sitkoff 



BOY AND GIRL TRAMPS OF 
AMERICA 

In 1933 and 1934, Thomas Minehan, a young soci- 
ologist at the University of Minnesota, disguised 
himself in old clothes and hopped freight trains 
crisscrossing six midwestern states. He joined the 
bands of boys, and more than a few girls, who 
formed the ranks of a roving army of 250,000 chil- 
dren torn from their homes in the Great Depres- 
sion. Over a two-year period, Minehan associated 
on terms of intimacy and equality with several 
thousand transients, collecting five hundred life 




During the Depression, some 250,000 young people took to the 
road, often with the blessing of parents at their wits end to 
feed and care for them. These boys were photographed 
hopping a freight car in California in 1940. National Archives 
and Records Administration 



histories of the young migrants. The result was a 
vivid portrayal of their harrowing existence, Boy and 
Girl Tramps of America, a work unique in its ability 
to reach beyond statistics and reveal the opinions, 
ideas, and attitudes of the boxcar boys and girls. 

Grinding poverty, shattered family relation- 
ships, and financially strapped schools that locked 
their doors were among the reasons most kids went 
on the road. They usually did so with the blessing 
of parents at their wits end to feed and care for 
them. The first weeks away from home could be eu- 
phoric, filled with a sense of romance and adven- 
ture. Minehan observed that after six months on the 
road, however, the boys and girls lost their fresh 
outlook and eagerness. Trips across the country 
were no longer educational, but were quests for 
bread. "There comes a day when the boys are alone 
and hungry, and their clothes are ragged and torn," 
wrote Minehan; "breadlines have just denied them 



IK 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



B R A I N ( S ) TRUST 



food, relief stations an opportunity to work for 
clothes. Abrakie [brakeman] has chased them from 
the yards. An old vagrant shares his mulligan with 
them and they listen." 

Riding with the road kids, Minehan estimated 
that 10 percent of those he met were girls, dressed 
in overalls or army breeches and boys' coats. They 
traveled in pairs, sometimes with a boyfriend, 
sometimes with a tribe of ten or twelve boys. Mine- 
han described "Kay," who was fifteen: "Her black 
eyes, fair hair, and pale cheeks are girlish and deli- 
cate. Cinders, wind and frost have irritated but not 
toughened that tender skin. Sickly and suffering 
from chronic undernourishment, she appears to 
subsist almost entirely upon her fingernails, which 
she gnaws habitually." 

For African-American youths, the road was 
even rockier. They were often turned away from a 
door where a white hobo would get a handout; on 
occasion, too, black youths riding the rails in the 
South were threatened with a lynching. 

Danger was a constant companion that could 
turn deadly in an instant. Railroad detectives, called 
"bulls," handled illegal riders savagely. By 1932, the 
Southern Pacific Company reported 683,457 tres- 
passers on its property, 75 percent of these estimat- 
ed to be from sixteen to twenty-five years old. In the 
first ten months of 1932, the Interstate Commerce 
Commission recorded 1,508 trespassers under 
twenty-one killed or injured. 

Minehan completed his research even as the 
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was being es- 
tablished by the Roosevelt administration, the sin- 
gle most vital program to meet the needs of the rov- 
ing army. By July 1933, a quarter of a million young 
men were serving in the CCC in 1,468 forest and 
park camps. The National Youth Administration 
later provided fifty camps that offered job training 
and education for girls. 

Minehan found that desperate as their lives 
were, the child tramps remained defiant: "I can't 
get a job anywhere," said a boy called Texas. "I 
can't get into the CCC because I have no depen- 
dents. I can't remain in any state unless I go to a 
slave camp. What chance have I got? Less chance 
than a man with two wooden legs in a forest fire. 



I've seen a lot of the country in the last year and I'm 
glad I've seen it but if a guy travels too much he be- 
comes a bum, and I don't want to be a bum." 

See Also: CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS, IMPACT 
OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; CIVILIAN 
CONSERVATION CORPS (CCC). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Abbot, Grace. Children's Bureau, Washington, D.C. State- 
ment on Relief for Unemployed Transients. Hearing be- 
fore a Subcommittee of the Committee on Manufac- 
tures on S. 5121, United States Senate, 72nd Cong., 
2nd sess. 

Anderson, Nels. "The luvenile and the Tramp." Journal 
of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Crimi- 
nology. (August 1, 1923): 290-312. 

Carstens, C. C. Child Welfare League of America. State- 
ment on Federal Aid for Unemployment Relief. Hearings 
before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Manufac- 
tures on S5125. United States Senate, 72nd Cong., 
2nd sess. 

Lacy, Alexander. The Soil Soldiers: The Conservation Corps 
in the Great Depression. 1976. 

McMillen, A. Wayne. "An Army of Boys on the Loose." 
The Survey Graphic (September 1933): 389-392. 

Minehan, Thomas. Boy and Girl Tramps of America. 1934. 

Uys, Errol Lincoln. Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move 
During the Great Depression. 1999. 

Errol Lincoln Uys 



BRAIN(S) TRUST 



The Brains Trust was a small group of academics se- 
lected by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his political ad- 
visors to help the Democratic candidate in 1932 in 
his presidential bid. The term was originally coined 
by Louis Howe, a long-time associate of Roosevelt. 
It was later shortened to Brain Trust and made pop- 
ular by New York Times reporter James Kieran. 

Given the complexities of the modern Ameri- 
can economy and the enormity of the Great De- 
pression and its effects, Roosevelt's law partner, 
Sam Rosenman, suggested to the Democratic can- 
didate that he seek the advice of academics in at- 
tempting to deal with the economic issues of the 



I N C Y C L P E D I A OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



115 



B R A I N ( S ) TRUST 



day, a practice Roosevelt had used previously dur- 
ing his governorship of New York. Rosenman re- 
cruited Raymond Moley, a political science profes- 
sor at Columbia University in New York, to help 
Roosevelt organize this academic group. 

Raymond Moley had already worked with Roo- 
sevelt during the Seabury investigation into corrup- 
tion in the New York City government. An expert 
in criminal justice, Moley was to help the candidate 
in political matters and introduce him to other aca- 
demics. After another Roosevelt law partner, Doc 
O'Connor, joined the small group, Moley recruited 
two more Columbia professors: Rexford G. Tugwell 
and Adolf Berle. 

Tugwell was a professor of economics at Co- 
lumbia and a highly prolific author who had written 
on the causes of the Great Depression and Herbert 
Hoover's failure to address the crisis. Tugwell was 
also familiar with the novel approaches being sug- 
gested to resolve America's agricultural problems. 
Adolf Berle was a well known legal expert who 
published with the economist Gardiner Means an 
important work on the modern corporation, The 
Modern Corporation and Private Property (1933). 
Moley, Tugwell, and Berle served as Roosevelt's 
Brains Trust throughout the 1932 campaign. 

The purpose of the Brains Trust was to educate 
Roosevelt on current economic issues, assist in 
speechwriting, and help the candidate formulate 
his own ideas on how to approach and resolve the 
Depression. Although the three academics would 
later follow their own distinctive beliefs and career 
paths, in 1932 they all agreed that big business was 
inevitable, that the Wilsonian approach of breaking 
up corporations into small units was unacceptable, 
that regulation was the key to dealing with big 
business, and that some form of planning in the 
economic sector was necessary. 

Throughout the 1932 campaign, the Brains 
Trust met frequently with Roosevelt. They often re- 
searched topics the candidate needed to know 
about or was embracing, and they helped him draft 
speeches, although Roosevelt typically put his own 
imprint on any speech, sometimes changing the 
wording and content as he delivered it. Moley 
worked with Roosevelt on the "forgotten man" 
speech in April 1932. Moley also helped Roosevelt 



draft a speech delivered in Saint Paul, often referred 
to as the "concert of interest" speech, in which the 
term New Deal was first used. Berle helped Roose- 
velt write the San Francisco Commonwealth Club 
speech, which called for economic planning in the 
future. Tugwell worked on a number of speeches, 
usually writing parts of the draft, especially if the 
speech dealt with agriculture and the domestic al- 
lotment proposal. 

In addition to speech writing, Moley tutored 
Roosevelt on political issues, Tugwell on agricultur- 
al matters, and Berle on finance and corporations. 
Tugwell, for example, worked hard to educate Roo- 
sevelt on domestic allotment, a plan to control farm 
overproduction by paying farmers to not plant 
crops. Although some Democratic leaders disliked 
the idea of professors advising their candidate, 
there was little they could do about it. Roosevelt re- 
lied on his Brains Trust and listened to what they 
had to say, whether or not he incorporated what 
they told him into his speeches or, later, into his 
New Deal programs. Election day marked the offi- 
cial end of the Brains Trust, but not the end of the 
role each member of the group played in Roose- 
velt's administration. 

Of the three, Berle was the only one who chose 
not to accept an official appointment in 1933. Rath- 
er, Berle returned to New York where he advised 
Fiorello La Guardia in his mayoral campaign and 
helped the newly elected mayor address New 
York's financial crisis. Berle continued to help the 
president in a variety of ways, however. For exam- 
ple, he advised Roosevelt on the banking crisis, the 
railroads, and foreign policy, especially concerning 
Latin America and Cuba. 

Raymond Moley was appointed assistant secre- 
tary of state in 1933. Working under Cordell Hull, 
Moley was closely associated with the president. 
Moley advised Roosevelt for the 1933 London Con- 
ference, but Roosevelt seemed to endorse Hull's 
views, rather than Moley's, when he sent his fa- 
mous "bombshell" message to the conference an- 
nouncing his decision to promote American eco- 
nomic nationalism to resolve the economic crisis. 
This announcement so undermined Moley's posi- 
tion that he gradually drifted away from the presi- 
dent. He eventually left the administration and be- 



116 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



R A N D E I S 



LOUIS 



came a magazine editor. Moley's disappointment 
with Roosevelt deepened as time went on, and he 
finally broke openly with the president during the 
1940 campaign. Thereafter, Moley became a consis- 
tent critic of the Roosevelt presidency. 

Rexford Tugwell fared much better. He re- 
mained with Roosevelt after the election, serving as 
an advisor until the inauguration, after which Tug- 
well was officially appointed assistant secretary of 
agriculture under Henry Wallace. Tugwell worked 
diligently in the Department of Agriculture (USDA) 
to implement domestic allotment under the provi- 
sions of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. His clash 
with the director of the Agricultural Adjustment 
Administration, George Peek, and Peek's eventual 
resignation, was seen as a victory for Tugwell, how- 
ever short-lived. Although Peek's replacement, 
Chester Davis, was committed to domestic allot- 
ment, he was also a determined administrator who 
did not tolerate disagreement from subordinates. 
His famous "purge" of liberals in the USDA over 
Southern sharecropping agreements was a direct 
attack on Tugwell. Tugwell was so livid about 
Davis's actions that he threatened to resign from 
the New Deal. Roosevelt convinced him to stay, 
and Tugwell became director of the Resettlement 
Administration (RA) in 1935. Despite his good in- 
tentions and administrative capabilities, Tugwell 
was targeted by the press as a radical and as a threat 
to America. He resigned from the RA in 1936, only 
to return to the administration in 1941 when Roo- 
sevelt appointed him governor of Puerto Rico. For 
the rest of his life and career, Tugwell remained 
loyal to Roosevelt, despite the disappointments he 
felt with Roosevelt and the New Deal after 1936. 

With Tugwell's departure from the administra- 
tion in 1936, all three original members of the 
Brains Trust were gone. Other advisers with aca- 
demic backgrounds and business expertise joined 
the administration, and the term associate member 
of the Brains Trust is sometimes applied to such in- 
dividuals as Hugh Johnson of the National Recov- 
ery Administration (NRA) and Donald Richberg of 
the NRA and the National Economic Council. Later 
advisers like Benjamin Cohen and Thomas Corco- 
ran are also sometimes referred to as Brains Trust- 
ers. In the end, though, the Brains Trust remained 



what it had started out to be — a small advisory 
group of academics who helped Roosevelt in his 
1932 bid for the presidency. 

See Also: BERLE, ADOLF A. JR.; ELECTION OF 1932; 
MOLEY, RAYMOND; TUGWELL, REXFORD G. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Berle, Beatrice Bishop, and Travis B. Jacobs, eds. Navigat- 
ing the Rapids, 1918-1971: From the Papers of Adolf 
Berle. 1973. 

Namorato, Michael V. Rexford G. Tugwell: A Biography. 
1988. 

Rosen, Elliot. Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust: From 
Depression to New Deal. 1977. 

Schwartz, Jordan A. The New Dealers: Power Politics in the 
Age of Roosevelt. 1993. 

Michael V. Namorato 



BRANDEIS, LOUIS D. 



In November 1931, as the American economy was 
sinking into frightening decline, U.S. Supreme 
Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis (November 
13, 1856-October 5, 1941) turned seventy-five. Be- 
hind him was an illustrious career as a prominent 
Boston attorney, a leading reformer active in a 
dozen progressive crusades, a close adviser to 
Woodrow Wilson, and, after 1914, the leader of the 
American Zionist movement. He had been on the 
Supreme Court since 1916, and had earned a repu- 
tation as an eloquent defender of civil liberties, a 
champion of the rights of labor, a supporter of state 
and local prerogatives against centralized federal 
authority, and a bitter foe of "the curse of bigness," 
both in business and in government. By the time of 
the Great Depression he had transcended much of 
the controversy that had characterized his turbulent 
years as a social activist, and he enjoyed nearly uni- 
versal respect and admiration as a wise elder states- 
man. Franklin D. Roosevelt occasionally referred to 
him as "Isaiah." 

His activities during the 1930s centered in three 
general areas. First, he maintained his interest in 
the Zionist project of establishing a Jewish home- 
land in Palestine. He paid close attention to Jewish 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



117 



R E A D L I N E S 



affairs, assiduously studied Palestine develop- 
ments, and grew increasingly worried about British 
policy there. He was one of the earliest to see the 
dangers to Jews in the rise of Adolf Hitler. Second, 
of course, he continued his work on the Supreme 
Court until his resignation in February 1939. Al- 
though he joined in declaring some key New Deal 
measures unconstitutional, he was numbered 
among the Court's liberal wing. One of his most 
significant opinions in this period was in Erie v. 
Tompkins (1938), which limited the authority of fed- 
eral courts and enhanced the judicial authority of 
the states. Although Brandeis admired Roosevelt 
personally, he was opposed to the president's at- 
tempt, in 1937, to "pack" the Supreme Court. 

Finally, Brandeis played an extremely impor- 
tant role in the spirited debates raging around the 
formation of New Deal policy. He did this, in part, 
by utilizing extensive informal channels of influ- 
ence — through Felix Frankfurter and Frankfurter's 
many disciples, through numerous private conver- 
sations with major and minor New Deal officials, 
and even, occasionally, through direct and indirect 
contacts with President Roosevelt himself. Soon 
Brandeis came to be regarded as the symbolic lead- 
er of that wing of New Deal thought that believed 
in imposing limitations on federal authority, avoid- 
ing centralization at the expense of local autonomy, 
and enhancing free market competition rather than 
relying upon federal measures that assumed and 
accepted the inevitability of large-scale production. 
Many historians of this period refer to those in 
Washington who held these views as Brandeisians 
or neo-Brandeisians. 

See Also: BLACK, HUGO; DOUGLAS, WILLIAM O.; 
FRANKFURTER, FELIX; HUGHES, CHARLES 
EVANS; SUPREME COURT. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dawson, Nelson Lloyd. Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurt- 
er, and the New Deal. 1980. 

Purcell, Edward A., Jr. Brandeis and the Progressive Consti- 
tution: Erie, the Judicial Power, and the Politics of the 
Federal Courts in Twentieth-Century America. 2000. 

Strum, Philippa. Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People. 
1984. 



Urofsky, Melvin I., and David W. Levy, eds., The Letters 
of Louis D. Brandeis, Vol. 5: Elder Statesman, 
1921-1941. 1978. 

David W. Levy 



BREADLINES 

Breadlines, in which poverty-stricken and hungry 
Americans queued for free food, were representa- 
tive of the increasing unemployment and conse- 
quent hunger caused by the Depression. Breadlines 
became common in many cities during the 1930s, 
and the sheer numbers of homeless and unem- 
ployed people often overwhelmed the charities that 
were giving out food. Rexford G. Tugwell, a New 
Deal administrator and advisor to Franklin Roose- 
velt, commented in his diary about the pervasive- 
ness of hunger during the Depression: "Never in 
modern times . . . has there been so widespread 
unemployment and such moving distress from cold 
and hunger." 

With the onset of the Great Depression, com- 
panies were forced to cut production and to lay off 
many of their employees. By 1932 there were some 
thirteen million Americans out of work, or one- 
fourth of all workers. Even those who remained 
employed often found their wages and hours 
sharply reduced, and providing adequate food for 
oneself and one's family became a daily struggle for 
many Americans. One oft-repeated story tells of a 
teacher in West Virginia who directed a young girl 
to go home and eat. The girl replied, "I can't. This 
is my sister's day to eat." In New York City one out 
of five children attending school was reported to be 
suffering from malnutrition. And in other areas, 
such as the coal-mining regions of Illinois, Ken- 
tucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, 
thousands of children went hungry. 

Breadlines were thus a necessity during the 
1930s. They were run by private charities, such as 
the Red Cross; private individuals — the gangster Al 
Capone opened a breadline in Chicago; and gov- 
ernment agencies. Breadlines became associated 
with shame and humiliation because many Ameri- 
cans felt responsible for their own downfall. As one 



II! 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



R E A D L I N E S 




A long line of people wait for free food in February 1932 in New York City. Because government relief programs were 
inadequate during the early years of the Depression, private organizations and benefactors often provided the food. Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt Library 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



119 



RIDGES 



A R R Y 



distressed man during the Depression put it: 
"Shame? You tellin' me? I would go stand in the re- 
lief line [and] bend my head low so nobody would 
recognize me." 

See Also: CHARITY; SOUP KITCHENS; UNEM- 
PLOYMENT, LEVELS OF. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bird, Caroline. The Invisible Scar. 1966. 

Garraty, John Arthur. Unemployment in History: Economic 
Thought and Public Policy. 1978. 

Komarovsky, Mirra. The Unemployed Man and His Family: 
The Effect of Unemployment Upon the Status of the Man 
in Fifty-Nine Families. 1940. 

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 
1929-1941, rev. edition. 1993. 

Kim Richardson 



BRIDGES, HARRY 

One of the most successful and radical labor leaders 
in the United States, Harry Bridges (July 28, 
1901-March 30, 1990) was integral to the formation 
of the International Longshoremen's and Ware- 
housemen's Union (ILWU) and a strong voice for 
the left in American labor throughout the Depres- 
sion years and after. 

Born in Australia to middle-class parents, Brid- 
ges became a sailor in his teens, and emigrated to 
San Francisco in 1920, eventually finding work as 
a longshoreman. He had already been exposed to 
the radicalism of the Industrial Workers of the 
World (IWW) while working in Australia, and he 
soon was involved in labor organizing on the San 
Francisco docks. In 1933, Bridges, along with Com- 
munists and other radicals, was at the forefront of 
efforts to rebuild the faded International Long- 
shoremen's Association (ILA). He and other labor 
activists sought to unite all unions in the industry 
into one federation. They proposed changes from 
the top-down leadership structure of previous 
unions, calling for regular union meetings, financial 
accountability for union officers, and a democratic 
constitution that would recognize the voices of 
rank-and-file members. 



In 1934, the newly revived ILA sought to nego- 
tiate a contract that would organize West Coast 
docks. Even after the intervention of President 
Franklin Roosevelt and in the face of opposition 
from the ILA's own president, the union voted to 
strike, shutting down West Coast docks beginning 
on May 9. Tensions during the strike also led to vio- 
lent clashes between protesting workers and police, 
most notably in San Francisco, where a general 
strike ensued. During the strike, Bridges gained a 
reputation as a dedicated organizer and successful 
leader, particularly after employers were forced to 
arbitrate with the union to end the strike. This no- 
toriety also made him a target for anti-labor forces 
who claimed Bridges was a Communist agitator, a 
charge he would deny. Evidence from Soviet ar- 
chives suggests that Bridges was a member of the 
Communist Party in the 1930s. 

After another large strike in 1936, Bridges was 
elected president of the Pacific Coast District of the 
ILA, but the district soon came into conflict with the 
more conservative union leadership. In 1937, the 
district's members voted to join the newly formed 
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and 
they renamed themselves the International Long- 
shoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. With 
Bridges as president, the ILWU was one of the most 
radical unions in the country, engaging in hundreds 
of job actions to improve working conditions and 
retaining a large faction of Communist members. 
With the rise of fascism in the late 1930s, Bridges 
led the ILWU's boycott of Italian and German 
ships, and the union later adopted a "no-strike" 
pledge during World War II in order to support the 
U.S. war effort. 

Bridges's continued radicalism made him the 
target of deportation hearings in the late 1930s, yet 
he remained defiant, even after the ILWU was ex- 
pelled from the CIO in 1950 for supporting its 
Communist membership. Bridges continued as 
president of the ILWU until 1977, remaining politi- 
cally outspoken and ensuring his legacy as one of 
America's most important labor leaders. 

See Also: CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL 

ORGANIZATIONS (CIO); INTERNATIONAL 
LONGSHOREMEN'S ASSOCIATION (ILA); SAN 
FRANCISCO GENERAL STRIKE (1934); STRIKES. 



120 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



R T H E R H D OF SLEEPING CAR PORTERS ( B S ( P ) 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The Harry Bridges Project. Available at: www 
.theharrybridgesproject.org 

Kimmeldorf, Howard. Reds or Rackets? The Making of 
Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. 
1989. 

Larrowe, Charles P. Harry Bridges: The Rise and Tall of 
Radical Labor in the United States. 1972. 

Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Long- 
shoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. 1988. 

Robert Francis Saxe 



more military ("buddy" is a military term for a fel- 
low-soldier) and militant, "Buddy, can you spare a 
dime?" The clear implication is that this powerful, 
embittered man — and "half a million" like him — 
could easily rise up against the political system that 
betrayed them with its "Yankee-Doodle-de-dum." 

After Americana opened on Broadway on Oc- 
tober 5, 1932, a month before the presidential elec- 
tion, reviewers singled out "Brother, Can You Spare 
a Dime?" for praise, and recordings by Bing Crosby 
and other singers made it a hit despite the fact that 
some radio stations downplayed or even banned 
the song. 



"BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A 
DIME?" 

The popular song "Brother, Can You Spare a 
Dime?," which became an anthem of the Great De- 
pression, was written in 1932 by composer Jay 
Gorney and lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg as part of 
a musical score for the satirical revue Americana. 
The revue took its theme from Roosevelt's "Forgot- 
ten Man" speech that launched his first presidential 
campaign by reminding Americans of the men who 
had fought our wars and worked in our factories 
but now were out of work. "Brother, Can You Spare 
a Dime?" was written for a scene in which men in 
soldiers' uniforms form a breadline. 

Gorney's melody starts out in a plaintive minor 
key — an unusual beginning for a Broadway theater 
song — and Harburg's lyric portrays a man who is 
not a pitiful panhandler, but a strong man bewil- 
dered to find himself in a breadline. In the past, he 
says, he has built a railroad and fought bravely in 
war, but now he is outraged to find that he must 
beg for a dime. In the opening verse, he expresses 
his bitterness, "They used to tell me I was building 
a dream," and in the chorus, the main body of the 
song, he recalls how jauntily he and other men 
went off to war, only to find themselves later "slog- 
ging through hell." 

By the end of the song, as the music soars up- 
ward in a crescendo, the singer's request becomes 
ominously threatening as he confronts his listener 
and repeats his request for money, but this time, in- 
stead of addressing him as "brother," he uses the 



See Also: BREADLINES; MUSIC. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Furia, Philip. The Poets of Tin Pan Alley : A History of Amer- 
ica's Great Lyricists. 1990. 

Meyerson, Harold, and Ernie Harburg. Who Put the Rain- 
bow in the Wizard of Oz? Yip Harburg, Lyricist. 1993. 

Wilk, Max. They're Playing Our Song. 1973. 

Philip Furia 



BROTHERHOOD OF SLEEPING 
CAR PORTERS (BSCP) 

Pullman porters worked exclusively on railroad cars 
called Pullman sleeping cars, the brain-child of 
George Mortimer Pullman and the major means of 
transportation used by the wealthy to travel long 
distances before the era of air travel. George Pull- 
man chose recently freed black men for the position 
of porter on his sleeping cars in order to evoke the 
comfort and style slaves had provided for the gentry 
in the antebellum South. By the 1920s, the Pullman 
porter was perhaps the most recognized African 
American in white America, and the Pullman Com- 
pany employed approximately twelve thousand Af- 
rican Americans, making it the largest private em- 
ployer of black men in the United States. In 1925 a 
group of porters, fed up with long hours, low pay, 
and the servile demeanor demanded by the Pull- 
man Company, formed the Brotherhood of Sleep- 
ing Car Porters (BSCP) in New York City, where it 
enjoyed a measure of success. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



121 



R T 



E R H D 



OF SLEEPING 



C A R 



PORTERS 



S C P 



The BSCP's campaign came to a halt when it 
reached Chicago, headquarters of the powerful, 
anti-union Pullman Company and home to more 
than a third of Pullman porters. Through the years 
Pullman executives had cultivated close relation- 
ships with black leaders by pouring money into in- 
stitutions in black Chicago and promoting the 
image of Pullman as a friend not just of workers, 
but the entire community. As a result, the majority 
of black leaders opposed the BSCP. Utilizing a 
community-based strategy, the BSCP set out to win 
the hearts and minds of ministers, the press, and 
politicians who did not appreciate the role labor 
unions could play in the larger black freedom strug- 
gle. By 1929, as significant numbers of black leaders 
began supporting the BSCP and its organizing net- 
works, a pro-labor perspective was taking shape in 
black Chicago. The pro-labor stance increased the 
union's credibility in the eyes of the community and 
increased membership in the union. Shortly there- 
after, fallout from the Depression, which included 
a severe decline in travelers, fewer jobs for porters, 
fewer tips for working porters, and fear associated 
with joining a union during hard times, contributed 
to a decline in BSCP membership. From a high of 
7,300 members in 1927, BSCP membership had 
dropped to 658 by 1933. While some observers de- 
creed that the BSCP had died, union porters 
dubbed the 1929 to 1933 period as the "dark days." 

The union's fate changed through its relation- 
ship with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) 
and the coming of New Deal labor laws. The AFL, 
which granted federal charters to thirteen BSCP lo- 
cals in 1929, provided very little financial assistance, 
but gave the BSCP a platform from which to ad- 
vance its call for greater economic opportunity for 
all black workers. Though the BSCP was reduced to 
a skeleton crew, the Brotherhood carried the gospel 
of unionism deep into the black community during 
the dark days by forging cross-class alliances with 
other groups challenging the racial status quo. Si- 
multaneously, the AFL continued to support racist 
unions while hundreds of thousands of black work- 
ers in steel, meatpacking, and autos were poised for 
organization. 

Questions related to organizing black industrial 
workers erupted at the 1935 AFL convention when 



its leadership, refusing to endorse industrial union- 
ism, set the stage for the emergence of the Con- 
gress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Although 
the BSCP never left the AFL, the strength it had 
gained within the black community by 1935 pushed 
the AFL to grant the BSCP an international charter, 
even as the AFL voted to sustain union color bars 
against thousands of other black workers. 

The BSCP's destiny was also altered by favor- 
able legislation promoted by the federal govern- 
ment. The Amended Railway Labor Act of 1934 
guaranteed railroad workers the legal right of col- 
lective bargaining, placing the National Mediation 
Board at the service of the union during elections. 
Finally, the Brotherhood gained recognition at the 
national level as the voice of all black workers when 
A. Philip Randolph, head of the BSCP, became 
president of the National Negro Congress in 1936. 
In 1937, the BSCP signed a historic labor contract 
with the giant Pullman Company, marking the first 
time representatives from a major American corpo- 
ration negotiated a labor contract with a union of 
black workers. But the larger significance of the 
BSCP's community organizing during the Great 
Depression lay in popularizing unions, thus provid- 
ing an important foundation for widespread union- 
ization of black workers. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; AMERICAN 
FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); NATIONAL 
NEGRO CONGRESS; ORGANIZED LABOR; 
RANDOLPH, A. PHILIP. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Anderson, lervis. A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Por- 
trait. 1973. 

Arnesen, Eric. Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Work- 
ers and the Struggle for Equality. 2001. 

Bates, Beth Tompkins. "A New Crowd Challenges the 
Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 
1933-1945." American Historical Review 102, no. 2 
(1997): 340-377. 

Bates, Beth Tompkins. Pullman Porters and the Rise of Pro- 
test Politics in Black America, 1925-1945. 2001. 

Brazeal, Brailsford Reese. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car 
Porters: Its Origin and Development. 1946. 



122 



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R W D E R 



EARL 



Harris, William H. Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, 
Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car 
Porters, 1925-1937. 1977. 

Beth Tompkins Bates 



BROWDER, EARL 



Earl Russell Browder (May 20, 1891-June 27, 1973) 
led the American Communist Party (CPUSA) to its 
greatest size and influence during the Great De- 
pression and World War II. Meanwhile, he was re- 
cruiting and directing, with a degree of autonomy, 
spies for the Russian secret police and Soviet mili- 
tary intelligence. 

Browder, the eighth of ten children, was born 
to Kansas parents who had lost their homestead to 
drought, disease, and debt. Earl's disabled father, 
William, and his homemaker mother, Margaret, 
taught populism, socialism, and anticlericalism to 
their offspring. Poverty forced the boys to leave ele- 
mentary school. Earl drifted through left-wing 
movements, most notably the Kansas City book- 
keepers and accountants' union and the Socialist 
Party. His opposition to World War I caused him to 
be imprisoned for a time in Leavenworth Peniten- 
tiary. There he read about the Russian Revolution, 
and became a dedicated Marxist-Leninist. He en- 
tered the Communist Party at mid-level, organizing 
an American delegation to the first Congress of the 
Red International of Labor Unions, held in Moscow 
in 1921. Known by its Russian abbreviation, Profin- 
tern, and subordinate to the Communist Interna- 
tional (Comintern), it had its own staff, funds, and 
networks in foreign countries. In mid-decade, 
Browder became intimate with Raissa Lu- 
ganovskaya, a Profintern attorney and former com- 
missar of justice in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov 
during the Russian Civil War. She helped him land 
a position organizing illegal trade unions to resist 
China's right-wing government. The post gave 
Browder undercover experience that served him 
well. After Soviet leader Joseph Stalin removed 
CPUSA head Jay Lovestone in 1930, Browder be- 
came part of a three-person leadership that also in- 
cluded William Z. Foster and William W. Wein- 



stone. There Browder proved a vicious infighter; 
after Foster was debilitated by a heart attack in 
1932, Browder won firm control of the CPUSA. 

Browder soon championed the Popular Front 
policy, directed by Moscow. Between 1933 and 
1939, his CPUSA called for antifascist unity and 
supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New 
Deal. Browder painted the Communists as heirs to 
American radical traditions, at the very time when 
the CPUSA was changing from a sect of immigrants 
to a party of ethnic and black Americans. It includ- 
ed 82,000 members and influenced many times that 
number. Browder even achieved a degree of auton- 
omy in domestic politics, with Soviet approval. Yet 
as early as 1933, he had begun building an espio- 
nage network among federal employees. 

The 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact killed the Popular 
Front and left the CPUSA morally bankrupt. When 
Germany invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941, 
Browder led the charge back to vigorous antifas- 
cism. The CPUSA regained members and Browder 
came to see himself as an independent Communist 
leader. After Stalin dissolved the Comintern to pla- 
cate the West, Browder propounded his Teheran 
Thesis, arguing that the wartime conference of 
United States, British, and Soviet leaders in Iran 
signified the acceptance of Communism as a per- 
manent force in the world. At home, big business 
could play a role in defeating fascism and extending 
prosperity into the postwar era. He also reconstitut- 
ed the CPUSA as the Communist Political Associa- 
tion, a nonpartisan leftist lobby. This action consti- 
tuted a grave heresy because it violated V.I. Lenin's 
concept of the vanguard role of the Communist 
Party set forth in 1903. Once victory in Europe be- 
came certain, the Soviets engineered Browder's re- 
moval and took his espionage agents. When he 
died not one Communist newspaper in the world 
printed his obituary. 

See Also: COMMUNIST PARTY; FOSTER, WILLIAM Z. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. Venona: Decoding 
Soviet Espionage in America. 1999. 

Isserman, Maurice. Which Side Were You On? The Ameri- 
can Communist Party during the Second World War. 
1982. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



123 



S C P 



Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism: The 
Depression Decade. 1984. 

Ryan, James G. Earl Browder: The Tailure of American 
Communism. 1997. 

Weinstein, Allen, and Alexander Vassiliev. The Haunted 
Wood: Soviet Espionage in America — the Stalin Era. 
1999. 

James G. Ryan 



BSCP. See BROTHERHOOD OF SLEEPING CAR 
PORTERS. 



BUNCHE, RALPH 



Ralph Bunche (August 7, 1904-December 9, 1971) 
was the first black to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He 
received the honor in 1950 for his efforts on behalf 
of the United Nations (UN) in negotiating a truce 
between Egypt and Israel. He eventually became 
undersecretary-general of the UN. In the late 
1960s, radical activists accused Bunche of ignoring 
domestic civil rights concerns, but in the 1930s 
Bunche had been a leading intellectual radical who 
attempted to steer civil rights groups in a new, ac- 
tivist direction that directly addressed black and 
white working class needs. 

Bunche received his B.A. degree from the Uni- 
versity of California, Los Angeles, and his M.A. and 
Ph.D. from Harvard University. Before he had com- 
pleted his doctorate, Howard University hired 
Bunche as an instructor, and he organized and 
chaired the school's political science department. In 
1934, when Bunche completed his dissertation on 
colonial governance in Africa, he became the first 
black American to earn the Ph.D. in political sci- 
ence. 

When Bunche started working at Howard Uni- 
versity his liberal political views became more radi- 
cal and pronounced. He called upon the National 
Association for the Advancement of Colored Peo- 
ple (NAACP) to abandon its legalistic civil rights re- 
form strategy for one that was dedicated to building 
an interracial workers' alliance. He argued that sup- 
porting class politics and instituting dramatic eco- 



nomic reform were the keys to solving blacks' sec- 
ond-class status. He publicly claimed the New Deal 
was a "raw deal" for blacks, and he openly worked 
with communists and socialists in organizing the 
National Negro Congress (NNC). The NNC, estab- 
lished in 1936, sought to build a coalition of organi- 
zations dedicated to solving the "Negro problem" 
through a new class politics. The same year, Bunche 
published A World View of Race, an aggressive cri- 
tique of the imperialist and capitalist roots of rac- 
ism. 

Bunche's public political stances began to soft- 
en as fascism spread across Europe and as the Unit- 
ed States became increasingly involved in the Allied 
war effort. He broke from the NNC when he con- 
cluded that it had become a tool of the Soviet 
Union. Due to his expertise in African affairs, the 
federal government hired Bunche as an African and 
Far East affairs analyst for what would become the 
Office of Strategic Services. He would later work for 
the State Department and then the UN. 

Before he moved into the government, howev- 
er, Bunche played a central role in the production 
of one of the most important social science surveys 
of black life in the United States: An American Di- 
lemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy 
(1944). This study, directed by Swedish economist 
Gunnar Myrdal, became the cornerstone of liberal 
ideology on race issues for much of the civil rights 
era. As Myrdal's assistant, Bunche supervised nu- 
merous other researchers and produced several 
thousand pages (collected in four long "memos") of 
analysis of black political development in the 
South, black betterment organizations, and black 
leadership. One of these memoranda, The Political 
Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, was published 
posthumously in 1973. 

See Also: HOWARD UNIVERSITY; NATIONAL 

ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF 
COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP); SOCIAL SCIENCE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Henry, Charles P. Ralph J. Bunche: Model Negro or Ameri- 
can Other? 1999. 

Holloway, Jonathan Scott. Confronting the Veil: Abram 
Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 
1919-1941. 2002. 



IZ*. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



S I N E S S M E N 



Urquhart, Brian. Ralph Bundle: An American Life. 1993. 

Jonathan Scott Holloway 

BURNS AND ALLEN. See HUMOR; RADIO. 

BUSINESSMEN 

Businessmen reached new levels of unpopularity 
during the 1930s. Following the prosperity of the 
1920s, the stock market crash of 1929 punctuated 
the end of the "New Era" in dramatic fashion. By 
1932, the nation's gross national product had 
dropped 33 percent, nearly 25 percent of workers 
had been thrown out of work, and the prices of 
most goods were cut in half. Business executives 
who had been seen as enlightened captains of in- 
dustry, responsible for much of capitalism's ad- 
vances during the years following the end of World 
War I, were soon perceived as responsible for capi- 
talism's collapse. Some, such as utility magnate 
Samuel Insull, fled the country as their corporate 
empires collapsed around them. In 1933 and 1934, 
the Senate Banking and Currency Committee, led 
by chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora, questioned 
leading businessmen and financiers, including J. P. 
Morgan, Charles Mitchell, Winthrop Aldrich, and 
Thomas W. Lamont, about their practices. Morgan 
acknowledged that he had (legally) avoided paying 
any income tax in 1930, 1931, and 1932, while oth- 
ers, such as Mitchell, eventually faced criminal 
charges for their actions. The legitimacy of capital- 
ism, itself, was increasingly called into question. 

Businessmen reacted to this social, political, 
and economic crisis, and to subsequent New Deal 
policy measures, in different ways and in ways that 
changed over time. To speak of "businessmen" as 
an unchanging monolith does injustice to the com- 
plexity of the historical record. It is, however, possi- 
ble to make some generalizations. In reacting to the 
Great Depression and the coming of the New Deal, 
businessmen drew on the intellectual currents that 
had been popular during the 1920s and earlier. 
They at first welcomed the election of President 
Franklin Roosevelt, and cautiously looked to the 



federal government to provide stability and legiti- 
mize the "associational" activities that antitrust 
laws had long prevented. By 1935, however, many 
businessmen were frustrated with the New Deal. 
Although there were exceptions, businessmen gen- 
erally opposed New Deal measures designed to in- 
crease the bargaining power of organized labor, 
provide public works projects, create unemploy- 
ment insurance and old-age insurance, and regu- 
late wages and hours. Businessmen could usually 
be counted as reliable supporters of a balanced fed- 
eral budget, and as vociferous opponents of mea- 
sures designed to increase federal revenues, such as 
Roosevelt's call to "soak the rich" with income tax 
increases. Efforts to regulate the nation's banks and 
financial markets, such as the 1933 Glass-Steagall 
Banking Act and the creation of the Securities and 
Exchange Commission, were also greeted with dis- 
dain by most businessmen. With the coming of 
World War II, though, New Dealers and business- 
men achieved a rapprochement of sorts. 

THE EARLY NEW DEAL AND THE NATIONAL 
RECOVERY ADMINISTRATION 

During the 1920s, a number of businessmen 
and politicians, including such figures as George 
Perkins, Frank Munsey, and Herbert Hoover, 
championed the idea of business cooperation. 
Through voluntary organizations, such as trade as- 
sociations, businesses could attempt to plan pro- 
duction, develop and implement codes of conduct, 
and avoid competing on price. These anticompeti- 
tive practices grew in part out of measures devel- 
oped in World War I to regulate wartime produc- 
tion, but they also expanded on the popular notion 
of the "business commonwealth." Thanks to en- 
lightened planning, supporters of the business 
commonwealth assumed, business could coordi- 
nate the economy and capitalism in such a way as 
to ensure prosperity and stability for all firms. 
Greater efficiencies would smooth out the business 
cycle's oscillations, minimizing unemployment and 
delivering a wider selection of goods to consumers. 

In developing the National Industrial Recovery 
Act (NIRA) in 1933, New Dealers explicitly drew on 
associational activities in their effort to end the eco- 
nomic depression. Businessmen welcomed Title I of 
the NIRA, which suspended the nation's antitrust 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



125 



S I N E S S M E N 



laws and called for business to participate in draft- 
ing codes of conduct that would govern competitive 
practices. Organizations such as the American Bar 
Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 
supported this idea, and even the National Associa- 
tion of Manufacturers offered a lukewarm endorse- 
ment of the policy. Bernard Baruch and Hugh John- 
son, both of whom had served on the War 
Industries Board during World War I, backed the 
NIRA, as did such leading businessmen as Gerard 
Swope, Henry Dennison, and Charles Abbot. Many 
of these individuals helped participate in the actual 
drafting of the legislation, and Hugh Johnson was 
placed in charge of the National Recovery Adminis- 
tration (NRA), which emerged from this work. The 
NRA not only reflected ideas about efficiency, plan- 
ning, and competition that dated back to thinkers 
such as Thornstein Veblen and Frederick W. Taylor, 
it also found favor with such New Dealers as Rex- 
ford Tugwell. Although reluctant to trust business- 
men, New Dealers saw in the NRA the possibility 
for the state to counter business's power by cham- 
pioning the interests of consumers, farmers, and 
labor. In practice, however, the codes of competi- 
tion that were drafted under the NRA reflected the 
power and interests of larger businesses. In sectors 
as diverse as cotton textiles, steel, lumber, petrole- 
um, and automobiles, for example, the NRA codes 
served to put in place government-sanctioned car- 
tels, largely achieving big business's goals while 
minimizing the influence of consumers and labor. 
As time passed, the NRA's popularity waned. By 
the time the Supreme Court declared Title I of the 
NIRA an unconstitutional use of federal power in 
Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States, the 
NRA had few remaining supporters. 

BUSINESS AND THE NEW DEAL, 1935-1939 

While businessmen initially looked to the New 
Deal to provide economic stability, they found most 
of Roosevelt's political agenda unpalatable. They 
were particularly upset by the New Deal's commit- 
ment to organized labor. Section 7(a) of NIRA's 
Title I, though, which enshrined the right of orga- 
nized labor to collectively bargain with employers, 
was initially met with guarded acceptance by the 
business community. Businesses located in north- 
ern, higher-wage environments generally assumed 



that it would improve their competitiveness relative 
to their southern counterparts, or simply accepted 
its inclusion as a price to be paid for the suspension 
of antitrust laws. When NIRA's Title I was struck 
down in Schechter, stronger protections for workers' 
rights to organize were incorporated into the lan- 
guage of the National Labor Relations Act, which 
became law in 1935 despite vigorous opposition 
from many business organizations. Business oppo- 
sition to the Social Security Act of 1935, while no- 
ticeable, was somewhat less intense, in part be- 
cause a number of firms characterized by welfare 
capitalism saw Social Security as a way to, in effect, 
transfer these sorts of programs to the federal gov- 
ernment. 

Measures such as the Fair Labor Standards Act 
of 1938 were also passed by Congress despite ob- 
jections from businessmen and firms concerned 
about further government encroachment into what 
they declared was their right to manage labor rela- 
tions as they saw fit. These issues were particularly 
salient in the steel, auto, and mining industries, 
where such businessmen as Myron Taylor of U.S. 
Steel and Alfred Sloan of General Motors confront- 
ed labor leaders like John L. Lewis and Walter Reu- 
ther. Such events as the 1936 to 1937 Flint sit-down 
strike and the 1937 Memorial Day massacre outside 
of Republic Steel in Chicago graphically demon- 
strated the high stakes of the conflict between labor 
and business, driving home to businessmen the im- 
portance of trying to shape public policy and public 
opinion. This effort had taken a number of forms 
throughout the Great Depression, but one of the 
most prominent organizations to emerge was the 
American Liberty League, founded in 1934 with fi- 
nancial backing from the DuPont family. Along 
with the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, the National 
Association of Manufacturers, and a number of 
other organizations, the American Liberty League 
led the public relations effort against President 
Roosevelt and the New Deal. It opposed deficit 
spending by the federal government, objected to 
Roosevelt's court-packing plan, and tried to influ- 
ence the rewriting of the federal tax code. 

Although businessmen had little success in re- 
habilitating their public image during the 1930s, 
with the coming of war they found a new chance 



1Z6 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



Y R D 



A R R Y 



to recapture the public's trust and respect. Many 
businessmen took a leave of absence from their pri- 
vate-sector employment in order to work for such 
new government bodies as the War Production 
Board, becoming "dollar-a-year men" (so named 
because, while retaining their private salaries, they 
took only minimal compensation from the govern- 
ment). While working for the government, they 
drew upon their expertise to advance the war effort. 
Investment banker Ferdinand Eberstadt, for exam- 
ple, developed and implemented the Controlled 
Materials Plan, which solved many of America's 
wartime production problems by controlling the al- 
location of copper, aluminum, and steel. After con- 
verting automobile production facilities to the 
building of airplanes, the United States managed to 
produce nearly 300,000 aircraft during the war, eas- 
ily trumping the productivity of the other comba- 
tant nations. By the time the war ended, business- 
men had made some strides in changing public 
opinion. By 1953, for example, David Lilienthal, a 
staunch New Dealer, published Big Business: A New 
Era, a glowing account of big business and its place 
in American society. 

See Also: AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE; BANKING 
PANICS (1930-1933); BARUCH, BERNARD; 
CAUSES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION; 
JOHNSON, HUGH; MORGAN, J.P., JR.; 
NATIONAL RECOVERY ADMINISTRATION (NRA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in 
America, 1920-1935. 1994. 

Hawley, Ellis W. The New Deal and the Problem of Monop- 
oly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence. 1966. Reprint, 
1995. 

Leff, Mark H. The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal 
and Taxation, 1933-1939. 1984. 

McCraw, Thomas K. American Business, 1920-2000: How 
It Worked. 2000. 

Jason Scott Smith 



BYRD, HARRY 

Senator Harry Flood Byrd (June 10, 1887-October 
20, 1966) led the Democratic Party political ma- 



chine in Virginia. According to historian James T. 
Patterson, Byrd was one of the "irreconcilable 
Democrats," who voted against the New Deal be- 
ginning as early as 1935. He opposed the Franklin 
Roosevelt administration 65 percent of the time; 
only Senator Carter Glass, also from Virginia, op- 
posed the New Deal more. Byrd became a signifi- 
cant member of the Republican-Democratic con- 
gressional coalition that emerged to oppose the 
New Deal by 1938. 

Born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and raised 
in Winchester, Virginia, Byrd was the scion of 
prominent Virginia families. He traced his lineage 
to the William Byrds, who had helped to settle colo- 
nial Virginia. Harry Byrd, however, downplayed his 
distinguished ancestry and preferred to think of 
himself as a "self-made" man. He left school at age 
fifteen to take over his father's bankrupt newspa- 
per, the Winchester Evening Star. Byrd also began 
to invest in apple orchards, eventually becoming 
one of the largest apple producers in the country. 

Both his father, Richard, and his maternal 
uncle, Henry Flood, were active in state politics, 
and they encouraged Byrd to run for office. Byrd's 
uncle was one of the key architects and leaders of 
the Democratic Party political machine, known 
simply as the "Organization." As his uncle's pro- 
tege, Byrd served in the state legislature from 1916 
to 1925, and became chairman of the state Demo- 
cratic Party upon his uncle's death. By the mid- 
19203, Byrd had risen to lead the Organization. Effi- 
cient management and a restricted electorate as- 
sured the political success of Byrd and his favored 
candidates for state offices. Elected governor in 
1926, Byrd reorganized the state government in an 
effort to eliminate waste and inefficiency. A fiscal 
conservative, Byrd earned a reputation for himself 
as a progressive. He focused on maintaining a bal- 
anced state budget, keeping state taxes low, and 
providing few social services. 

In 1933, Byrd was appointed to the Senate 
when Claude Swanson joined Roosevelt's cabinet. 
Facing reelection in 1934, Byrd supported President 
Roosevelt and the New Deal programs. Yet, as a fis- 
cal conservative, he voiced his concerns about the 
rapid expansion and reckless spending of the feder- 
al government. A champion of self-help, Byrd as- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



127 



Y R N E S 



AMES 



serted that government work relief programs un- 
dermined individual character. Moreover, the New 
Deal, popular with both blacks and whites in Vir- 
ginia, threatened to disrupt the political and social 
control of the Byrd machine. By 1935, Byrd openly 
opposed Roosevelt's policies, voting against the 
Wagner Labor Relations Act and Social Security. 
He secured an amendment to the Social Security 
Act that allowed states to determine how much aid 
they would contribute to the program. Through his 
influence, Virginia was the last state to join the pro- 
gram in 1938. Moreover, in 1936, at Byrd's urging, 
the Senate created a Select Committee to Investi- 
gate Executive Agencies of the Government and 
appointed Byrd chair. Throughout his career in the 
Senate, which lasted until his retirement in 1965, 
Byrd consistently criticized federal government ex- 
pansion, large federal expenditures, and deficit 
spending. 

See Also: CONSERVATIVE COALITION; DEMOCRATIC 
PARTY; GLASS, CARTER; NEW DEAL. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Heinemann, Ronald L. Depression and New Deal in Vir- 
ginia: The Enduring Dominion. 1983. 

Heinemann, Ronald L. Harry Byrd of Virginia. 1996. 

Patterson, James L. Congressional Conservatism and the 
New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in 
Congress, 1933-1939. 1967. 

Larissa M. Smith 



BYRNES, JAMES F. 

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, of Irish Catho- 
lic parents, James Francis Byrnes (May 2, 
1879-April 9, 1972) matured into the most influen- 
tial southerner in the Depression-era Senate. 
Raised by his mother, a dress maker, and his mater- 
nal grandmother, the young Byrnes received a pa- 
rochial school education and became a full-time 
clerk for a Charleston law firm at the age of four- 
teen. He studied law independently, and was ad- 
mitted to the South Carolina bar in 1904. In 1910 
Byrnes won South Carolina's second district by 
fifty-seven votes and entered the U.S. House of 



Representatives. Dark haired and sharp featured, 
the young politician possessed an encompassing 
public persona that shielded a skillful, sly mind and 
an industrious spirit. 

Intent on maintaining white supremacy, South 
Carolina's minority of Protestant white males con- 
trolled Byrnes' electoral base, which had suffered 
since 1876 from corrosive race baiting. Although 
Byrnes could have appeal to racial prejudices, he 
preferred to campaign on economic and social im- 
provement platforms. He supported Woodrow Wil- 
son's World War I administration and the forma- 
tion of the League of Nations. He met Franklin 
Roosevelt at the 1912 Democratic convention, and 
during the Wilson years Byrnes benefited from 
Roosevelt's friendship. Byrnes refused to join the 
Ku Klux Klan and, in 1924, ran unsuccessfully for 
the Senate against the demagogic Coleman L. 
"Coley" Blease. Six years later, with the help of a 
new friend, Bernard Baruch, and the growing eco- 
nomic crisis, Byrnes defeated Blease. 

Upon his nomination for president, Franklin 
Roosevelt drew politically shrewd Byrnes into the 
"Brains Trust," and the two men sustained a warm 
relationship throughout the 1930s. Possessing such 
confidants as Carter Glass, Joseph Robinson, and 
Byron "Pat" Harrison, Byrnes emerged as a key leg- 
islative leader for much New Deal legislation. Con- 
vinced that the Depression's origins lay at home, 
Byrnes opted for a planned economy. He partici- 
pated as a calculating compromiser to help create 
the Emergency Banking Act, the Farm Credit Act, 
the Homeowners' Loan Act, the 1933 Economy 
Act, and such agencies as the Agriculture Adjust- 
ment Administration, the Civilian Conservation 
Corps, and the National Recovery Administration. 
As a member of the Senate conference committee 
Byrnes also forged understandings that facilitated 
the establishment of the Securities and Exchange 
Commission in 1934. 

Byrnes used work relief funds from the Public 
Works and the Works Progress Administrations 
(WPA) to alter the face of South Carolina. He sided 
with veterans to override a presidential veto of a 
bonus bill. Driven by the race-based politics of his 
constituency, he fought in 1935 the Wagner- 
Costigan proposal, a federal anti-lynching bill. Al- 



128 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



V R N E S 



JAMES 




James Francis Byrnes, 1943. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FS A/OWI Collection 



though Byrnes was ill during passage of such 1935 
reforms as the National Labor Relations Act, the 
Eccles Banking Act, the Revenue Act, the Public 
Utilities Holding Company Act, and the Social Se- 
curity Act, he nonetheless endorsed them on the 
basis that these new laws would benefit South Car- 
olinians. In 1936 he easily won reelection to the 
Senate. 

In 1937 Byrnes joined Roosevelt's attempt to 
reorganize the court system. Despite the alarm of 
many wealthy South Carolinians, Byrnes under- 
stood that the average voter preferred reform. 
When the reform effort failed, Byrnes bemoaned 
the political errors that prevented passage. Byrnes' 
votes against the Fair Labor Standards and Child 
Labor Acts also had their roots in the South Caroli- 



na electorate and the increasingly urban tilt of the 
New Deal. Concurrently, his resistance to extension 
of the WPA was also rooted in the concerns of rural 
precincts where the agency's wage scales drew 
away labor and earned cotton growers' wrath. 
Byrnes actions were further shaped by his belief 
that the Depression was by this time lifting. After 
telling Roosevelt that he would stand with his 
friends, he supported conservative senators Walter 
George, Millard Tydings, Guy Gillette, and Ellison 
D. Smith when Roosevelt attempted to purge them 
from the Congress in 1938. Yet, Byrnes also helped 
reelect such New Dealers as Florida's Claude Pep- 
per and Alabama's Lister Hill. While pundits 
claimed these actions marked a break with Roose- 
velt, the South Carolinian had refused to sign the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



1Z9 



Y R N E S 



AMES 



southern Conservative Manifesto authored by Josi- 
ah Bailey, who touted a conservative opposition to 
the course of the New Deal. Byrnes endorsed the 

1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act, composed the 

1939 Administrative Reorganization Law, and 
managed the refunding of the WPA. 

After trips to Japan and Germany in the mid- 
1930s, Byrnes feared future aggression. In 1938 he 
urged the Roosevelt administration to accept Jew- 
ish emigres from Nazi persecution, and, as chair of 
the Navy appropriations subcommittee, he sup- 
ported the expansion and increased preparedness 
of the U.S. Navy. Byrnes was appointed an asso- 
ciate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1941, but 
he resigned that post in 1942 to serve as Roosevelt's 
director of the economic stability. He later served as 
secretary of state from 1945 to 1947 during the Tru- 
man administration and as governor of South Car- 
olina from 1951 to 1955. 



See Also: BRAIN(S) TRUST; ISOLATIONISM; SOUTH, 
GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Byrnes, James Francis. All in One Lifetime. 1958. 

Byrnes, James Francis. Papers. Clemson University Spe- 
cial Collections. Clemson, South Carolina. 

Byrnes, James Francis. Speaking Frankly. 1947. 
Hayes, Jack Irby, Jr. South Carolina and the New Deal. 
2001. 

Moore, Winfred B., Jr. "New South Statesman: Lhe Polit- 
ical Career of James Francis Byrnes, 1911-1941." 
Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976. 

More, Winfred B., Jr. "'Soul of the South': James F. 
Byrnes and the Racial Issues in American Politics, 
1911-1941." The Proceedings of the South Carolina 
Historical Association (1978): 42-52. 

Morgan, Lhomas S. "James F. Byrnes and the Politics of 
Segregation." Historian 56 (summer 1994): 645-654. 

Robertson, David. Sly and Able: A Political Biography of 
James F. Byrnes. 1994. 

Henry C. Ferrell, Jr. 



130 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 




CAGNEY, JAMES 



Born in New York City, James Cagney (July 17, 
1899-March 30, 1986) was the son of an Irish bar- 
tender and his Norwegian wife. After graduating 
from Stuyvesant High School, Jimmy Cagney at- 
tended Columbia University. His show business ca- 
reer began in 1918 when he appeared in local 
vaudeville revues. This work led to his first role in 
a major Broadway show Fitter Fatter in 1920. After 
an unsuccessful visit to Hollywood in 1922, Cagney 
danced with his wife, Frances Willard "Billie" Ver- 
non, on the vaudeville circuit in New York. Cagney 
won critical notice for small stage roles and by 1929 
he was a star on Broadway. 

Cagney's movie career began with the Warner 
Brothers musical Sinner's Holiday (1930). The cocky 
redhead from the Lower East Side and Yorkville 
neighborhoods quickly became a movie star in the 
1930s, often playing a fast-talking Irish-American 
tough guy. His roles in Public Enemy (1931) and 
Smart Money (1931) helped establish the gangster 
movie genre. Cagney was handsome, athletic, and 
versatile; his experience as a dancer was evident in 
his unique body movement and dynamic screen 
presence. But his ironic wit and comic talent led to 
a wide variety of roles, including those in Blonde 
Crazy (1931) and Taxi (1932). 



Discontented with the Hollywood studio sys- 
tem, the independent New Yorker left Los Angeles 
for six months while renegotiating his contract in 
1931. With his salary doubled, Cagney was one of 
the first Irish-American actors to achieve megastar 
status playing urban antiheroes. He had leading 
roles in nineteen films in the next four years. De- 
pression-era audiences were charmed by the feisty 
big city wise guy in such hit movies as Winner Take 
All (1932), Hard to Handle (1933), Lady Killer (1933), 
and Jimmy the Gent (1934). His performance in Foot- 
light Parade (1933) was among his most memorable. 
In this movie he played a light-footed Broadway 
stage director confronting the competition of talk- 
ing motion pictures. Cagney danced and sang in 
three Busby Berkeley production numbers and was 
featured in the film's tribute to the National Recov- 
ery Administration, reminding Depression-weary 
viewers how much they depended on President 
Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its lavish budget and strong 
supporting cast distinguished Footlight Parade from 
most of the Hollywood dream factory movies 
Cagney made in the 1930s. 

Cagney's performance in Comes the Navy (1934) 
helped that picture earn an Academy Award nomi- 
nation for best picture, but many of his movies in 
the 1930s were less memorable. When Cagney 
teamed with his friend Pat O'Brien in nine movies, 
however, the Irish-American pair delighted audi- 



131 



C A G N E Y 



AMES 




James Cagney (second from right) as the gangster Tom Powers in the 1931 William Wellman film The Public Enemy. John 
Springer Collection/CORBIS 



ences with their wit and energy. The restless 
Cagney left Warner Brothers in 1935 to work with 
independent film companies but returned to earn 
his first nomination as best actor in Angels with 
Dirty Faces (1938). Among the best roles he played 
in the 1930s was his part as a Prohibition racketeer 
in The Roaring Twenties (1939). 

While Cagney was often described as cocky or 
pugnacious, his movie star qualities were more dif- 
ficult to define. Perfectly suited for the hard times 
of the thirties, he possessed a gritty character with 
clipped speech and restless body language that mo- 
viegoers found irresistible. His political conscious- 
ness, as a founder of the Screen Actors Guild, his 



criticism of Jack Warner's studio system, and his 
being a subject of a HUAC investigation in the late 
1930s and 1940s, also suited the times. 

James Cagney made more than ninety movies 
in his long and productive career, but he is best re- 
membered for his tough guy roles in the fifty mov- 
ies he made from 1930 to 1940. He retired to Mar- 
tha's Vineyard in 1961 and received the American 
Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1974. He 
died on March 30, 1986, at his farm in Stanfordville, 
New York. 

See Also: BERKELEY, BUSBY; HOLLYWOOD AND THE 
FILM INDUSTRY. 



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BIBLIOGRAPHY 

McCabe, John. Cagney. 1997. 

Schickel, Richard. James Cagney: A Celebration. 1985. 
Sklar, Robert. City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield. 1992. 

Peter C. Holloran 



CAHILL, HOLGER 

Holger Cahill (January 13, 1887-July 8, 1960) was 
national director of the Federal Art Project of the 
Works Project Administration (WPA) from its in- 
ception in 1935 to its termination in 1943. Born 
Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarsson, Cahill was the child of 
parents who immigrated to North Dakota from Ice- 
land. He spent most his adolescence in a variety of 
manual jobs from Winnipeg to Shanghai before 
settling in New York City, where his connections 
with the arts community led him into journalism. 
He began taking courses at Columbia University 
and, from 1922, working for the Newark Museum 
in New Jersey, where he organized major exhibi- 
tions of American folk art. In 1932 Cahill became 
acting director of the New York City's Museum of 
Modern Art, for which he arranged an exhibition 
entitled "American Folk Art: The Art of the Com- 
mon Man in America, 1750-1900." A prolific author 
and a respected authority on art, Cahill rejected 
conventional distinctions between "fine" and 
"folk" art, and he idealized the antebellum period 
when, he believed, the arts and society had been to- 
tally integrated through universal practice. Federal 
service provided Cahill with the opportunity to re- 
store the arts to "the people," both as producers 
and consumers. 

While the provision of relief for destitute artists 
was the Federal Art Project's principal function, 
Cahill sought to recover the "American culture pat- 
tern" in both the scope and diversity of its pro- 
grams. This involved the promotion and dispersion 
of art throughout the nation. Art projects were es- 
tablished in thirty-eight states and the Federal Art 
Project employed some ten thousand artists who 
produced 128,000 murals, easel paintings, and 
sculptures and 240,000 prints that decorated 
schools, libraries, and other public buildings. The 



sheer scale of the project was complemented by its 
variety. There were four dimensions to the Federal 
Art Project's work involving the promotion of cre- 
ative art, art education, community service, and re- 
search. Almost 50 percent of its personnel were en- 
gaged in creative art, and the Federal Art Project 
assisted painters who would later become interna- 
tionally renowned, including Jackson Pollock, Mark 
Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Approximately, 
25 percent of the Federal Art Project's workforce 
was involved in establishing 103 art centers that of- 
fered art classes in twenty-three subjects. Travelling 
exhibits and "Art Weeks" brought art to a wider 
public. 

Cahill also oversaw the recording of an Ameri- 
can vernacular tradition. The Index of American 
Design employed five hundred workers in thirty- 
five states and compiled 22,000 plates of textiles, 
furniture, ceramics, and other artifacts. For Cahill, 
the masses were crucial to the nation's art re- 
sources, and in 1939 he organized the "Contempo- 
rary Unknown American Painters" exhibition at the 
Museum of Modern Art. In contrast to his counter- 
part, Edward Bruce, who headed the Treasury De- 
partment's Section of Fine Arts, Cahill did not dis- 
criminate against the avant-garde, and major 
commissions were given to artists such as Stuart 
Davis and Arshile Gorky. 

The WPA was a complex organization, and 
much of Cahill's work as director was consumed by 
administrative matters, such as liaison with state 
authorities, negotiations with unions, and political 
lobbying. Dependent upon annual congressional 
appropriations, the existence of the Federal Art 
Project was precarious and liable to the kind of 
swingeing budget cuts that occurred in 1936 and 
1937. Cahill understood that the Federal Art Project 
was vulnerable because its per capita costs were 70 
percent higher than for manual workers in the 
WPA, and his efforts to maintain the project in the 
face of widespread criticism required him, at times, 
to work a nineteen-hour day. When Congress abol- 
ished Federal One in 1939 and turned responsibility 
for the remaining arts projects to states, Cahill re- 
mained in a coordinating role, although he became 
less influential. If his vision for the integration of 
the arts and society was not fully realized, his efforts 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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CALDWELL 



E R S K I N E 



provided relief for thousands of artists and nurtured 
those artists who would form the vanguard of ab- 
stract expressionism in the postwar era. After the 
termination of the federal art project in 1943, Cahill 
returned to New York City to concentrate on writ- 
ing fiction. 

See Also: ART; FEDERAL ART PROJECT (FAP); 
FEDERAL ONE; WORKS PROGRESS 
ADMINISTRATION (WPA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cahill, Holger, and Alfred Barr, Jr., eds. Art in America: 

A Complete Survey. 1935. 
Contreras, Belisario R. Tradition and Innovation in New 

Deal Art. 1983. 
Mavigliano, George J., and Richard A. Lawson. The Ted- 

eral Art Project in Illinois, 1935-1943. 1990. 
McDonald, William F. Tederal Relief Administration and 

the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the 

Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration. 

1969. 
McKinzie, Richard D. The New Deal for Artists. 1973. 
O'Connor, Francis V., ed. Art for the Millions: Essays from 

the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA 

Tederal Art Project. 1973. 

Stuart Kidd 



CALDWELL, ERSKINE 

Erskine Preston Caldwell (December 17, 1903- 
April 11, 1987) was a prolific writer whose novels, 
stories, and nonfiction about the American South 
combined burlesque humor, social criticism, brutal 
violence, and graphic sexuality. He was one of the 
Depression-era's most prominent and controversial 
literary figures. 

The son of a reform-minded itinerant minister, 
Caldwell lived in seven southern states by the time 
he was twelve. Although he never received a high 
school diploma, he attended the University of Vir- 
ginia, which he left without a degree in 1925 to 
work as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal. Dedicated 
to becoming a professional fiction writer, Caldwell 
quit the paper in 1926 and moved to Maine, where 
he lived in dire poverty and obscurity, gradually 
gaining notice for stories published in several of the 
era's little magazines. 



The central theme of Caldwell's Depression- 
era writing is the agony of rural impoverishment. 
His first two novels, Poor Fool (1929) and The Bas- 
tard (1930), hard-boiled tales of amoral loners, at- 
tracted little critical or popular notice. Caldwell 
came to literary prominence with the publication of 
Tobacco Road (1932), the story of a family of desti- 
tute Georgia sharecroppers, the Lesters, stubbornly 
clinging to farmland that has been ruined by soil 
erosion. Lazy, licentious, and morally depraved, the 
Lesters' brutal, often obscene behavior culminates 
when one of the family's sons, Dude, backs his au- 
tomobile over his grandmother, who is left unat- 
tended for hours until she is thrown, still alive, into 
an open grave. God's Little Acre (1933) narrates the 
story of the Waldens, another indigent farm family 
that has been digging futilely for gold on their bar- 
ren land. The plot, noteworthy for the pornographic 
rendering of an adulterous sex scene, also includes 
the proletarian tale of a temporary takeover of a 
closed mill by the locked-out workers. 

The 1933 theatrical adaptation of Tobacco Road, 
which became the decade's longest-running 
Broadway play and toured the country, brought 
Caldwell fame and financial security. The play's 
popularity outside the South, however, stemmed in 
part from the fact that the story was often played for 
comedy rather than social critique, and quite likely 
reinforced stereotypes about the degeneracy of 
southerners. 

In addition to writing two other novels during 
the thirties, Journeyman (1935) and Trouble in July 
(1940), Caldwell also published hundreds of short 
stories, many about poverty, sex, and racism, in 
magazines and in five collections, including the 
critically-acclaimed Kneel to the Rising Sun (1935). In 
later decades, many of Caldwell's Depression-era 
novels were released as mass-market paperbacks, 
with astonishing results. By the early 1960s, he had 
sold over sixty million books and was being adver- 
tised as "the best-selling novelist in the world." 

A committed, if idiosyncratic, leftist, Caldwell 
also wrote journalism designed to expose the hor- 
rors of American poverty. A 1935 series for the New 
York Post described the dire malnutrition suffered 
by several Georgia families, claiming that "men are 
so hungry that they eat snakes and cow dung." In 



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GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



1937, Caldwell collaborated with celebrated photo- 
journalist Margaret Bourke-White, whom he would 
marry in 1939, on the decade's first major photo- 
essay book, You Have Seen Their Faces, which of- 
fered a pointed critique of economic exploitation in 
the rural South. However, some liberals, including 
James Agee, contended that Bourke-White's pho- 
tographs were manipulative and that the book's de- 
piction of the poor was sentimental and conde- 
scending. 

Throughout his work, Caldwell sought to chal- 
lenge romantic misconceptions of his native South 
by exposing the human costs of soil erosion and 
economic exploitation. However, the exceedingly 
debased nature of his characters often reinforced 
stereotypes of poor whites, African Americans, and 
women, and seemed to place blame on the very 
people Caldwell saw as victims, rather than on larg- 
er social structures. Moreover, the pornographic 
quality of his writing generated virulent protest, in- 
cluding campaigns to have his work banned in sev- 
eral cities. 

Caldwell's work, a volatile blend of social pro- 
test, ribald humor, sexual frankness, and shocking 
violence, defies conventional aesthetic and political 
categories. He remains one of the Depression era's 
most enigmatic authors. 

See Also: BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET; LITERATURE; 
SOUTH, GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burke, Kenneth. "Erskine Caldwell: Maker of Gro- 
tesques." In The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies 
in Symbolic Action, 3rd edition. 1973. 

Caldwell, Erskine. The Bastard. 1929. 

Caldwell, Erskine. Poor Fool. 1930. 

Caldwell, Erskine. Tobacco Road. 1932. 

Caldwell, Erskine. God's Little Acre. 1933. 

Caldwell, Erskine. Journeyman. 1935. 

Caldwell, Erskine. Kneel to the Rising Sun. 1935. 

Caldwell, Erskine. Trouble in July. 1940. 

Caldwell, Erskine. The Complete Stories of Erskine Cald- 
well. 1953. 

Caldwell, Erskine, and Margaret Bourke-White. You 
Have Seen Their Faces. 1937. 

MacDonald, Scott. Critical Essays on Erskine Caldwell. 
1981. 



McDonald, Robert L. The Critical Response to Erskine 
Caldwell. 1997. 

Miller, Dan B. Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco 
Road, a Biography. 1995. 

Joseph Entin 



CANADA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 

Like most of the industrialized world in the 1920s, 
Canada enjoyed an uneven prosperity during the 
latter years of that decade. Internal economic 
growth was based on speculation (in real estate and 
on the stock market) and a great wave of consumer 
spending on houses, automobiles, and household 
appliances, all financed on credit and promoted by 
a newly-developed advertising industry. When 
Wall Street led the way in a collapse of stock prices 
in October 1929, Bay Street in Toronto was only a 
heartbeat behind. Canadian businessmen did not 
initially see Black Tuesday as more than a tempo- 
rary setback, but it was soon associated with a gen- 
eral economic collapse that was more serious and 
protracted in Canada than in almost any other "ad- 
vanced" nation of the world. 



THE CANADIAN ECONOMY 

The Great Depression was hardly a uniquely 
Canadian phenomenon. It was the downward part 
of a periodic international economic cycle that af- 
fected all nations, although the industrialized suf- 
fered more. On the other hand, the Depression was 
arguably more severe in Canada than in almost any 
other nation except the United States. Officially re- 
corded unemployment reached almost one-fifth of 
the labor force in Canada in 1933, but such statistics 
were only the tip of the iceberg. In Montreal, in 
1934, almost 30 percent of the population was liv- 
ing on official assistance, and the figure for French- 
Canadians was almost 40 percent. The relief alloca- 
tion in Montreal — $21.88 per month — was well 
below the estimated cost of a "restricted diet for 
emergency use." 

The government did not count independent 
farmers as unemployed, although many had nega- 
tive incomes in the early 1930s. The prairie farm 



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community, especially, suffered through drought 
and bad harvests in these years, which meant that 
farm families did not always have their own har- 
vests to eat. Omnipresent dust became the symbol 
for the Depression in western Canada. The govern- 
ment did not count independent fishermen or tim- 
berers as unemployed either, and most significantly 
of all, it did not count women. In the worst years, 
therefore, fewer than half of those Canadians who 
wanted a paying job were able to find one. 

Two major factors made the Canadian eco- 
nomic situation so serious. One was proximity to 
and involvement in the American economy because 
the United States was even more hard-hit by the 
depression than Canada. The other was the extent 
of Canadian reliance on the production and sale 
abroad of raw materials ranging from grain to lum- 



ber to minerals. The bottom dropped out of the in- 
ternational market for such goods in 1929, and it 
did not recover until much later in the 1930s. Cana- 
dian manufacturing production also dropped by 
one-third between 1929 and 1933. But Canada had 
other problems as well, including political and con- 
stitutional arrangements that militated against ac- 
tive policies of social assistance and social insurance 
to those Canadians who were suffering. 



CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEMS 

Canada was a federal state, and sections nine- 
ty-one and ninety- two of the British North America 
Act — the largest part of the Canadian constitution 
created by act of the British Parliament in 1867 — 
carefully distinguished between the powers of the 
federal government and the powers of the prov- 



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GREAT DEPRESSION 



I N 



inces. Provincial powers included almost all of the 
powers relevant to social conditions. But the prov- 
inces were not given commensurate powers of tax- 
ation and revenue -raising, largely because the 
nineteenth-century Fathers of Confederation had 
never anticipated vast amounts of expenditure on 
health, welfare, and unemployment. Moreover, the 
Canadian constitution made absolutely no mention 
of cities or municipalities, which bore much of the 
burden for urban unemployment but had little tax 
base except real property. The municipalities dis- 
pensed much-needed relief on a cheeseparing basis 
that made no effort to maintain the dignity of the 
recipients. 

During the early 1930s, constant political strug- 
gle occurred between the federal government and 
the provincial governments, but also between the 



provincial governments and the municipalities. The 
federal government refused to expend money on 
relieving unemployment because of "constitutional 
limitations." Not until the 1935 election did the 
government in power pay much attention to the 
cries of the destitute. As for the provinces, they 
blamed their failure to act on the "feds." In the 
midst of the finger-pointing, a federal Employment 
and Social Insurance Act of 1935 was declared un- 
constitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada be- 
cause it violated provincial authority. 

Ideological constraints were probably as impor- 
tant as constitutional limitations in hamstringing 
federal action during the Depression. R. B. Bennett, 
the Canadian prime minister from 1930 to 1935, 
lacked imagination and a willingness to experiment 
in active government. A typical Conservative, for 



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most of his administration he balanced his budget 
and sought international economic improvement 
chiefly through a "Canada First" protectionist poli- 
cy combined with imperial preference. In 1935 he 
announced a sudden conversion to activism, how- 
ever, telling a national radio audience, "I am for re- 
form. I nail the flag of progress to the mast. I sum- 
mon the power of the state to its reform." Most 
Canadian voters did not believe that Bennett's new 
policy was anything but opportunism though, and 
voted instead for Mackenzie King's Liberals, who 
had promised very little but had the solid backing 
of the electorate in Quebec. What Bennett's "con- 
version" did represent, however, was a growing re- 
alization by large segments of the Canadian busi- 
ness and professional community that only a 
stabilized economy could stave off a major political 
and social upheaval. 



SOCIAL CONDITIONS 

Given the extent of unemployment, especially 
in the resource sector of the economy, and the lim- 
ited forms of social assistance, life was extremely 
hard for large numbers of Canadians during the 
Depression. In many regions, particularly those 
outside Ontario and Quebec, virtually the entire 
population was on the dole or thrown entirely on 
their own resources. Conditions were particularly 
hard on women, upon whose shoulders as house- 
wives and mothers was thrown the burden of 
maintaining the coherence and integrity of the fam- 
ily in the midst of economic crisis. Perhaps the most 
publicized wife and mother was Elzire Dionne, who 
gave birth to identical quintuplets in May of 1934. 
The Dionnes were classic examples of impover- 
ished farmers, living in a northern Ontario home 
without plumbing and electricity. The province of 



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GREAT DEPRESSION 



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Ontario swiftly removed the photogenic quints 
from the control of their parents, declaring them 
wards of the Crown, on the grounds that the Dion- 
nes could not possibly bring them up appropriately. 

For the half of the population that had employ- 
ment, life during the thirties was often quite a 
pleasant experience. Food, housing, and consumer 
goods were relatively cheap, and servants and ser- 
vices were readily available at bargain rates. In 
Montreal, laundresses who washed and ironed by 
hand in their own homes earned $2 per day. Eco- 
nomic conditions certainly improved dramatically 
in the late part of the decade, especially in the urban 
areas of Ontario and Quebec. 

For Canada's First Nations, especially the 
Metis, there was a general sharing in the drought 



conditions on the Prairies and the overall Depres- 
sion markets and employment opportunities. At 
the same time, the Department of Indian Affairs ex- 
perienced administrative cutbacks leading to much 
inactivity and confusion, and the 1930s actually saw 
a considerable growth of organization among ab- 
original peoples. The Metis organized 1' Association 
des Metis d' Alberta in 1930, while on the West 
Coast the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia 
was founded in 1931, and the Pacific Coast Native 
Fisherman's Association in 1936. 

One of the major social effects of the Depres- 
sion was to widen the gap in Canada between the 
nation's poor — like the Dionnes — and a well-to-do 
and well-educated elite. Contrary to predictions, 
universities maintained or even added to their en- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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rollments during the decade, increasing the propor- 
tion of females among their student bodies in the 
process. Despite administrative belt-tightening, for 
students and faculty alike, life within the ivory 
tower was good. Canadians who spent the Depres- 
sion on the wrong side of the economic divide 
would be understandably extremely eager, after the 
end of World War II, to ensure that they were al- 
lowed to participate in the postwar era of pros- 
perity. 

MOVEMENTS OF POLITICAL PROTEST 

Organized parties of protest and radical reform 
abounded in the "Dirty Thirties." During the early 
years of the Depression, however, only the Com- 
munist Party of Canada offered a national voice for 
Canadian popular discontent, creating in 1930 a 
National Unemployed Workers' Association that 
within a year had 22,000 members across the coun- 
try. The Communists could be charged with follow- 



ing the commands of the Communist International, 
and were quickly repressed by section 98 of the 
Criminal Code, introduced in 1919 during the earli- 
er "red scare" to outlaw the advocacy of revolution- 
ary agitation. Eight Communist leaders were arrest- 
ed in August 1931, and although they were 
subsequently released, the party had lost its mo- 
mentum and never recovered it. A few Fascists 
were to be found over the decade, but they were 
never taken seriously. 

The League for Social Reconstruction (LSR), 
which held its first convention in Toronto in Janu- 
ary 1932, sought a "planned and socialized econo- 
my." The LSR was proudly non-Marxist and non- 
revolutionary, and considered itself merely an elitist 
educational organization. Not until 1933 did the 
LSR participate in the formation of a new political 
party, formed by representatives of farmers' and 
labor organizations at Regina, Saskatchewan. The 
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (or CCF, 



U0 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



C A N A D 



GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



as it was usually called), emphasized economic 
planning and a series of universal welfare measures 
that would be introduced after necessary amend- 
ments had been made to the British North America 
Act. The CCF attracted over 300,000 votes in the 
1933 British Columbia provincial election, and won 
8.9 percent of the popular vote nationally (seven 
parliamentary seats). The new MPs were led into 
the House of Commons by J. S. Woodsworth and 
T. C. Douglas. But the CCF would subsequently 
enjoy strong support in only a few provinces (nota- 
bly British Columbia and Saskatchewan) and would 
make no inroads east of Ontario. 

Other newly-organized movements of protest 
existed on mainly a provincial or regional basis. 
Most had populist roots. Perhaps the most influen- 
tial of the new creations was the Social Credit Party 
of Alberta, which emerged out of the travails of 
farmers in that province. Social Credit was devel- 
oped by a Calgary schoolmaster and radio preacher, 
William Aberhart (1878-1943), who had broadcast 
for the Prophetic Bible Institute over the West's 
most powerful radio station, CFCN, since 1924. In 
1932, Aberhart was converted to the economic the- 
ories of a Scottish engineer named C. H. Douglas, 
a monetary theorist who believed that capitalism 
was incapable of distributing purchasing power to 
the masses of people. Douglas advocated the distri- 
bution of money, in the form of "social credit," to 
enable people to buy the goods and services they 
produced. Aberhart took over these theories, which 
he did not fully understand, and converted them 
into a practical platform overlaid with fundamen- 
talist evangelicalism. He emphasized state inter- 
vention in the economy and the issuance of a social 
dividend (eventually set at $25 per month) to all cit- 
izens as part of their cultural heritage. The new 
party swept to victory at the polls in 1935. Over the 
next few years, much of its economic program 
would be disallowed by the federal courts as un- 
constitutional. But the party remained in power in 
Alberta until 1972. Versions of Social Credit sprang 
up all over the western provinces, and a British Co- 
lumbia variant would govern British Columbia for 
over twenty years beginning in 1952. 

In Quebec, a popular leader with tendencies to- 
ward demagoguery emerged in 1933 in the person 



of Maurice Duplessis (1890-1959). Duplessis rode 
to power in 1935 on the backs of the Catholic social 
action movement and a Quebec nationalism associ- 
ated with the Action Liberal e Nationale (ALN). 
These two movements merged to create a powerful 
force for attacking the capitalist system. Duplessis 
insisted that Quebec was owned by foreigners. 
What was needed was "l'achat chez nous" ["buying 
at home"] and the destruction of the great financial 
establishments. When in power, Duplessis quickly 
abandoned the reform program that brought him 
into office, retaining mainly only a concern for pro- 
vincial autonomy, a fervent anti- Communism — the 
"Padlock Act" of 1937 closed any place suspected 
of disseminating Communist propaganda — and a 
paternalist program of grants and handouts for the 
disadvantaged. Like Social Credit, the program of 
Duplessis's Union Nationale Party was far different 
from its campaign promises, but the party remained 
in power until well after World War II. 

Perhaps the most effective movement of Cath- 
olic social action occurred in the Maritime region, 
peopled by farmer-fishers who had no control over 
marketing and distribution. The Antigonish move- 
ment gained its impetus from two Roman Catholic 
priests at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigon- 
ish, Nova Scotia — Father James Tompkins and Fa- 
ther Moses Coady — who advocated that small pro- 
ducers regain power over their own production and 
consumption through economic cooperation in the 
forms of cooperative banks, stores, and marketing 
agencies. The Antigonish ideology, like most popu- 
list movements of the Depression in Canada, was 
a curious mixture of radical rhetoric and conserva- 
tive attitudes, well designed to appeal to small pro- 
ducers. 

From a political and constitutional perspective, 
the most extreme action of the 1930s occurred not 
in Canada but in its neighboring Dominion of 
Newfoundland. The economy of Newfoundland 
was so dependent on fish and other extractive re- 
sources that failed to find markets in the early 1930s 
that the government was not only forced to declare 
bankruptcy but to place itself under the tutelage of 
Great Britain, which administered Newfoundland 
through appointed trustees. The trusteeship re- 
mained until, by a series of contorted steps, New- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



HI 



CANADA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



foundland finally joined the Canadian Confedera- 
tion in 1949. 

PUBLIC VIOLENCE 

The thirties in Canada were periodically punc- 
tuated by outbreaks of public discontent that often 
turned to violence. Some of the violence occurred 
when spontaneous demonstrations were broken up 
by authorities apprehensive of the threat to social 
order. This was the case in both a famous riot in 
Vancouver in 1935 and in a subsequent riot in Regi- 
na that occurred when police armed with baseball 
bats moved to disperse a group of unemployed Ca- 
nadians travelling to Ottawa to protest their situa- 
tion. Much of the violence resulted from confronta- 
tions between organized labor and the authorities. 
On the whole, labor unions did not flourish during 
the hard times of the 1930s, but many workers 
fought desperately to maintain their position. Po- 
lice and even the militia were often called upon in 
strike situations. Some strikes were gestures of des- 
peration, such as that by coalminers in Saskatche- 
wan in 1931, which ended in a riot in Estevan. Later 
in the decade, when economic conditions were bet- 
ter and workers attempted to organize industrial 
unions in the factories, both management and gov- 
ernments desperately opposed such actions. A no- 
table strike occurred in 1937 in a General Motors 
plant in Oshawa, which resulted in a victory by the 
newly formed Committee of Industrial Organiza- 
tion (CIO, later called the Congress of Industrial 
Organizations). What is perhaps the outstanding 
feature of public discontent in Canada was how sel- 
dom it led to violence and how little damage was 
done to life and property. 

RISE OF SOCIAL WELFARE 

As in most jurisdictions, the length and intensi- 
ty of the Depression in Canada dramatized the in- 
adequacy of the existing arrangements for social 
justice, thus giving a substantial boost to debate 
over schemes of social protection, especially in the 
public sector. Contrary to much popular mythology, 
a fair amount of social insurance was in existence 
in Canada before the Depression and was extended 
during the 1930s, almost entirely on a provincial 
basis. Little reform occurred on a national or federal 
level, however, leading critics to argue that Canada 



lagged behind other nations in its social welfare 
provisions, although by the early 1940s, all national 
political parties were committed to reform. 

A general old-age pension scheme had been 
introduced by the federal government in 1927, 
jointly financed by both levels of government and 
administered by the provinces. It paid a maximum 
of $20 per month to British subjects over the age of 
seventy. Despite other constitutional limitations, 
the federal government was clearly responsible for 
veterans, and various health and pension schemes 
for those who had fought in World War I took up 
a substantial proportion of the federal budget in the 
1930s. Several provinces attempted to introduce 
public health-care insurance during the Depres- 
sion, but were opposed by the medical profession. 
On the other hand, the doctors in some provinces 
did introduce their own schemes of health-care in- 
surance, which became the basis of Blue Cross cov- 
erage. Compulsory national unemployment insur- 
ance was introduced in 1940 following a 
constitutional amendment. However, most nation- 
al Canadian social insurance schemes were intro- 
duced on a piecemeal basis well after the Depres- 
sion was over. 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 

Canada had achieved world recognition as an 
independent nation as a result of World War I, and 
became a dominion, an autonomous community 
within the British Empire, as a result of the West- 
minster Conference of 1930. Throughout the De- 
pression, Canada was an active member of the 
League of Nations and during the decade devel- 
oped a small but highly skilled Department of Ex- 
ternal Affairs, with an extremely limited social view 
of the world. In 1935 the nation executed a major 
change of international policy by negotiating a 
most-favored nation treaty with the United States. 
This treaty signaled a new emphasis on the Canadi- 
an-American relationship, as Canada began to dis- 
engage from the British Empire and adopted a con- 
tinentalist position. Like most of the participants in 
World War I, Canada was slow to rearm. Indeed, 
during most of the 1930s it spent less than $1 per 
capita annually on its military establishment. Cana- 
da was for obvious reasons reluctant to come out of 



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its isolationist shell, although events in Europe and 
elsewhere around the world gradually forced its en- 
gagement. The Canadian government fully sup- 
ported the British policy of "appeasement" in the 
later 1930s, and was hardly prepared for World War 
II. 

One of the consequences of events in Europe 
was the emergence of a large number of refugees 
from Nazi persecution, most of them Jews. Canadi- 
an authorities showed little interest in assisting 
these people, and in 1938 actually began limiting 
Jewish immigration, despite desperate pleas from 
its Jewish community, which offered to finance ref- 
ugees at no cost to the government. A general Ca- 
nadian suspicion of Jews was even more virulent in 
Quebec, and the government of William Lyon Mac- 
kenzie King was — like previous Canadian govern- 
ments — obsessed by the need for assimilable new- 
comers. Canada continued to drag its feet on 
refugee policy, and never accepted more than a few 
thousand Jewish refugees. Since the nation was 
desperately short of scientific, intellectual, and cul- 
tural talent, in even the crassest of non- 
humanitarian terms its refugee policy was a disas- 
ter. In moral terms, the Canadian attitude — 
summed up by one of its mandarins as "None is too 
many" — was unconscionable, particularly since the 
country constantly lectured the world from a high 
moral pedestal. 



CANADIAN CULTURE 

Perhaps paradoxically, the period of the De- 
pression was in some ways a very positive one for 
the development of a distinctive Canadian culture, 
although most popular culture remained depen- 
dent on the United States. Many of the unem- 
ployed found solace in their local public libraries, 
and more than one radical political critic and writer 
first found his or her voice in the library stacks. The 
federal government, which was publicly responsi- 
ble for regulating the airwaves, had received a re- 
port from a royal commission in 1929 calling for the 
nationalization of radio, as in Great Britain, instead 
of allowing private broadcasters, as in the United 
States. The government eventually decided on a 
dual system — both public and commercial — 
establishing by the Broadcasting Act of 1932 the 



Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, which 
in 1936 became the publicly-operated Canadian 
Broadcasting Corporation, with extensive English 
and French language networks. Over the years, the 
CBC has been the principal patron of Canadian cul- 
tural content in the nation, and during the late 
1930s it served as the Canadian equivalent of the 
writers' branch of the Works Progress Administra- 
tion. 

On a less public level, the governor-general of 
Canada, the Earl of Bessborough, spearheaded the 
creation of the Dominion Drama Festival in 1932, 
which served to promote amateur regional theater 
throughout Canada. The Dominion Drama Festival 
was able to take advantage of a strong upsurge of 
interest in the theater during the Depression, which 
came about partly because so many Canadians had 
free time on their hands and partly because radical 
intellectuals found drama, poetry, and art to be 
ideal mediums for expressing their discontent with 
the status quo. Much of the most original creative 
work done in the 1930s in Canada came from the 
radicals, who were neither part of the university es- 
tablishment nor of Americanized popular culture. 

CONCLUSION 

Somehow Canada managed to survive the De- 
pression with its social fabric relatively intact, only 
to lurch unexpectedly into World War II. Many Ca- 
nadians were forced to defer their expectations of 
a better life for nearly an entire generation. They 
were as a result eager both to participate in the 
postwar prosperity and to insure through the grad- 
ual elaboration of a network of social welfare provi- 
sions that the people of Canada would never again 
experience such privations. 

See Also: AFRICA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; ASIA, 
GREAT DEPRESSION IN; AUSTRALIA AND NEW 
ZEALAND, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; EUROPE, 
GREAT DEPRESSION IN; INTERNATIONAL 
IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION; MEXICO, 
GREAT DEPRESSION IN. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Baillargeon, Denyse. Making Do: Women, Family, and 
Home in Montreal During the Great Depression. 1999. 

Baum, Gregory. Catholics and Canadian Socialism: Politi- 
cal Thought in the Thirties and Forties. 1980. 



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Finkel, Alvin. Business and Social Reform in the Thirties. 
1979. 

Gray, James H. The Winter Years: The Depression on the 
Prairies. 1966. 

Horn, Michiel. The League for Social Reconstruction: Intel- 
lectual Origins of the Democratic Left in Canada, 
1930-1942. 1980. 

Neatby, H. Blair. The Politics of Chaos: Canada in the Thir- 
ties. 1972. 

Peers, Frank W. The Politics of Canadian Broadcasting, 
1920-1951. 1969. 

Ryan, Toby Gordon. Stage Left: Canadian Theatre in the 
Thirties. 1981. 

Safarian, A. E. The Canadian Economy in the Great Depres- 
sion. 1970. 

Smiley, Donald S., ed. The Rowell-Sirois Report: An 
Abridgement of Book One of the Rowell-Sirois Report on 
Dominion-Provincial Relations. 1963. 

Struthers, James. No Fault of Their Own: Unemployment 
and the Canadian Welfare State 1914-1941. 1983. 

Thompson, John Herd, with Allan Seager. Canada 
1922-1939: Decades of Discord. 1985. 

J. M. BUMSTED 



CAPONE, AL 

A child of Brooklyn, New York, Alphonse Capone 
(January 17, 1899-January 25, 1947) found notori- 
ety and wealth in Chicago through organized 
crime. Capone was born to an Italian immigrant 
family in 1899. Though a promising student, he left 
school in the sixth grade, and from then it was a life 
in the streets. Capone was probably twenty when 
he killed his first victim. Three years later, he fol- 
lowed Johnny Torrio, his mentor in crime, to Chica- 
go. Together, they built a model criminal organiza- 
tion. 

Torrio was a modernizer who did for gambling, 
prostitution, and the Prohibition-era sale of liquor 
what John D. Rockefeller had for the oil business. 
The automobile and telephone — as well as the 
Thompson submachine gun — were some of the 
modern tools Torrio employed. When a 1925 assas- 
sination attempt left him wounded, Torrio retired 
and left the business to his protege. 

Like Torrio (and Rockefeller, Sr.), Capone ra- 
tionalized the marketplace with a pool arrange- 



ment, where different gangs were allowed control 
of different sections of the city. Anyone dissatisfied 
with their share met a bloody end. The seven vic- 
tims of the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre were 
but one example. 

Perhaps Capone's true genius lay in his crafting 
a public image. "They call Capone a bootlegger," he 
once complained. "Yes. It's bootleg while it's on the 
trucks, but when your host at the club, in the locker 
room or on the Gold Coast hands it to you on a sil- 
ver platter, it's hospitality" (Bergreen, p. 268). Such 
comments always served Capone well with the 
public. So did his reputation for generosity: When 
the Depression struck Chicago with nearly 50 per- 
cent unemployment, Capone opened up soup 
kitchens to feed the needy. The public did not care 
that Capone "encouraged" others to pay the cost of 
his project — Big Al lent a helping hand at a time 
when government did not. "Capone has become 
almost a mythical being in Chicago," (Bergreen, p. 
402) one critic lamented in 1930. Hollywood gave 
the story form a year later with Edward G. Robin- 
son as Little Caesar, who was Capone by any other 
name. The press had already made much of Capone 
as a kind of street philanthropist. 

Capone was grossing some $100 million annu- 
ally by the late 1920s. This wealth proved his undo- 
ing, or at least his failure to report it did — he was 
convicted of income tax evasion in 1931 and spent 
eight years in federal prisons, including Alcatraz. By 
then, Capone had fashioned a myth for the Depres- 
sion and beyond. He was the gangster as antihero. 
Capone died from the ravages of syphilis in 1947. 

See Also: CRIME; LAW ENFORCEMENT; 
PROHIBITION. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bergreen, Laurence. Capone: The Man and the Era. 1994. 
Kobler, John. Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone. 
1971. 

Douglas Bukowski 



CAPRA, FRANK 

Frank Capra (May 18, 1897-September3, 1991) was 
a motion picture director, producer, and writer who 



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FRANK 




Clark Gable as reporter Peter Warne and Claudette Colbert as heiress Ellie Andrews in Frank Copra's 1934 romantic comedy It 
Happened One Night. The Kobal Collection 



won three Academy Awards for best director in the 
1930s. Born in Bisacquino, Sicily, Capra emigrated 
at the age of six with his family to Los Angeles, 
where he grew up. In the early 1920s, after graduat- 
ing from Throop College of Technology (now Cal- 
tech), he wrote gags for movie producers Hal Roach 
and Matt Sennett. After writing material for screen 
comic Harry Langdon, Capra directed three films 
starring Langdon in 1926 and 1927 before the two 
had a falling- out. 

In 1928, Capra was hired by Harry Cohn, head 
of Columbia Pictures. Between 1928 and 1933, 
Capra would direct nineteen features for Columbia, 
including American Madness (1932), a film about the 
collapse of a bank, which anticipated many of the 
themes of Capra's later social films. In 1931, Capra 



began working with screenwriter Robert Riskin, 
who would go on to write most of Capra's major 
films of the 1930s. 

Although Capra had begun to make a name for 
himself during the early 1930s, his first huge hit 
came with It Happened One Night (1934). The film 
concerns an heiress (Claudette Colbert) who is se- 
cretly traveling from Miami to New York to escape 
her father. She is discovered by an out-of-work 
newsman (Clark Gable), who senses that her tale 
might make a good scoop. Naturally, the two fall for 
each other. It Happened One Night helped to create 
the screwball comedy, one of Hollywood's most 
important subgenres during the 1930s. It also es- 
tablished Capra as one of Tinseltown's most popu- 
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swept the Oscars, garnering the awards for best 
picture, director, writer, actor, and actress. 

With the exception of Lost Horizon (1937), a 
box-office disappointment that led to a bitter rift 
with Cohn and tensions with Riskin, Capra's suc- 
cess continued unabated over the next several 
years. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) earned Capra 
his second best director Oscar. A third arrived with 
You Can't Take It with You (1938). Mr. Smith Goes to 
Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941) capital- 
ized on the success of Mr. Deeds with similar plots 
about a little man taking on corrupt and powerful 
interests. The darkly comic Arsenic and Old Lace 
(produced 1941-1942; released 1944) was just 
wrapping production when the Japanese bombed 
Pearl Harbor. Shortly thereafter, Capra became an 
officer in the Army Signal Corps, where he super- 
vised the Why We Fight series of propaganda films 
during World War II. 

After the war, Capra directed two more signifi- 
cant films: It's A Wonderful Life (1946), which de- 
spite later becoming his most watched film never 
found an audience at the time of its release, and 
State of the Union (1948). Thereafter, Capra's career 
experienced a rapid decline. 

Critics and audiences have sometimes seen 
Capra's 1930s films, especially the social trilogy of 
Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith, and John Doe, as cinematic 
embodiments of the spirit of the New Deal. On 
closer inspection they are less clearly liberal. 
Capra's own politics were far from Rooseveltian: 
He was a lifelong conservative Republican. While 
Capra's most important screenwriter, Riskin, was a 
New Deal liberal, another important writer on his 
pictures, Myles Connolly, was a reactionary anti- 
Communist. Out of this political stew emerged 
films that, perhaps unintentionally, illuminate the 
ambiguities of American populism during the Great 
Depression. Although Capra's films centered on 
tribunes of the little man, often their heroes' most 
implacable foe was the people themselves: the pan- 
icked crowd trying to withdraw their money from 
the bank in American Madness; the thousands of let- 
ters calling for Senator Smith's resignation in Mr. 
Smith; or the angry throng at the stadium in John 
Doe. 



See Also: HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY; 
MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Capra, Frank. The Name above the Title: An Autobiography. 
1971. 

Carney, Raymond. American Vision: The Tilms of Frank 
Capra. 1986. 

Maland, Charles. Frank Capra. 1980. 

McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. 
1992. 

Poague, Leland A. Another Frank Capra. 1994. 

Sklar, Robert, and Vito Zagarrio, eds. Frank Capra: Au- 
thorship and the Studio System. 1998. 

Wolfe, Charles. Frank Capra: A Guide to References and Re- 
sources. 1987. 

Benjamin L. Alpers 



CARDOZO, BENJAMIN N. 

Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (May 24, 1870-July 9, 
1938) served as an associate justice of the U.S. Su- 
preme Court from 1932 until 1938. Cardozo was 
born in New York City and earned his law degree 
at Columbia University. He was admitted to the 
New York bar in 1891 and gained a reputation for 
his scholarly approach to law and his belief that the 
law should be adapted to modern conditions. Car- 
dozo was appointed to the New York Court of Ap- 
peals in 1914 and was elevated to its chief judgeship 
in 1926. He served on this state court until Presi- 
dent Herbert Hoover appointed him to replace re- 
tiring Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, Jr., in 1932. 

Like Holmes and Louis Brandeis, Cardozo was 
a legal realist and a pre-New Deal progressive who 
believed that the Constitution, especially as it af- 
fected state governments, should be flexible, and 
that states should have broad discretion to make 
laws to solve or alleviate social and economic prob- 
lems resulting from industrialization and urbaniza- 
tion, such as child labor, unsafe working conditions, 
and abusive business practices. In such cases as 
MacPherson v. Buick (1916) and Ultramares Corpora- 
tion v. Touche (1931), Cardozo wrote decisions for 



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POLITICAL 



New York that respectively expanded the legal re- 
sponsibilities of businesses in product liability and 
fraud cases. A series of lectures that Cardozo gave 
at Yale Law School reflected these ideas and opin- 
ions and was published as a book, The Nature of the 
Judicial Process, in 1921. 

Cardozo, like other pre-New Deal progressives, 
was more willing to grant the states, rather than the 
federal government, broader powers to enact labor, 
social welfare, and regulatory reforms. Since the 
early New Deal emphasized economic planning 
and the regulation of prices, wages, and production 
through codes made and enforced by the executive 
branch, Cardozo joined the majority of the Su- 
preme Court in striking down the National Indus- 
trial Recovery Act in the Schechter decision of 1935. 
Cardozo dissented, however, in the Supreme 
Court's anti-New Deal decisions in the Butler and 
Carter cases of 1936. In Butler, he and Brandeis 
joined Harlan Stone's dissenting opinion. Harlan 
claimed that the Agricultural Adjustment Act 
should be upheld since because Congress had the 
constitutional authority to regulate agricultural pro- 
duction through excise taxes. In Carter, Cardozo 
wrote a dissenting opinion arguing that the Guffey 
Coal Act should be upheld since the commerce 
clause gave Congress the authority to regulate the 
prices, wages, and trade practices of the interstate 
coal industry. 

By 1937, he belonged to the pro-New Deal ma- 
jority on the court. After Cardozo's death in 1938, 
he was replaced on the Supreme Court by Felix 
Frankfurter. 

See Also: BRANDEIS, LOUIS D.; FRANKFURTER, 
FELIX; HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, JR.; 
SUPREME COURT. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cardozo, Benjamin N. The Nature of the judicial Process. 
1921. 

Kaufman, Andrew L. Cardozo. 1998. 

Polenberg, Richard. The World of Benjamin Cardozo: Per- 
sonal Values and the judicial Process. 1997. 

Sean J. Savage 



CARTOONS, POLITICAL 

Political cartoons, or editorial cartoons, serve as a 
commentary on current events. From the first use 
of such cartoons in newspapers and periodicals in 
the early nineteenth century to the Great Depres- 
sion in the 1930s and thereafter, political cartoons 
have played a major role in shaping public percep- 
tions and opinions. By using satire rather than mere 
humor, political cartoons communicate the views of 
the cartoonist and add depth to an editorial in a 
newspaper or magazine. 



FAMOUS POLITICAL CARTOONISTS OF THE 
1930s 

Several political cartoonists gained fame for 
their work during the Great Depression, including 
Clifford Berryman, Herb Block, J. N. "Ding" Dar- 
ling, Jerry Doyle, Rollin Kirby, and Fred O. Seibel. 

/. N. "Ding" Darling. Jay Norwood Darling 
(1876-1962) received the Pulitzer Prize twice for his 
editorial cartooning (1924 and 1943) and was 
named the best cartoonist by the nation's top edi- 
tors in 1934. From 1906 until his retirement in 1949, 
Darling chronicled the thoughts, ideas, trends, and 
politics of the United States primarily for the Des 
Moines Register, although his cartoons appeared in 
newspapers throughout the United States. He was 
particularly noted for his wit and his use of political 
satire, especially in relation to conservation policy. 
Darling's interest in conservation led in 1933 to his 
being appointed chief of the Bureau of Biological 
Survey by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Al- 
though Darling was a strong Republican and not a 
supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal policies, he nev- 
ertheless was an energetic promoter of conserva- 
tion projects and his cartoons often emphasized the 
value of governmental regulations that could bene- 
fit the environment. The J. N. "Ding" Darling Na- 
tional Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island in Florida 
is named after him. 

Herb Block. Another popular Depression-era car- 
toonist was Herbert L. Block (1909-2001). Block 
published his first editorial cartoon, titled "This is 
the forest primeval — ", six months before the 1929 
New York Stock Exchange crash that marked the 



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POLITICAL 




A 1938 cartoon by Clifford Berryman depicting President Roosevelt encircled by playful children, each symbolizing a New Deal 
program. CORBIS 



onset of the Great Depression. Like Darling, Block 
was interested in protecting nature and the envi- 
ronment, especially the cutting of America's virgin 
forests, and he addressed these concerns in his car- 
toons. Block's interest in nature later broadened 
into concern for the economic and international en- 
vironment that developed in the 1930s. 

Block started his career as a cartoonist for the 
Chicago Daily News in 1929. In 1933, he started 
working as a syndicated cartoonist under the name 
HerBlock for the Newspaper Enterprise Associa- 
tion, a feature service headquartered in Cleveland. 



He joined the Washington Post in 1946, and stayed 
there for the rest of his career. During the Depres- 
sion he provided superb commentary about unem- 
ployment and poverty in the United States and the 
rise of fascism in Europe. One cartoon, titled "Well 
everything helps," depicts Hoover fishing at Rapi- 
dan River with members of Congress and his ad- 
ministration. Block comments on the deepening 
Depression by showing Hoover reviewing his "eco- 
nomic program" with his fishing line in the water, 
and later selling his catch of fresh fish on a street 
in Washington, D.C. 



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Block's cartoons addressed many aspects of the 
Great Depression and his editorial comments were 
a rallying call for reform. Though Block was sup- 
portive of New Deal policies, he nonetheless ques- 
tioned Roosevelt's efforts in some areas, notably 
the president's unsuccessful attempt in 1937 to 
pack the U.S. Supreme Court. Block was awarded 
the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1942, 
1954, and 1979, honors that confirmed his reputa- 
tion as one of the country's leading political car- 
toonists. 

jerry Doyle and Fred O. Seibel. Gerald "Jerry" Doyle 
(1898-1986) and Fred O. Seibel (1886-1968) were 
two of the more popular political cartoonists of the 
New Deal era. They were especially noted for their 
distinctive depictions of Roosevelt. Seibel was an 
editorial cartoonist from 1926 to 1968 for the Rich- 
mond Times-Dispatch, while Doyle spent most of his 
career at The Philadelphia Record and Philadelphia 
Daily News. Doyle's sophisticated drawings gener- 
ally expressed support for Roosevelt, whom he de- 
picted as tall, imposing, powerful, and larger-than- 
life. Doyle usually showed Roosevelt smiling, gave 
him titles such as "skipper" to show that he was in 
charge, and sometimes depicted him as a quarter- 
back in football games. Seibel, whose drawings 
were less realistic in style, generally depicted Roo- 
sevelt as struggling and lacking control, with a pro- 
truding chin and a body like a penguin. Seibel's car- 
toons sometimes included an image of a magician 
pulling a rabbit out of a hat, which was meant to in- 
dicate that Roosevelt's policies would only succeed 
by magic. Neither Doyle nor Seibel, however, 
would hesitate to reverse his usual depiction of 
Roosevelt when, in the cartoonist's opinion, the 
subject matter warranted it. One of Doyle's most 
famous cartoons showed Roosevelt holding a pic- 
ture of Hitler with Hitler's arms in a position of sur- 
render and Roosevelt's elongated arms forming a V 
for victory. 



DRAWING PRESIDENTS 

Hoover and Roosevelt were regular subjects of 
political cartoons during the 1930s. In the first hun- 
dred days of Roosevelt's administration in 1933, 
cartoonists tended to show Roosevelt as a confi- 
dent, strong, and energetic leader whose intentions 



for the nation were good. These cartoons suggested 
that Americans sensed that the new president had 
faith in the future and could lead the nation out of 
hard times. The February 1934 issue of Vanity Fair, 
for example, includes a rugged-looking Roosevelt 
riding a bucking horse in the shape of the United 
States. By 1935, however, the country had only 
achieved a modest degree of recovery, and some 
political cartoonists began to express opposition to 
Roosevelt and his programs. 

See Also: COMMUNICATIONS AND THE PRESS; 
HUMOR. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Fred O. Seibel (1886-1968), Editorial Cartoonist, Richmond 
Times-Dispatch. Virginia Commonwealth Univer- 
sity. Available at: www.library.vcu.edu/jbc/speccoll/ 
exhibit/seibell .html 

Herblock's History: Political Cartoons from the Crash to the 
Millennium. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 
Available at: www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/herblock 

/. N. "Ding" Darling Foundation. Homepage at: 
www.dingdarling.org/cartoons.html 

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. 
1994. 

Robinson, Erik. Political Cartooning in Florida, 1901-1987. 
1987. 

William Arthur Atkins 



CASTE AND CLASS 

The terms caste and class are associated with an in- 
terpretation of American race relations that came to 
prominence in the late 1930s and was widely influ- 
ential in both social scientific and applied social in- 
quiry. Part of an older, historically-rooted trend to- 
ward more social scientific understandings of racial 
inequality, the caste and class school was neverthe- 
less a product of Depression-era social thought and 
investigation. At a time rightly associated with 
deepening economic division and looming fear of 
"class warfare," the caste and class concept offered 
a powerful, if flawed, analysis of the depths and the 
consequences of racism in the United States. 

The caste and class concept was first laid out in 
a brief 1936 essay by social anthropologist W. Lloyd 



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Warner, and it was more fully developed in a series 
of community studies conducted in the Depres- 
sion-era South. Warner, who started his anthropo- 
logical career studying aboriginal tribes in Australia, 
was among the leaders of a broader trend towards 
applying anthropological techniques honed in ob- 
serving "primitive" cultures to "typical" American 
communities. It was in this type of study that he 
and others developed the caste and class concept. 
Indeed, in important ways the concept emerged out 
of the contrast between industrial New England 
and the post-plantation agricultural South. While 
still engaged in an ambitious study of the substan- 
tially ethnic but predominantly white city of New- 
buryport, Massachusetts, Warner launched a paral- 
lel study in Natchez, Mississippi. In Newburyport, 
as Warner reported in his famous Yankee City series, 
social relations were organized around an elaborate 
status hierarchy based on class, upheld not only by 
differences of wealth and income, but even more 
importantly by class-coded behavior, attitudes, and 
cultural traits. In Natchez, however, the picture was 
more complicated. In Natchez, there was not one, 
but two separate class hierarchies, one black and 
one white. They in turn existed within a rigid and 
pervasive caste system — an all-encompassing eco- 
nomic, political, social, and cultural system of racial 
subordination that was aimed at maintaining white 
supremacy. While at times caste and class worked 
in tension with one another, the overwhelming 
weight of the system was devoted to keeping Afri- 
can Americans — and especially the small black 
middle- and upper-classes — "in their place." Con- 
versely, no matter how low they were on the class 
hierarchy, whites always had the social, cultural, 
and psychological advantage over African Ameri- 
cans. 

Although he was by no means the first to de- 
scribe black/white relations as a caste system, War- 
ner's framework proved more widely influential — 
reflecting his own status as a prominent white so- 
cial scientist, as well as the landmark empirical 
studies conducted using the caste and class con- 
cept. Studies such as John Dollard's Caste and Class 
in a Southern Town (1937), Hortense Powder- 
maker's After Freedom (1939), and Deep South (1941) 
by Warner students Allison Davis, Burleigh Gard- 
ner, and Mary Gardner elaborated the interlocking 



mechanisms of caste and class subordination in 
empirical detail. A series of studies commissioned 
by the American Council on Education investigated 
the impact of caste and class on black adolescent 
personality development. Important though they 
were in illuminating the structural and institutional 
dimensions of southern racism, what these studies 
shared — again reflecting a broader trend in con- 
temporary social science — was a fascination with 
the cultural and psychological scars it left. African 
Americans in the South, or so the deeply flawed 
portrait that emerged from these studies suggested, 
had become "accommodated" to racial subordina- 
tion in what threatened to become a self- 
perpetuating complex of repressed frustration, self- 
hatred, and, for the lower classes in particular, cul- 
tural "pathology." 

Criticized at the time for its basically static, pes- 
simistic vision of American race relations, the caste 
and class framework was nevertheless important 
for drawing attention to the enduring reality of rac- 
ism as a key factor in the persistence of African- 
American poverty and economic subordination — 
during and beyond the depths of the Great Depres- 
sion. Its central analysis, however, left an ambigu- 
ous legacy that also endures: on the one hand, an 
argument for attacking the roots of white racism; on 
the other, a distorted cultural and psychological im- 
agery of the African -American lower class. 

See Also: CLASS; RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS; 
SOCIAL SCIENCE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Davis, Allison; Burleigh B. Gardner; and Mary R. Gard- 
ner. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of 
Caste and Class. 1941. 

Davis, Allison, and John Dollard. Children of Bondage: The 
Personality Development of Negro Youth in the Urban 
South. 1940. 

Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. 1937. 

Powdermaker, Hortense. After Freedom: A Cultural Study 
in the Deep South. 1939. 

Scott, Daryl Michael. Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and 
the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996. 
1997. 

Warner, W. Lloyd. "American Caste and Class." Ameri- 
can Journal of Sociology 42 (September 1936): 
234-237. 

Alice O'Connor 



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6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



CAUSES OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION 

Disagreement over the causes of the Great Depres- 
sion began before the economic collapse that com- 
menced in 1929 had even been given that name, 
and the disagreement has persisted ever since. Nor 
does the debate show any signs of imminent reso- 
lution in the early twenty-first century. Arguments 
over what caused the Great Depression are deeply 
entwined with economic, social, and political phi- 
losophy. 

A major reason for the controversy is that the 
Depression seemingly disproved the efficacy of the 
unregulated free market. Defenders of the faith of 
classical free market economics are, therefore, 
obliged to seek elsewhere for the causes of the col- 
lapse of the economy following a decade of lower- 
ing taxes and lifting restrictions on business by suc- 
cessive Republican administrations. It is an article 
of dogma to them that an unfettered marketplace 
is self-correcting. Accordingly, devotees of Adam 
Smith's worldview must find fetters — some sort of 
government interference or regulation — on which 
to lay the blame. 

WORLD WAR I AND THE ORIGINS OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION 

Although it was in many ways eclipsed by the 
second installment of the twentieth century's world 
conflict, World War I (or "the Great War" as it was 
still known at the time of the Depression) was a 
major source of much of what happened in the 
world for most of the remainder of the century, in- 
cluding World War II and the Cold War. The role 
played by the Great War in helping to produce the 
Great Depression was also significant. Although 
the death toll from World War I was relatively small 
for the United States, the war was catastrophic for 
many European nations. 

The war's economic impact was similarly pro- 
found. The war stimulated and distorted the econo- 
mies not only of the belligerent nations, but those 
of many nonbelligerents as well. Wartime inflation 
was followed by postwar deflation in most coun- 
tries. During the war and for several months after 
the armistice, demand for American farm products, 



especially grains, soared, as did prices. Such profit- 
able conditions led American farmers to go deeply 
into debt to buy additional land and machinery. 
These happy circumstances for American farmers 
were, however, an artificial consequence of the war, 
which severely disrupted European agriculture. 
When the latter recovered rapidly after the war, the 
demand for the expanded production of American 
farms plummeted, helping (along with a sharp con- 
traction in the money supply) to carry the economy 
into a sharp recession in 1920 and 1921. Agriculture 
was to remain in depressed conditions throughout 
the period of more general prosperity from 1923 to 
1929. 

The war also radically altered international fi- 
nance. It transformed the United States for the first 
time from a net debtor nation into the world's larg- 
est creditor. Massive war debts owed by the British 
and French to American creditors were part of the 
economic landscape of the 1920s, as were the huge 
reparation payments the European victors de- 
manded from Germany. The problem of war debts 
and reparations was a continuing irritant to the in- 
ternational economy in the twenties. 

Perhaps more significant in its adverse effects 
on the world economy was the war's establishment 
of the United States in the role previously held by 
Great Britain as the world's banker or creditor-in- 
chief. This position carried with it responsibilities 
for which the Americans were ill prepared and that 
they were disinclined to shoulder. In particular, 
American political leaders of the twenties were 
committed to maintaining a favorable balance of 
trade, meaning that they wanted the nation to ex- 
port more than it imported. This posture was, in the 
long term, incompatible with America's assump- 
tion of the position of the world's leading lender, 
because other countries had to sell more to the 
United States than they bought from it if they were 
to have the funds to repay the debts they owed to 
American creditors. 



THE STOCK MARKET CRASH 

This much can be stated categorically: Popular 
perceptions to the contrary notwithstanding, the 
stock market crash of October 1929 did not cause 
the Great Depression. Although hardly anyone re- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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GREAT DEPRESSION 



alized it at the time, the economic contraction that 
became the Depression had already begun in the 
summer of 1929, when the economy started to slow 
considerably. 

"You know," Herbert Hoover once remarked to 
journalist Mark Sullivan, "the only trouble with 
capitalism is the capitalists; they're too damn 
greedy." This is a truism that has been proven re- 
peatedly, but it is also true that greed is a highly 
contagious disease against which few people's im- 
mune systems provide much protection. This is 
particularly the case when those already infected 
are actively working to spread the contagion, as 
many of them were in the 1920s. (Du Pont execu- 
tive and Democratic National Chairman John J. 
Raskob, for example, wrote a 1929 article entitled, 
"Everybody Ought to be Rich.") The result was an 
epidemic of greed in the United States in the mid 
and late 1920s. 

The first major outbreak of the disease in the 
decade occurred in Florida, where it took the form 
of real estate speculation. It began with the reality 
of the growing value of beachfront property in a 
place with warm winters that had been made acces- 
sible to well-to-do northeastern and midwestern 
residents by the development of the automobile 
and the construction of highways. Quickly, howev- 
er, Florida real estate became a classic bubble in 
which prices rose far beyond realistic values, simply 
because they were rising. That is, speculators were 
willing to pay ever higher prices for land because 
they expected someone else to be willing to pay 
even more for it a week or a month later. The Flori- 
da bubble burst, as all bubbles that keep expanding 
ultimately must, following a severe hurricane in 
1926, but the greed virus had already infected a dif- 
ferent area: Wall Street (which was, in any case, its 
natural habitat). 

The Great Bull Market of the late twenties was 
fueled by easy credit in the form of margin buying 
(buying stock by putting up a small percentage of 
its cost in cash and borrowing the rest "on margin," 
using the stock itself as collateral for the loan). In 
a rapidly rising market, the "leverage" provided by 
margin buying made the possibilities for huge prof- 
its extraordinary. By the time the Federal Reserve 
sought to dampen the speculative fever in 1928 and 



1929 by raising interest rates, the mania had taken 
on a life of its own. "Nothing matters as long as 
stocks keep going up," the New York World said as 
1929 began. "The market is now its own law. The 
force behind its advance are now irresistible." 

Historian Maury Klein sums up the situation 
well in his book Rainbow's End (2001): "Put simply, 
too many people held too much stock on borrowed 
money." When the economy began to slow in the 
summer of 1929, it sent signals to Wall Street that 
were disregarded by most investors, but heeded by 
many of the richest insiders. Among those who 
quietly got largely out of the market before the bot- 
tom fell out were Raskob (who apparently thought 
that he ought to remain rich while "everybody" lost 
their shirts), Bernard Baruch, Joseph P. Kennedy, 
and President Hoover himself. 

The crash was a response to an already begun, 
but as yet invisible to most observers, Depression. 
It amounted to a spectacular funeral for the "New 
Era" of eternal prosperity that had been proclaimed 
a few years earlier. Funerals, it is worth remember- 
ing, do not cause death; they recognize the dece- 
dent's passing, which has already occurred. Such 
was the relationship between the crash and the de- 
mise of prosperity. 

The crash did, however, accelerate the down- 
ward spiral of the economy by wiping out much of 
the paper wealth of investors and by altering the 
previously euphoric outlook of so many people into 
one of pessimism, which led them to be much more 
cautious in their spending and investment. Both of 
these consequences of the crash further eroded de- 
mand. 



MONETARY POLICY AND THE GOLD 
STANDARD 

There is no question that the money supply can 
have profound effects on the economy. In the sim- 
plest terms, if the money supply is insufficient, 
prices must fall, which can lead to the sort of serious 
deflation that contributed to the Panic of 1893, the 
worst economic depression in American history 
prior to the Great Depression. If, on the other hand, 
the money supply grows faster than the demand for 
money, prices will rise, causing inflation. In the late 
1920s and early 1930s, the most notable and recent 



152 



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6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



example of the potentially catastrophic conse- 
quences of runaway price increases was the hy- 
perinflation that had gripped Germany in 1922 and 
1923, when the exchange rate between the German 
and American currencies went in less than two 
years from 192 marks to the dollar to 4.2 trillion 
marks to the dollar. Annualized for the two years, 
this was an inflation rate in excess of a trillion per- 
cent a year. By November 1923, German money 
was essentially worthless. 

Germany's horrible experience with hyperin- 
flation contributed to the coming of the Depression 
in two important ways. First, it wreaked havoc on 
the German economy and those of several other 
central European countries, and they never fully re- 
covered from the effects for the remainder of the 
decade. Second, the German disaster caused other 
nations to be unduly concerned with avoiding infla- 
tion when the more dangerous economic predator 
lurking in the shadows of late twenties prosperity 
was actually deflation. In their efforts to defend 
their nations against inflation, political and eco- 
nomic leaders inadvertently strengthened the 
building forces of deflation. 

In the decades prior to World War I, most major 
countries had been on the gold standard, meaning 
that their currencies were convertible to a set 
amount of gold. This meant that the value of all cur- 
rencies on the gold standard had a stable exchange 
rate with other currencies that were tied to gold. 
The gold standard was abandoned by most of the 
belligerents during World War I (the United States, 
a late entrant into the war, remained on the gold 
standard), but there was a concerted effort to re- 
store it after the war. Because of the major disrup- 
tions of the war, exchange rates were allowed to 
float from 1919 to well into the 1920s. Such floating 
rates provided some protection against the prob- 
lems in one or a few countries spreading to other 
countries, but most nations' governments were 
committed to returning to the gold standard with 
fixed rates of exchange as rapidly as possible. Great 
Britain did so in 1925 and France followed in 1928. 
By 1929, forty-five nations were on the gold stan- 
dard. 

By 1929, much of the world's gold was rapidly 
flowing into the United States and France. At- 



tempts by various countries to keep their currencies 
at prewar exchange rates led them into deflationary 
policies, intended to cheapen the prices of their 
products on the international market and so bring 
gold back into their countries to support their cur- 
rencies. These deflationary actions contributed to a 
worldwide contraction in economic activity. 

TECHNOLOGY AND THE DEPRESSION 

Technology was in three major respects a sig- 
nificant factor in creating the conditions that pro- 
duced the Great Depression. 

First, new technologies provided much of the 
impetus for the unprecedented prosperity of the 
1920s. The development of important new products 
that large numbers of people can be persuaded to 
buy is often the driving force in periods of economic 
boom, as appears to have been the case with per- 
sonal computers and the Internet in the boom of 
the 1990s. The development of such new consumer 
products encourages investment in new plants and 
equipment and provides employment for large 
numbers of workers. This was plainly the case with 
the automobile in the 1920s. The motor car was not 
new in the twenties; nor was its method of mass 
production, which had been perfected prior to 
World War I. What was new in the decade follow- 
ing that war was the enormous expansion of the 
market for cars and the rapid development of nu- 
merous industries that were stimulated by the mass 
ownership of automobiles. Among these booming 
industries of the prosperity decade that preceded 
the Depression were petroleum (exploration, drill- 
ing, refining, and retailing); steel production; road 
and highway construction (which pulled along the 
cement industry); and motels, diners, and tourist 
attractions. 

Nor was the automobile alone among new 
technologies that had been developed by the early 
1920s in providing fuel for the economy of the de- 
cade. Radio, little more than a promising curiosity 
at the decade's start, had spread across the nation 
and into the homes of a majority of Americans by 
1929. Along with the automobile and, to a lesser ex- 
tent, a variety of new household appliances, the 
swift rise of radio to the status of "necessity" for 
middle-class life provided an enormous stimulus to 
the economy. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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GREAT DEPRESSION 



It should be noted that while the potential mar- 
ket for radios and electrical appliances was huge, it 
was limited to areas where electricity was available. 
Although all densely populated parts of the United 
States were electrified, large expanses of rural 
America were not, so rural Americans were not part 
of the potential market for electrical devices. Addi- 
tionally, while there was no such access barrier to 
farmers buying automobiles (and many did buy 
them), the fact that agriculture remained economi- 
cally depressed throughout the decade also reduced 
the potential market for automobiles among the 
nation's farmers. 

A rapid economic expansion induced by the 
products of new technology can be great while it 
lasts, but it is, almost by definition, limited in its du- 
ration. Once most consumers have purchased the 
new products, demand for them must decline. 
Businesses involved in the industries can try to less- 
en the effects of a saturation of the market for their 
products by trying to expand the potential number 
of consumers through lower prices and installment 
purchase plans. They can also use the introduction 
of new models and planned obsolescence to churn 
the market with repeat customers. Both of these 
strategies were employed to considerable effect in 
the second half of the 1920s. Even so, the trajectory 
of new sales of a new technology will almost always 
be downward as the market for the product ap- 
proaches saturation. 

If an economic boom that has been stoked by 
one or more new technologies is to continue after 
the market for it or them has been largely supplied, 
new technologies that can be made to appear to be 
necessities for consumers must be introduced. The 
lack of such additional new products in the second 
half of the 1920s is the second way in which tech- 
nology played a significant part in causing the De- 
pression. In terms of the development of new or 
significantly improved products, the ten-year peri- 
od beginning in 1925 was probably the least pro- 
ductive time in the twentieth century. The only 
major new product introduced during those years, 
as the economy moved from extraordinary boom to 
unprecedented bust, was the electric refrigerator. 

If technological innovation failed to introduce 
much in the way of new products during the late 



1920s and early 1930s, that did not mean that there 
was a hiatus in technological advance. On the con- 
trary, there was great technological advance in the 
methods for producing the products that had al- 
ready been developed. During the 1920s, produc- 
tivity of industrial workers increased by 50 percent 
or more. And, even while huge numbers of workers 
were jobless in the 1930s and wages were very low, 
technological advances in manufacturing processes 
continued, resulting in another 25 percent increase 
in productivity in that decade. 

The effects of this sort of technological advance 
on the economy tend to be the opposite of those of 
the development of new products, and the rapid in- 
novation in productive processes in the 1920s was 
the third major contribution of technology in laying 
the groundwork for the Great Depression. 

Certainly process innovation requires some 
new investment, but it is usually on a much smaller 
scale than that required for manufacturing new 
products. Furthermore, improvements in the tech- 
nology of production usually lead to the number of 
machines and buildings used to make products 
being decreased. Most important, the whole point 
of such innovations in process is to increase pro- 
ductivity, so they almost invariably result in fewer 
workers being employed to manufacture a given 
quantity of the ultimate consumer product. In the 
six years from 1923 to 1929, output per person-hour 
of labor in manufacturing in the United States in- 
creased by nearly 32 percent. 

To summarize the role of technology in the De- 
pression: Technological advances that introduced 
new products greatly stimulated the economy of 
the 1920s, but the lack of new products in the late 
1920s placed a drag on the economy when the mar- 
ket for the earlier innovations became largely satu- 
rated. Continuing advances in the technology of 
producing already existing goods contributed to an 
increase in unemployment and to a lessening of de- 
mand, both because of the unemployment itself 
and because increased productivity without corre- 
sponding wage increases reduced the share of na- 
tional income going to potential consumers (i.e., 
workers who remained employed). 



15*. 



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f 



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6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



INCOME DISTRIBUTION AND "UNDER- 
CONSUMPTION" 

Both types of technological advance — new 
products and new processes to make them — 
contributed to a fundamental shift in the economy. 
Put simply, mass production necessitates mass con- 
sumption. In this new economy, therefore, it was 
essential that a large portion of the population have 
both the desire and the means to buy products that 
were not, by any standards of the past, necessary 
for them to have. "Now you have taken over the job 
of creating desire," Hoover told advertisers in 1925. 
This meant that such traditional values as frugality 
and deferred gratification had to be undermined. 
Advertising served this objective by keeping "the 
customer dissatisfied," as a 1929 article by a Gener- 
al Motors executive put it. 

The whole idea of the new consumption-driven 
economy seemed odd to some observers. "It still 
escapes me why a prosperity founded on forcing 
people to consume what they do not need, and 
often do not want," social critic Stuart Chase wrote 
in 1929, "is, or can be, a healthy and permanent 
growth." 

Persuading people that they should buy what 
they had not even known they wanted was, howev- 
er, only the first step in achieving the level of mass 
consumption needed to soak up the products of 
mass production. Effective demand requires money 
as well as motivation to buy. For this reason, as an 
economy becomes more dependent on mass con- 
sumption, it should move toward a less concentrat- 
ed distribution of income. In the 1920s, just the op- 
posite was happening. The slice of the national 
income pie going to the richest one percent of 
Americans grew from 12 percent in 1920 to 19 per- 
cent in 1929. This increasing maldistribution of in- 
come posed a serious threat to prosperity. 

If a sufficient number of customers with desire 
and money to buy what the nation's industry was 
producing could not be found at home, a possible 
solution would be to sell the excess abroad. But sev- 
eral obstacles blocked this route: First, as the 
world's principal lender, the United States could 
not continually export more than it imported; sec- 
ond, tariff barriers constrained international trade; 
third, other industrial countries were facing similar 



problems of overproduction and so they, too, 
sought to export more than they imported. 

In the absence of some means of transferring a 
larger share of income to those who would buy the 
products coming off assembly lines — through taxa- 
tion, higher wages, or deficit spending by the gov- 
ernment, all of which went against the grain of 
popular thinking and the dominant political and 
economic philosophy of the era (indeed, tax cuts on 
upper income brackets in the Coolidge years helped 
to increase the maldistribution) — the only way to 
keep the economy going seemed to be to allow 
people who did not have enough money to buy 
products to buy them anyway. Advertising led peo- 
ple to hunger for products; credit let them, however 
briefly, satisfy that hunger. Selling products on 
credit became ever more popular as the twenties 
wore on. This process kept demand within shout- 
ing distance of supply for a few years beyond when 
the imbalance would otherwise have hit. But in 
postponing the day of reckoning, the rising burden 
of debt made the eventual fall much harder. 

As he left a post-crash meeting of industrialists 
called by President Hoover on November 21, 1929, 
Henry Ford succinctly stated a major cause of the 
Great Depression then underway: "American pro- 
duction has come to equal and even surpass not our 
people's power to consume, but their power to pur- 
chase." 



TARIFFS AND THE DECLINE OF 
INTERNATIONAL TRADE 

Once the Depression had begun, the policies 
and actions of various governments around the 
world in reaction to it worsened the situation. Tariff 
barriers — led by the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in the 
United States, passed in 1930 — were erected to 
protect domestic markets. These impediments to 
international trade added to the deflationary forces 
already at work, and the world economy slipped 
ever deeper into depression. 



CONCLUSION 

"One cannot recall when a new year was ush- 
ered in with business conditions sounder than they 
are today," the Wall Street Journal gushed on Janu- 
ary 4, 1929. Exactly two months later, Herbert Hoo- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



155 



c c c 



ver proclaimed in his inaugural address that he had 
"no fears for the future of our country. It is bright 
with hope." Following the stock market crash less 
than eight months later, President Hoover reas- 
sured the nation in the same terms the Journal had 
used at the year's outset, saying that the economy 
was "fundamentally sound." 

The most comprehensive answer to the ques- 
tion of what caused the Great Depression is that 
conditions by the last year of the 1920s were quite 
the opposite of these optimistic pronouncements. 
Had the economy in fact been "fundamentally 
sound," the stock market crash would surely have 
produced some deleterious economic fallout, but 
the decline would not have been nearly as steep, 
deep, or prolonged as it turned out to be. The un- 
fortunate truth was that, in a variety of ways out- 
lined in this entry — from international banking, 
war debts, and reparations, through the effects of 
the gold standard on money supply, the wild spec- 
ulation of the decade's orgy of greed, the lack of 
major new products combined with rapid increases 
in productivity, the economy's new dependence on 
mass consumption, and widespread consumer 
debt, to the growing maldistribution of income, the 
economy was fundamentally unsound in 1929. That 
many-faceted unsoundness caused the Great De- 
pression. 

See Also: EUROPE, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; 
INTERNATIONAL IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION; KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS; 
LAISSEZ-FAIRE; MONETARY POLICY; SCIENCE 
AND TECHNOLOGY; STOCK MARKET CRASH 
(1929). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Chandler, Lester V. America's Greatest Depression, 
1928-1941. 1970. 

Eichengreen, Barry. Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and 
the Great Depression, 1919-1939. 1992. 

Fearon, Peter. War, Prosperity, and Depression: The U.S. 
Economy, 1917-1945. 1987. 

Friedman, Milton, and Anna lacobson Schwartz. A Mon- 
etary History of the United States, 1867-1960. 1963. 

Galbraith, Lohn Kenneth. The Great Crash: 1929. 1955. 

Hall, Thomas E., and J. David Ferguson. The Great De- 
pression: An International Disaster of Perverse Econom- 
ic Policies. 1998. 



Kindleberger, Charles P. The World in Depression, 
1929-1939, rev. edition. 1986. 

Klein, Maury. Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929. 2001. 

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 
1929-1941, rev. edition. 1993. 

Smiley, Gene. Rethinking the Great Depression. 2002. 

Temin, Peter. Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depres- 
sion? 1976. 

Temin, Peter. Lessons from the Great Depression. 1989. 

Robert S. McElvaine 



CCC. See CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS; 
COMMODITY CREDIT CORPORATION. 



CERMAK, ANTON 



Before there was a Roosevelt coalition of reformers, 
organized labor, and ethnics, there was a Cermak 
coalition. This one elected a mayor of Chicago and 
might have accomplished more had Anton Cermak 
(May 9, 1873-March 6, 1933) not been assassinated 
while meeting with president-elect Franklin Roose- 
velt. 

Cermak was born in Kladno, Bohemia, now 
part of the Czech Republic. Cermak came with his 
family to the United States as an infant, and grew 
up in Braidwood, a coal-mining community south- 
west of Chicago. He made his way to Chicago as a 
teenager with limited education but great ambition. 

Like other newcomers, Cermak naturally gravi- 
tated to the Democratic Party, but with a differ- 
ence — this regular politician never saw a need to 
fear or war on reformers. His tolerance for diverse 
viewpoints served Cermak in a career that saw his 
election as alderman, bailiff of the municipal court, 
president of the Cook County Board, and state rep- 
resentative. 

Cermak's politics combined advocacy for immi- 
grants with opposition to Prohibition. For years be- 
fore passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, Cer- 
mak led the United Societies, an umbrella group 
that fought to keep legal the sale and consumption 
of liquor. While his standing as a "wet" on the issue 
of Prohibition made enemies, it also had advan- 
tages: By the mid-1920s, when voters later turned 
against the Amendment, Cermak was vindicated. 



156 



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A N D L E R 



RAYMOND 



Cermak spent the 1920s courting other ethnic 
groups so that in 1931 he was ready to run for 
mayor of Chicago. Opposing him was Republican 
William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson. The three-term 
incumbent derided Cermak as "Pushcart Tony," a 
reference to Cermak's first real job in Chicago. Cer- 
mak's reply could have been a motto for Democrats 
in the Age of Roosevelt: "It's true I didn't come over 
on the Mayflower, but I came over as soon as I 
could." Cermak even reached out, in a way, to Afri- 
can Americans. In the 1927 mayor's race, Demo- 
crats circulated the rumor that a Republican win 
would lead to a black takeover of the city, but Cer- 
mak refused to engage in such demagogy. The Chi- 
cago electorate picked Cermak by nearly 200,000 
votes, and no Republican mayoral candidate has 
won Chicago since. Unfortunately for the victor, 
vote totals did not translate into the money neces- 
sary to keep government running. The city ran on 
funds generated mostly by real estate taxes, and 
with nearly half the working population unem- 
ployed, Chicagoans had stopped paying their taxes. 
Cermak soon was forced to slash budgets and lay 
off workers. At one point, the city owed its employ- 
ees some $40 million in back wages. Cermak went 
to Washington, D.C., requesting assistance from 
the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 
only to have the Republican-controlled RFC turn 
him down. 

Because Cermak was a committed "wet" who 
favored the speedy repeal of Prohibition, he favored 
Al Smith over Franklin Roosevelt as Democratic 
nominee for president in 1932. It was a decision 
that ultimately cost Cermak his life. In February 
1933 Cermak traveled to Miami to repair his rela- 
tionship with the president-elect. Aiming at the 
next president, assassin Joseph Zangara instead 
shot Chicago's mayor, who was sitting alongside 
Roosevelt in an open car. Cermak died of his 
wounds three weeks later. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bukowski, Douglas. Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the 
Politics of Image. 1998. 

Gottfried, Alex. Boss Cermak of Chicago: A Study of Politi- 
cal Leadership. 1962. 

Douglas Bukowski 



CHANDLER, RAYMOND 

American writer of hard-boiled detective novels, 
Raymond Chandler (July 23, 1888-March 26, 1959) 
helped develop the genre and stretch its limitations. 
Born in Chicago, Chandler was seven years old 
when his parents divorced and his mother took him 
to England to live. He attended Dulwich College, a 
preparatory school, from 1896 to 1905. In 1907 he 
became a British subject. After working as a civil 
servant and a reporter, and after publishing poems, 
literary essays, and fiction without achieving much 
success, Chandler returned to the United States in 
1912. In World War I he served at the western front 
with the Canadian army. After the war Chandler 
worked as a reporter and bookkeeper in California. 
He married Cissy Pascal, a woman seventeen years 
his senior, in 1924. In 1932, after ten years with the 
Dabney Oil Syndicate, he was fired for drinking, 
absenteeism, and involvement with women who 
worked for him. 

Out of work, he began writing "hard-boiled de- 
tective stories," which were published in Black Mask 
and other detective magazines. His first novel, The 
Big Sleep (1939), introduced Philip Marlowe as 
Chandler's detective and narrator. Marlowe's sar- 
donic wisecracks and idealistic outlook gave The Big 
Sleep and the novels that followed a style and sub- 
stance that moved them beyond the limitations of 
the detective novel towards the techniques and 
concerns of the serious novel, particularly those 
concerns raised by the Depression. Marlowe, as 
Chandler's spokesman in the novels, pointedly 
comments on class and wealth as corrupting influ- 
ences on American society. Chandler's large cast of 
characters provides a cross section of American life, 
and his tangled plots and the atmosphere of the 
urban jungle suggest the complexities of the mod- 
ern world. Marlowe's idealism leads him to seek 
meaning, order, and justice in the increasingly 
meaningless, chaotic, and corrupt world, and Mar- 
lowe's inevitable failure and disillusionment at the 
end of the novels make him a particularly modern 
antihero. Chandler's most highly regarded novels 
besides The Big Sleep are Farewell, My Lovely (1940), 
The High Window (1942), Lady in the Lake (1943), 
The Little Sister (1949), and The LongGoodbye (1954). 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



157 



A P L I N 



A R L I E 



Chandler also was a successful screenwriter, most 
notably for such movies as Double Indemnity (1944), 
The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train 
(1951). Devastated by his wife's death in 1954, 
Chandler attempted suicide and was hospitalized 
several times for depression and alcohol-related 
health problems before he died on March 26, 1959. 

See Also: HARD-BOILED DETECTIVES; HOLLYWOOD 
AND THE FILM INDUSTRY; LITERATURE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gardiner, Dorothy, and Kathrine Sorley Walker, eds. 
Raymond Chandler Speaking. 1977. 

Hiney, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography. 1997. 

MacShane, Frank. The Life of Raymond Chandler. 1976. 

Speir, Jerry. Raymond Chandler. 1981. 

Austin Wilson 



CHAPLIN, CHARLIE 

Charles Spencer ("Charlie") Chaplin (April 16, 
1889-December 25, 1977), motion-picture actor, 
director, producer, and writer, was born in London, 
England, to two music-hall singers who separated 
soon after his birth. Chaplin experienced a difficult 
and often unstable childhood. A talented mimic, he 
began acting early, and by 1913 the successful 
music-hall performer signed a movie contract to 
work for Keystone's Mack Sennett. Chaplin quickly 
developed a comic persona, the Tramp, which 
launched him to stardom, and began to write and 
direct his short comedies. By 1919 he had built his 
own movie studio and cofounded United Artists 
with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. 
Griffith. During the 1920s Chaplin shifted from 
two-reel shorts to feature-length films, most nota- 
bly The Gold Rush (1925). 

During the Depression Chaplin completed one 
film, City Lights (1931), and made two more, Mod- 
ern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). City 
Lights was planned before the stock market crash of 
1929 and is best considered Chaplin's farewell to 
the 1920s, particularly for its satirical portrayal of an 
urban millionaire who is generous when drunk but 
suicidal when sober. 



The Depression left its imprint on both Modern 
Times and The Great Dictator. In 1931 and 1932 
Chaplin took a fifteen-month world tour, which 
demonstrated his global fame and confronted him 
with the suffering of the Depression. Responding to 
calls for socially relevant works, Chaplin began 
work in 1933 on a project, The Masses, that was re- 
leased in 1936 as Modern Times. Although it resem- 
bled earlier Chaplin features with its visual comedy, 
romance, and pathos, Modern Times was more topi- 
cal than his previous films, alluding to the Depres- 
sion in images of frantic assembly lines, closed fac- 
tories, and street clashes between protesters and 
the police. Ideologically progressive, the film sym- 
pathized with common people like his Tramp and 
the gamin, and criticized authority figures like the 
factory owner or the policeman who kills the 
gamin's father. Critics and moviegoers were divid- 
ed in their response to this new and more socially 
aware Chaplin. 

Chaplin's next film, The Great Dictator, aligned 
itself with another progressive cause of the later 
Depression years: antifascism. A pointed satirical 
attack on fascism, the film starred Chaplin in two 
roles — a gentle Jewish barber and the dictator of 
Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel. Chaplin conceived the 
film in the late 1930s, halted production on it briefly 
when World War II erupted in 1939, then decided 
that even during wartime, it was important to use 
humor to combat what he considered to be cruel 
totalitarianism. The Great Dictator was Chaplin's 
biggest box-office success in its initial domestic re- 
lease. Recognizing its popularity, Franklin D. Roo- 
sevelt asked Chaplin to read the film's final speech 
at a presidential inaugural ball in 1941. By the end 
of the Depression, Chaplin was developing the rep- 
utation of a politically aware and progressive film- 
maker; that reputation would later cause him prob- 
lems after the Cold War set in, when he faced 
accusations that he was a Communist. 

See Also: FASCISM; HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM 
INDUSTRY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gehring, Wes D. Charlie Chaplin, a Bio-Bibliography. 
1983. 

Lynn, Kenneth Schuyler. Charlie Chaplin and His Times. 
1997. 



158 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A R I T Y 




The Salvation Army's charitable services during the Great Depression included meals and lodging for transients. This 1938 
photograph by Ben Shahn shows the organization's Newark, Ohio, offices. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, 
FSA/OWI Collection 



Lyons, Timothy J. Charles Chaplin, a Guide to References 
and Resources. 1979. 

Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture the Evo- 
lution of a Star Image. 1989. 

Robinson, David. Chaplin, His Life and Art. 1989. 

Charles J. Maland 



CHARITY 

Prior to the Great Depression, private charity 
played a critical, if supplemental, role in the na- 
tion's patchwork relief system. Although public and 
private charities grew considerably between 1910 
and 1929, private charity constituted barely one 
quarter of all aid in 1929. But because private agen- 



cies administered most relief funds, their values 
shaped virtually all public programs that emerged 
before and during the 1930s. 

Between 1929 and 1931 most politicians and 
professionals believed that the expansion of private 
charity would help the nation overcome its devas- 
tating economic problems. Through emergency ap- 
peals, private charity quadrupled to $170 million in 
two years — 34 percent of all relief funds. As its pri- 
mary funders, the community chests remained 
strong proponents of private charity, as did the 
Herbert Hoover administration, which extolled its 
virtues despite clear evidence that private charities 
lacked adequate resources to cope with rising un- 
employment. 

The economic crisis quickly exhausted even the 
best efforts of private charities. For example, the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



159 



CHARITY 




Police officers in New York City augment civilian charity efforts by distributing eggs and bread to the needy in 1930. Library of 
Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection 



number of families on relief in Detroit increased 
from four thousand to forty-five thousand between 
October 1930 and January 1931. In Cleveland, near- 
ly ten times as many families received charily in 
mid-1932 than had received it in 1929. 

In 1930, the community chests raised $84.8 mil- 
lion in 386 cities. This was only an $8 million in- 
crease over the 1929 total and it had to be distribut- 
ed among 33 more cities. Even a model city such as 
Philadelphia, which was spending about $1 million 
each month on private charity, could not cope with 
the increasing need. Funds were stretched so thin 
that 57,000 families received between $1.50 and $2 
per person per week, plus a little coal, some food, 



and used clothing. By November 1931, Philadelphia 
had exhausted its charitable funds. 

Although private charities feared that an ex- 
panded public welfare system would hurt their abil- 
ity to raise funds, by late 1931 they recognized that 
existing networks of relief could not adequately re- 
spond to increased demands for assistance, espe- 
cially in major cities. Conflicts emerged, however, 
between city officials, who faced growing pressure 
to act, and business leaders, who argued that such 
actions would stifle economic recovery. 

Private charities also could not raise new re- 
sources because their primary donors — working 
and middle-class people — lacked the income to 



160 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A V E Z 



DENNIS 



contribute. By late 1931 their national organizations 
reluctantly conceded that federal intervention was 
imperative. The 1932 Republican platform, howev- 
er, affirmed the parly's position that relief was pri- 
marily a private responsibility. 

As relief programs expanded during the De- 
pression, traditional distinctions between the "wor- 
thy" and "unworthy" poor persisted. In New York, 
private charities classified the newly unemployed 
separately and assigned their cases to unpaid junior 
staff. Throughout the 1930s, racial discrimination 
continued to create barriers for the receipt of charity 
among African Americans, although they were 
twice as likely as whites to be certified as eligible. 

The policies of the Franklin Roosevelt adminis- 
tration continued such practices even as they dra- 
matically expanded public relief. In January 1935 
Roosevelt spoke of the differences between the 
"productive" and "unproductive" poor, and, at the 
height of the New Deal, the government continued 
to assume that private charity was best suited to ad- 
dress the needs of the "old poor." Public relief pro- 
grams maintained a central feature of private chari- 
ties — their emphasis on investigation, which 
persisted long after the Depression. 

See Also: BREADLINES; PHILANTHROPY; SOUP 
KITCHENS. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Axinn, lune, and Mark Stern. Social Welfare: A History of 
the American Response to Need, 5th edition. 2001. 

Katz, Michael B. The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the 
American Welfare State. 2001. 

Margolin, Leslie. Under the Cover of Kindness: The Inven- 
tion of Social Work. 1997. 

Patterson, James. America's Struggle against Poverty in the 
Twentieth Century. 2000. 

Watkins, T. H. The Great Depression: America in the 1930s. 
1993. 

Wenocur, Stanley, and Michael Reisch. From Charity to 
Enterprise: The Development of American Social Work 
in a Market Economy. 1989. 

Michael Reisch 



CHAVEZ, DENNIS 



Dennis Chavez (April 8, 1888-November 18, 1962) 
was a U.S. Senator from New Mexico. One of only 
a handful of Mexican Americans ever elected to the 
Senate, Chavez ardently supported the New Deal 
to bring jobs and educational opportunities to his 
constituents. 

Born Dionisio Chavez in Los Chaves, New 
Mexico, the future New Dealer entered school for 
the first time in 1895 when his family moved to Al- 
buquerque. He quit after the seventh grade to help 
support his parents and eight siblings. While work- 
ing full time as a delivery boy, Chavez continued his 
education by reading extensively. In 1917, he re- 
ceived a Senate clerkship and eventually parlayed 
this opportunity into admission at Georgetown 
University Law School in Washington, D.C. At this 
time, the only requirement to enter law school was 
satisfactory completion of entrance examinations. 
Chavez received his degree at the age of thirty-two 
and returned to Albuquerque to practice law. 

Although his father had served as a Republican 
precinct captain, Republican neglect of his Mexi- 
can-American neighborhood led Chavez to register 
as a Democrat. In 1922, he won his first political 
seat in the New Mexico House of Representatives. 
Eight years later, he entered the U.S. House of Rep- 
resentatives, receiving much of his support from the 
large Hispanic electorate in the state. In 1934, Cha- 
vez ran for the U.S. Senate but narrowly lost to in- 
cumbent Bronson Cutting and then charged fraud. 
Cutting's sudden death ended the dispute, and 
Chavez received an appointment to the vacant seat. 
He would remain in the Senate until his death in 
1962. 

In the 1930s, Chavez firmly backed the New 
Deal, advocated neutrality, and sought to improve 
relations with Latin America. Mostly associated 
with the Works Progress Administration, Chavez 
pushed the agency to provide jobs to New Mexico's 
poor and to use its funds to construct schools to en- 
able others to follow his footsteps out of poverty. 
He supported the Good Neighbor policy of Frank- 
lin Roosevelt that ended U.S. intervention in Latin 
America and, in 1939, he advocated recognition of 
Francisco Franco's Spain as a further means of im- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



161 



CHILDREN 



N D ADOLESCENTS 



proving relations with the countries to the south of 
the U.S. border. 

Still, Chavez did not become a national figure 
until 1944, when he introduced a bill prohibiting 
discrimination in employment on the basis of race, 
creed, color, national origin, or ancestry. The legis- 
lation died, but Chavez claimed a notable place in 
history by laying the groundwork for subsequent 
civil rights legislation. 

See Also: LATINO AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; MEXICO, GREAT 
DEPRESSION IN; RACE AND ETHNIC 
RELATIONS. 



The economic Depression of the 1930s led many 
couples to have even fewer children, and a growing 
number of young men who were unable to find em- 
ployment postponed marriage. By 1940, individuals 
under twenty years of age made up only 36 percent 
of the nation's total population, and the country's 
median age had risen to 29. Interestingly, as chil- 
dren and adolescents became a smaller proportion 
of the nation's total population, they became a 
more visible part of public policy and American cul- 
ture. Changes in public policy and culture that took 
place during the 1930s established a universal defi- 
nition of American childhood for the balance of the 
twentieth century. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Lujan, Roy. "Dennis Chavez and the National Agenda." 
New Mexico Historical Review 74, no. 1 (1999): 55-74. 

Nance, Arden R. "Partisan Politics and Progress: Roose- 
velt's New Deal in New Mexico." Password 45, no. 
1 (2000): 32-40. 

Caryn E. Neumann 



CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS, 
IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON 

The 1930s marked a seminal decade in the history 
of American childhood. The onset of the Great De- 
pression hit children and adolescents hard, but at 
the same time new policies and changing public at- 
titudes signaled positive changes for America's 
youngest citizens. Since the mid-nineteenth centu- 
ry, Americans had been moving toward a new defi- 
nition of childhood and adolescence. Modern 
childhood was viewed as a period distinct from 
adulthood and separate from adult responsibilities. 
For over one hundred years, longer life expectancy 
and declining birth rates had lowered children's 
proportion of the total U.S. population. In 1830, in- 
dividuals nineteen years of age and under (the U.S. 
Census Bureau's definition of children) constituted 
56 percent of the country's population with a na- 
tional median age of 16.7. In 1930, children's pro- 
portion of the total population had declined to 38 
percent, and the nation's median age rose to 26.4. 



MODERN CHILDHOOD AND THE ONSET OF 
THE GREAT DEPRESSION 

Before the onset of the Great Depression, chil- 
dren's diminished share of the total population par- 
alleled a general improvement in their lives. An es- 
timated U.S. infant mortality rate of 130 deaths per 
1,000 live births in 1900 fell to 85.8 deaths in 1920 
and to 64.6 in 1930. By 1930 most states had passed 
compulsory school attendance laws for those under 
sixteen, established public high schools (although 
many were segregated), and placed restrictions on 
the industrial employment of young people under 
fourteen years of age. In addition, medical science 
had made great strides in treating and preventing 
childhood diseases such as diarrhea, rickets, and 
diphtheria. 

Child welfare experts attending President Her- 
bert Hoover's 1930 White House Conference on 
Child Health and Protection pointed to the prog- 
ress that had been made for American children. In 
his opening address, Hoover waxed sympathetic 
about the value of children, but there were few pos- 
itive results from the 1930 conference. The Hoover 
administration seemed to turn a blind eye to the 
worsening economic conditions for youngsters and 
their families. Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman 
Wilbur, a medical doctor, argued in 1932 that the 
economic Depression could actually be good for 
children. Families with less money to spend, Wilbur 
concluded, would be forced to depend upon each 
other and live a more wholesome home life. 

It was obvious to many others that a growing 
number of American children and their families 



16Z 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



CHILDREN 



A N D 



ADOLESCENTS 



were living in miserable conditions during the 
worsening economic crisis. By the time Franklin D. 
Roosevelt took office in March 1933 it was clear that 
children were experiencing some of the Depres- 
sion's worst consequences. While the national di- 
vorce rate did not rise, desertion became more 
common. Although infant mortality rates had con- 
tinued to fall during 1931 and 1932, they were 
climbing again by 1933 for the first time since such 
data had been collected in the United States. With 
unemployment rates at 25 percent, many families 
that had been middle-class during the 1920s 
slipped into poverty, contributing to rising inci- 
dence of hunger and malnutrition among children 
and adolescents. Psychological stress on adults re- 
sulted in domestic violence and child abuse. School 
districts ran out of money, classrooms became more 
crowded, school years were shortened, and many 
young people dropped out of school to seek work. 
Cash strapped business owners and parents ig- 
nored or intentionally violated existing child labor 
laws. Franklin Roosevelt noted that one-third of 
America's citizens were ill-housed, ill-clothed, and 
ill-fed. Of those, the majority were children. 



A NEW DEAL FOR CHILDREN 

Child welfare advocates attending the U.S. 
Children's Bureau's Child Health Recovery Confer- 
ence on October 6, 1933, called for emergency food 
relief, school lunch programs, funds to pay the sala- 
ries of public nurses, and reimbursement plans to 
pay private physicians to care for needy children. 
Government officials from the U.S. Children's Bu- 
reau and the Federal Emergency Relief Administra- 
tion (FERA) told attendees that more than six mil- 
lion children lived in families on federal and state 
relief. Responding to conference recommendations, 
the FERA and Children's Bureau quickly imple- 
mented the Child Health Recovery Program 
(CHRP). This two-year effort concentrated on pro- 
viding emergency food and medical care to Ameri- 
ca's poorest children, especially those living in rural 
areas. In the end CHRP did not live up to advo- 
cates' ambitious expectations, but it marked the 
first New Deal relief program directed at children 
and the first established at the federal level to help 
the nation's youngest citizens. 



-'i^ 




, 












The children of struggling sharecroppers, like this child in 
Alabama in 1936, often worked long hours in the fields. 
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI 
Collection 



The 1935 Social Security Act was the New 
Deal's next generation of programs and its most 
ambitious. Besides the better known old-age pen- 
sion plan, the 1935 Social Security Act included 
three specific programs for children: Titles IV, V, 
and VII. Title IV, the Aid to Dependent Children 
program (ADC, later renamed Aid to Families with 
Dependent Children), replaced the widely varied 
state-based mothers' pension systems. As state 
governments ran out of money for mothers' pen- 
sions, families turned to FERA welfare funds. This 
circumstance ran contrary to the U.S. Children's 
Bureau's established argument that mothers' pen- 
sion recipients were entitled to long-term aid, not 
simply emergency unemployment relief. Pension 
advocates wanted to keep mothers at home with 
their children and out of the wage-labor force. The 
federal ADC program was founded on this philoso- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



163 



I L D R E N 



N D ADOLESCENTS 




Like many children during the Great Depression, these sons of unemployed miners at Miller Hill, West Virginia, in 1937 faced 
poverty when their parents lost their jobs. National Archives and Records Administration 



phy. It initially defined those eligible for aid as any 
child under sixteen who lived with a parent or close 
relative as caregiver, but had no breadwinner in the 
home. Amendments to Title IV in 1939 expanded 
the program to sixteen and seventeen year olds. 
ADC established the idea that in the absence of pa- 
rental support, the federal government was ulti- 
mately responsible for needy children. States pro- 
vided additional allotments to match federal ADC 
funds, but payments were meager and caregivers 
(mostly single mothers) received no stipend for 
their own support. This situation left ADC families 
in perpetual poverty. Furthermore, at the state level 
many blacks and minorities, as well as youngsters' 
whose mothers were judged as "immoral," found 
themselves denied aid. Over time the debate con- 



cerning who "deserved" ADC made it the most 
controversial part of the Social Security Act. 

Title V of the Social Security Act provided fed- 
eral money for maternal and child health care for 
needy women and children. Title V was the only 
health care program included in the 1935 act, mak- 
ing poor children and pregnant mothers the only 
recipients of federally subsidized health care until 
passage of the 1965 Medicare Act. 

Title VII focused on young people with "special 
needs." The Children's Bureau estimated that there 
were approximately 300,000 orphaned, abandoned, 
or physically and/or mentally handicapped children 
living in the United States who were dependent on 
the state for their support. By 1935, only one-fourth 



161. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS 



of the states had established county welfare boards 
to look after the needs of such children. Title VII 
made the health and well-being of dependent chil- 
dren a joint federal-state responsibility. 

The Great Depression also focused attention on 
adolescents. In 1933, the Children's Bureau esti- 
mated that 23,000 adolescents traveled the country 
riding the rails and hitchhiking along highways in 
search of work. While some were females, most ad- 
olescent "hobos" were males. Many felt they were 
a burden on their already strapped families and hit 
the road to find work. The unemployment rate for 
American boys sixteen to twenty years of age was 
twice that of adults. Many people were sympathetic 
to the plight of unemployed youth, but some also 
charged that homeless boys were dangerous juve- 
nile delinquents. The infamous Scottsboro Boys' 
case, in which nine black youths were accused of 
raping two white women in Alabama in 1931, and 
other high-profile criminal trials fueled such fears. 
In March 1933 Congress established the Civilian 
Conservation Corps (CCC). For the next nine years 
the CCC employed more than 2.5 million males 
aged seventeen through twenty-three. Enrollees 
built recreational facilities and engaged in land con- 
servation work. Life in the CCC was regimented 
and many officials enforced Jim Crow rules within 
the camps. CCC participants sometimes served as 
scapegoats for local community problems, but 
overall, the CCC was one of the New Deal's most 
popular relief efforts, ending only after U.S. en- 
trance into World War II. 

Like the CCC, the National Youth Administra- 
tion (NYA, 1935-1943) was also a popular New 
Deal program directed at American youth. As a di- 
vision of the Works Progress Administration 
(WPA), the NYA provided part-time work-relief for 
high school and college-aged students, as well as 
full-time jobs for unemployed young people no 
longer in school. The NYA was open to both males 
and females and had a Division of Negro Affairs 
headed by Mary McLeod Bethune. Like the CCC, 
it was a popular program that ended only after the 
United States entered World War II. Another WPA 
program, day nursery schools, actually expanded 
during World War II. Organized to provide jobs for 
unemployed teachers, these high quality pre- 



schools opened to children of all races and set the 
standard for preschool education throughout the 
United States. 

Another side of the New Deal focused on get- 
ting young people out of the wage-labor force. The 
1938 Fair Labor Standards Act successfully wrote 
child labor restrictions into federal law for the first 
time. It outlawed the employment of individuals 
under sixteen in the manufacture of goods shipped 
across state lines. It also set regulations for the em- 
ployment of sixteen and seventeen year olds, and 
prohibited all minors from working in specific in- 
dustries. The law ignored young people who 
worked in agriculture or domestic service, but the 
economic crisis of the 1930s increased pressure on 
politicians to end child labor. For the first time in 
history, American children were expected to spend 
more of their time in school than on the job. 



YOUTH CULTURE AND THE LEGACY OF 
THE GREAT DEPRESSION 

This fact underscores the new status of child- 
hood by the 1930s. Popular radio shows appealed 
to young consumers, even during dire economic 
times. Films featuring the "Our Gang" kids, and 
child stars such as Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, 
and Shirley Temple depicted an idealized child- 
hood absent from adult responsibilities. Children's 
lives on the big screen were filled with activities ex- 
perienced with peers, not adults. By the late 1930s 
a majority of seventeen year olds attended high 
school for the first time in the nation's history. The 
quality of schools varied widely, but communities 
accepted the notion that education through high 
school was a public responsibility. 

The shift to high schools as a universal experi- 
ence for American adolescents reinforced the de- 
velopment of a distinct youth culture. Dating 
moved adolescent boys and girls far from the 
watchful eyes of parents. Clubs such as the Boy 
Scouts, Girl Scouts, Young Men's Christian Associ- 
ation, Young Women's Christian Association, 
Young Men's Hebrew Association, and the Depart- 
ment of Agriculture's 4-H Clubs gained new mem- 
bers. Racial and ethnic segregation persisted, but 
comic books and other "kid" centered aspects of 
popular culture crossed social divisions. Highlight- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



165 



I L D R E N 



N D 



ADOLESCENTS 




Several New Deal programs offered sports and recreation opportunities to children around the country. This group of boys 
exercises under the direction of a National Youth Administration counselor at a recreation center in Nampa, Idaho, in 1936. 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



ing the significance of youth culture, a 1941 article 
in Popular Science introduced the word teenager into 
the American print vocabulary. The important mat- 
ter of growing up became the focus for most chil- 
dren and teens. The economic crisis somewhat hin- 
dered the development of a commercialized youth 
culture dancing to the rhythm of swing music, but 
the concentration of most young people into high 
schools strengthened the trend. 

The dramatic crisis that engaged Americans 
during the 1930s clearly shaped the lives of children 
and youth. Individuals who grew up during the 
Great Depression were also the first generation to 
experience a government that recognized a federal 
responsibility for protecting and shaping the lives 
of the nation's youngest citizens. Racial, gender, 
and ethnic discrimination persisted, but the idea 
that every child should have the right to basic eco- 



nomic security, a childhood separate from adult re- 
sponsibilities, and a high school education was ac- 
cepted as an American entitlement. 

See Also: AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN (ADC); 
AMERICAN YOUTH CONGRESS; CIVILIAN 
CONSERVATION CORPS (CCC); EDUCATION; 
FAMILY AND HOME, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON; HEALTH AND NUTRITION; 
NATIONAL YOUTH ADMINISTRATION (NYA); 
SOCIAL SECURITY ACT. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Berkowitz, Edward D. America's Welfare State: From Roo- 
sevelt to Reagan. 1991. 

Bremner, Robert H., et. al, eds. Children and Youth in 
America: A Documentary History. 1970-1774. 

Graff, Harvey J., ed. Growing Up in America: Historical Ex- 
periences. 1987. 



166 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



CITIES 



A N D 



S U 



R B S 



Hawes, Joseph M. Children between the Wars: American 
Childhood, 1920-1940. 1997. 

Illick, Joseph E. American Childhoods. 2002. 

Kett, Joseph F. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 
1790 to the Present. 1977. 

Lindenmeyer, Kriste. "A Right to Childhood" : The U.S. 
Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-1946. 
1997. 

Reiman, Richard A. The New Deal and American Youth: 
Ideas and Ideals in a Depression Decade. 1992. 

U.S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the Unit- 
ed States, Colonial Times to 1970. Bicentennial edi- 
tion, part 1. 1976. 

Kriste Lindenmeyer 



CIO. See CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL 
ORGANIZATIONS. 



CITIES AND SUBURBS 

With brute force, the Great Depression hit Ameri- 
ca's metropolitan areas, the centers of economic 
growth during the 1920s. The Wall Street crash 
nearly halted construction of skyscrapers and resi- 
dential housing, then staggered output of durable 
goods. Pittsburgh steel mills, automobile assembly 
lines in Detroit and Flint, and tire factories in Cleve- 
land and Toledo were all stilled. Declines in freight 
shipments laid off thousands from the docks of San 
Francisco, Memphis, and New Orleans, and 
slashed output at the American Locomotive Corpo- 
ration in Schenectady. By 1933, idle blast furnaces 
at Birmingham's Tennessee Coal and Iron brought 
to that city the highest unemployment in the urban 
South. Only a few cities weathered the storm. 
Miami and Phoenix filled with sun worshippers, 
federal spending on Hoover Dam buoyed Las 
Vegas, and Washington, D.C., became the New 
Deal's company town. 

THE RELIEF CRISIS 

Although millions of jobless lived in the cities, 
few city governments distributed outdoor relief 
(with the notable exception of Boston). Most relied 
on voluntary charities and lodging shelters. Across 



the South, businesses moved whites into jobs held 
by African Americans, and New Orleans Mayor T. 
Semmes Walmsley required municipal employees 
to show poll-tax receipts. Officials in the Southwest 
deported aliens; Los Angeles alone repatriated over 
eleven thousand Mexicans, and the city dispatched 
police to turn away migrants at California's borders. 
By the fall of 1933, 59 percent of the Phoenix's Mex- 
ican population was on relief, compared to 11 per- 
cent of Anglos. Atlanta's jobless rate reached 25 
percent, but was triple that in black neighborhoods. 

Business-led voluntarism tried to stem the di- 
saster. Mayor's committees in Buffalo and Nashville 
prevailed on industrial leaders to stagger layoffs, 
and Buffalo's Man-a-Block and Household Helper 
schemes scrounged for part-time jobs. Philadel- 
phia's (Horatio Gates Lloyd) Committee for Unem- 
ployment Relief raised $4 million in private contri- 
butions. But when voluntary resources were 
exhausted in 1931, cities had to look elsewhere. The 
business-led Allegheny County Emergency Associ- 
ation launched a "Pittsburgh Plan" for quasi-public 
improvements, while Kansas City boss Tom Pren- 
dergast corralled the chamber of commerce behind 
a $50 million "Ten Year Plan" for boulevards and 
other public works. New York City's Welfare Coun- 
cil forced Mayor James J. Walker to create a depart- 
ment of public welfare. 

In suburban New Jersey towns, governments 
slashed public works, chiefly road and sewer re- 
pairs, while regional school districts juggled the loss 
in per-pupil reimbursements. Communities forced 
salary givebacks from police, firemen, and teachers, 
the latter stereotyped as single and female. Chari- 
ties attempted to serve the "invisible" white-collar 
jobless in the suburbs. Ramsey's Committee of the 
Unemployed searched for odd jobs and collected 
funds from churches and fundraisers like the Young 
Ladies Community Club's "prosperity bridge." 
Ridgewood disbursed charitable aid via the Social 
Service Association, then in late 1931 formed the 
Emergency Relief Bureau to provide direct relief 
and made-work. By December 1933 the Ridgewood 
Taxpayers Association obtained a voluntary 5 per- 
cent salary cut from teachers, who acknowledged a 
"clear understanding of civic affairs." 

The relief crisis encouraged labor and liberal ac- 
tivists to challenge business primacy. In Detroit, 



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Thousands of unemployed urban Americans relied on -private charity during the early years of the Depression, before full-scale 
federal relief efforts were underway. These men lined up outside a soup kitchen in Chicago in 1931. The food was reportedly being 
supplied by the gangster Al Capone. National Archives and Records Administration 



Frank Murphy scored an upset mayoral victory in 
1930 over the issue of relief levels. The election in 
Minneapolis of Farmer-Laborite William A. Ander- 
son touched off demonstrations that ousted the 
conservative relief administrator. But strong Re- 
publican city-manager governments in Cleveland 
and Cincinnati resisted deficits to finance relief, as 
did property owners' leagues in Denver and Hous- 
ton. Conservative bankers in New York, who 
held Detroit's commercial paper, forced slashes 
in Motor City relief, and Rochester's banking 
fraternity threatened a credit strike against the city 
manager's budget. In spring 1933, the House of 
Morgan and Chase National Bank boycotted the 
underwriting of New York municipal bonds until 



the city agreed to cut relief and hold down property 
taxes. 



A GUARDED PARTNERSHIP 

In May 1932, big-city mayors, led by Murphy of 
Detroit, pleaded for credit from the Reconstruction 
Finance Corporation, and in February 1933 they 
launched the U.S. Conference of Mayors to de- 
mand $5 billion for self-liquidating public works. 
They nudged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ac- 
cept federal emergency relief, and thereafter lever- 
aged much New Deal spending, notably via the 
Civil Works Administration (CWA) and Works 
Progress Administration (WPA). Such urban lead- 
ers as New York settlement head Mary K. Sim- 



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khovitch and Cleveland activist Ernest J. Bonn, who 
spearheaded the nation's first municipal housing 
authority, demanded slum clearance and public 
housing. 

Localities responded guardedly, notably Balti- 
more, Richmond, and Portland, Oregon, where 
Democrats who favored states' rights attacked fed- 
eral intervention. Although Roosevelt was reelected 
on an urban tide in 1936, his sweep of 104 of the 
country's 106 cities with populations greater than 
100,000 blanketed pockets of disenchantment. 
Roosevelt carried 68.3 percent of the vote in Balti- 
more, including bellwether Polish and Italian 
wards, but in Philadelphia, he suffered a falloff 
among Irish and working-class Italians. Chicago's 



African Americans were weaned from Republican 
"race men" less by Roosevelt's appeal than by 
Mayor Edward Kelly's deft politics of recognition. 
Doubling his support from Chicago blacks, Roose- 
velt still garnered only 49 percent in 1936. 

New Deal welfare spending did not bring a 
"Last Hurrah" for urban political machines. Relief 
was politicized in Jersey City, where Frank Hague 
controlled Public Works Administration (PWA) 
spending for the Margaret Hague Medical Center; 
and in Memphis, whose boss, Edward Hull Crump, 
tithed WPA employees and directed Army Corps of 
Engineers projects on the Mississippi River. The 
power of Tammany Hall had declined in New York 
City before Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia wielded New 



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CITIES AND SUBURBS 




Unemployed union members march in Camden, New Jersey, in 1935 to draw attention to their plight. Such parades were held in 
many cities during the Depression as massive numbers of disgruntled and desperate unemployed men and women demanded jobs 
and relief. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



Deal patronage to forge his own reform coalition, 
and Bruce Stave concludes that David Lawrence's 
Democratic organization in Pittsburgh "had its 
roots in the New Deal." 



MODERNIST URBANISM 

In the absence of a national urban policy, feder- 
al programs rested largely on 1920s social theory 
and modernist design: assumptions about the "so- 
cial disorganization" of the slums, the importance 
of the "neighborhood unit," and economies of scale 
that civic centers and hospital complexes provided 
the sprawling metropolis. Bauhaus architects such 



as Marcel Breuer, the visionary architect Le Corbu- 
sier, famous for his "tower in the park," and indus- 
trial designers like Norman Bel Geddes helped 
popularize the Art Deco streamlined slab look, 
which has been dubbed PWA Moderne. Against 
machine-age efficiencies, proponents of small- 
scale English "garden cities" made little headway. 
Clarence Stein and Lewis Mumford of the Regional 
Planning Association of America envisioned new 
towns in suburban greenbelts. Although Resettle- 
ment Administration head Rexford G. Tugwell 
sympathized with this program, his agency realized 
only three such cities. 



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CITIES AND SUBURBS 




Many American cities confronted problems of homelessness and substandard housing during the Depression. These shacks on the 
outskirts of Paterson, New Jersey, in 1935 housed about twenty-five people, most of them unemployed textile workers. National 
Archives and Records Administration 



Federal relief dollars enhanced modern urban- 
ization that was already underway. Nashville and 
New York finished civic centers with court houses 
and state office buildings, although the completion 
of the Federal Triangle on Pennsylvania Avenue in 
Washington, D.C., proved the most imposing proj- 
ect. The WPA financed the removal of trolley tracks 
in 224 cities, replacing unsightly rails with green 
medians and smooth asphalt. Planning depart- 
ments designed schemes for traffic separation, in- 
cluding beltways around central business districts, 
a dream of vehicular flow inspired by the U.S. Bu- 
reau of Public Roads' Toll Roads and Free Roads 
(1936) and General Motors' Futurama exhibit at the 
1939 New York World's Fair. Redevelopers cleared 
decaying wharves for waterfront parks in Milwau- 



kee and Des Moines and for riverside parkways like 
Boston's Storrow Drive. 

New York City was transformed under Mayor 
La Guardia and Park Commissioner Robert Moses, 
the city's de facto public works czar. With its own 
WPA jurisdiction, the city accounted for one- 
seventh of all WPA appropriations. The agency re- 
furbished scores of parks and playgrounds, over 
three hundred schools, and miles of parkways, 
along with North Beach Terminal (renamed La 
Guardia Field), the largest single WPA project in 
the country. Federal works also had a significant 
impact on cities in parts of the South, Southwest, 
and West that would later be called the Sunbelt, a 
region starved for such improvements. In New Or- 
leans, the PWA improved sewerage, restored the 



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French Quarter, and built the Charity Hospital, 
then the second largest health-care facility in the 
country. The WPA overhauled Nashville's streets, 
while the PWA built three high schools, including 
Pearl High for African Americans. The WPA in- 
stalled the sewerage and water mains of Albuquer- 
que's Near Heights subdivision and completed Las 
Vegas's War Memorial Building, vital to the town's 
convention economy. California historian Kevin 
Starr argues that federal public works — notably the 
construction of Boulder (Hoover) Dam and Recon- 
struction Finance Corporation (RFC) investment in 
the San Francisco -Oakland Bay Bridge — made pos- 
sible California's future as a sun-drenched, popu- 
lous, vehicular world. 



TRANSFORMATION OF HOUSING 

To revive mortgage financing and construction, 
in June 1933, the Roosevelt administration enacted 
the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), 
which over the next two years saved more than one 
million non-farm residences from foreclosure. Ken- 
neth T. Jackson has pointed out, however, that the 
HOLC's standardized appraisals rated neighbor- 
hoods A to D (with D indicating neighborhoods of 
greatest risk, which were usually inhabited by East- 
ern Europeans, Mexicans, and African Americans) 
and daubed red on "Residential Security Maps." 
Lizabeth Cohen found that 60 percent of HOLC's 
Chicago loans went to C and D neighborhoods, but 
redlining starved home refinance in inner-city De- 
troit and Philadelphia. Discriminatory practices also 
affected Federal Housing Administration mortgage 
insurance. Jackson showed that substantial mort- 
gage relief was provided to A and B districts in sub- 
urban Essex County in New Jersey, and Ladue, 
Clayton, and Webster Groves in Missouri, com- 
pared to scant aid begrudged C and D streets in 
central Newark and Saint Louis. 

Federal support engaged scores of cities in slum 
clearance and low-rent public housing. With data 
from the CWA Real Property Inventory, activists in 
Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Newark documented 
the dimensions of the slum problem and won refer- 
enda for municipal housing authorities. After the 
National Industrial Recovery Act authorized grants 
and loans to municipalities to clear lands and build 



housing, PWA administrator Harold L. Ickes un- 
dertook direct federal construction (until deterred 
by the U.S. Court of Appeals' 1935 Louisville Lands 
decision, which rejected the federal government's 
use of eminent domain). By 1937, the PWA had 
completed 22,600 units at a cost of $130 million, in- 
cluding Atlanta's Techwood Homes, the 10,800- 
room Cleveland Homes limited dividend, and Phil- 
adelphia's Carl Mackley Homes, sponsored by the 
Hosiery Workers Union. Working with more than 
150 municipal authorities after 1937, the U.S. 
Housing Authority sponsored an additional 
130,000 units by 1941. 

The low-rent program dovetailed with local 
priorities by stimulating business districts and 
maintaining segregation. Atlanta's all-white Tech- 
wood cleared blacks from a twelve-block slum near 
downtown, while the all-black (Joel Chandler) Har- 
ris Homes reinforced a racial barrier. The Cleveland 
Housing Authority built three projects in the heart 
of the ghetto, while ignoring black applicants for 
white projects. The PWA constructed the all-white 
Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn and the all-black 
Harlem River Houses, for which the New York City 
Housing Authority kept separate application of- 
fices. The Phoenix Housing Authority built distinct 
projects for Mexicans and blacks in South Phoenix 
and for Anglos on the city's west side. 



URBAN STYLE IN GRITTY TIMES 

The concentration of the unemployed made 
cities spawning grounds for radicalism (although 
Lizabeth Cohen argues that in Chicago, the city's 
common consumer culture provided a basis for 
working-class solidarity). As millions gave up on 
capitalism, self-help groups, such as Denver's Un- 
employed Citizens' League, canvassed for jobs and 
bartered work for food. In New York City, produc- 
tion-for-use enthusiasts organized an Emergency 
Exchange Association, which issued scrip and 
sparked similar exchanges in other cities. Stirred by 
African nationalists, eviction protests broke out in 
Harlem, while Communist Unemployed Councils 
stormed home relief offices. Communists staged 
food riots in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Saint 
Louis, and led the epic Detroit Hunger March on 
Ford Motor Company on March 7, 1932. Strikes 



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also occurred among mortgage payers in Radburn, 
New Jersey, and renters in New York's Sunnyside, 
Queens, both garden city experiments of the 1920s. 
In January 1934, Denver's unemployed invaded the 
Colorado state capitol, demanding legislators fund 
state relief. 

In New York, hundreds of writers, artists, and 
engineers were drawn to the Communist Party's 
Cultural Section and its John Reed Clubs. Eviction 
protests, sit-ins at relief offices, and other grass- 
roots actions mobilized working-class anger behind 
Toledo's Auto Lite strike in 1935 and sit-down 
strikes in Flint and Detroit in 1937. San Francisco's 
left-wing tradition, with its boisterous Embar- 
cadero, energized the general strike of July 1934. 
Cities provided the crucible for the Congress of In- 
dustrial Organization's growth in the mass produc- 
tion industries. 

These urban pressures also transformed race 
relations. Anger at inadequate relief allowances and 
rage against evictions touched off African- 
American self-help efforts and store boycotts in 
Phoenix, in Cleveland's Woodland ghetto, and in 
Harlem along 125th street. After the March 19, 
1935, Harlem riot, Mayor La Guardia appointed a 
commission that spotlighted the ghetto's over- 
crowding. Outrage also spawned Reverend Adam 
Clayton Powell's protest for equal employment, 
which picketed the 1939 New York World's Fair. 

The Depression-era American city gave a gritty, 
hard-edge look to design and culture, while artists 
became determined to document widespread want 
and protest, producing the CWA's Public Works of 
Art Project, the murals of the Treasury Relief Arts 
Project, the Federal Art Project, the American Scene 
style of painting, and Ben Shahn's proletarian real- 
ism. The golden age of revelatory photography in- 
spired Berenice Abbott and Arnold (Weegee) Felig 
in New York and Dorothea Lange in San Francisco, 
while the docudrama of the WPA "Living Newspa- 
per" reflected what historian William Stott has 
called the era's "sublime fidelity to fact." 

THE LEGACY OF THE 1930s 

The Depression accentuated regional discrep- 
ancies in city development. Urban population 
growth, which had risen to 27.3 percent in the 



1920s, sank to 7.9 percent during the 1930s. Slow- 
downs in immigration, slumping birthrates, and the 
end of suburban annexations halted central city 
growth across the industrial North. Five of the 
twelve largest cities in the Midwest (Cleveland, 
Saint Louis, Toledo, Akron, and Youngstown) suf- 
fered losses in population during the 1930s. Among 
cities with a population of 100,000 or more, the only 
ones that grew by 20 percent or more were Wash- 
ington, D.C., and Sunbelt wonders, including 
Miami, San Diego, Houston, and Los Angeles. 
While nearly all the northern metropolitan areas 
grew by single-digit percentages, metropolitan Los 
Angeles jumped by 25 percent, Houston grew 51 
percent, and Miami soared 90 percent. 

Subsidies from Washington sped expansion 
and modernization of municipal government. With 
federal dollars, cities took on more responsibilities, 
ranging from social work for relief recipients and 
felons to WPA day nurseries and city planning. City 
governments streamlined tax assessment and col- 
lection and turned functions over to special author- 
ities, including ports, highways, and toll bridges. 
The tax revolt also hastened the spread of manager 
cities in Michigan, Virginia, Texas, and Florida. In 
the suburbs, lean budgets spurred the amalgama- 
tion of Jacksonville and Duval counties, consolidat- 
ed services in Milwaukee County, and spirited the 
move for "home rule" in Hamilton, Mahoning, 
Cuyahoga, and Stark counties in Ohio. Most met- 
ropolitan counties extended zoning and undertook 
comprehensive plans for parks, parkways, and sub- 
division regulations. Modern executive government 
emerged in Arlington and other northern Virginia 
counties and in Nassau and Westchester, New 
York. 

Nevertheless, the 1930s left American cities 
with an uncertain future. While the New Deal 
spurred an urban-Washington axis, and theoretical 
statements like the National Resources Commit- 
tee's Our Cities (1937) affirmed the role of cities in 
national recovery, the country lacked an urban poli- 
cy. Experts predicted that central cities would re- 
main stagnant, with unemployment at permanent- 
ly high levels. Yet cities were centers of 
revitalization. A zeal to reclaim blighted districts 
would galvanize the Pittsburgh Regional Planning 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT D E P R E S S I N 



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CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS ( C C C ) 



Association's postwar "renaissance" and fuel Rob- 
ert Moses's ambitions for the arterial highways and 
residential towers of modern New York. They re- 
mained the centers of an urban liberalism that 
would define American politics for the next two 
generations. 

See Also: ARCHITECTURE; FEDERAL HOUSING 

ADMINISTRATION (FHA); GREENBELT TOWNS; 
HARLEM RIOT (1935); HOUSING; HUNGER 
MARCHES; LA GUARDIA, FIORELLO H.; MOSES, 
ROBERT; MURPHY, FRANK; PLANNING; SAN 
FRANCISCO GENERAL STRIKE (1934). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Abbott, Berenice. Changing New York. 1939. 
Argersinger, Jo Ann E. Toward a New Deal in Baltimore: 

People and Government in the Great Depression. 1988. 
Biles, Roger. Memphis in the Great Depression. 1986. 
Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the 

Tall of New York. 1975. 
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers 

in Chicago, 1919-1939. 1990. 
Conkin, Paul K. Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal 

Community Program. 1959. 
Dorsett, Lyle W. Tranklin D. Roosevelt and the City Bosses. 

1977. 
Fine, Sidney. Trank Murphy, Vol. 1: The Detroit Years. 

1975. 

Fox, Bonnie R. "Unemployment Relief in Philadelphia, 
1930-1932: A Study of the Depression's Impact on 
Voluntarism." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and 
Biography 93 (1969): 86-108. 

Gelfand, Mark I. A Nation of Cities: The Tederal Govern- 
ment and Urban America, 1933-1965. 1975. 

Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Trontier: The Suburbaniza- 
tion of the United States. 1985. 

Kessner, Thomas. Tiorello H. La Guardia and the Making 
of Modern New York. 1989. 

Lubell, Samuel. The Tuture of American Politics. 1952. 

Radford, Gail. Modern Housing for America: Policy Strug- 
gles in the New Deal Era. 1996. 

Schwartz, Bonnie F. The Civil Works Administration: The 
Business of Relief in the New Deal. 1982. 

Smith, Douglas L. The New Deal in the Urban South. 1988. 

Starr, Kevin. Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in 
California. 1996. 

Stave, Bruce M. The New Deal and the Last Hurrah: Pitts- 
burgh Machine Politics. 1970. 

Sternsher, Bernard, ed. Hitting Home: The Great Depres- 
sion in Town and County. 1970. 



Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties Amer- 
ica. 1973. 

Trout, Charles H. Boston, the Great Depression, and the 
New Deal. 1977. 

Wye, Christopher G. "The New Deal and the Negro 
Community: Toward a Broader Conceptualization." 
Journal of American History 59 (1972): 621-640. 

Joel Schwartz 
Bonnie Fox Schwartz 



CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS 
(CCC) 

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was creat- 
ed in March 1933 during the first frantic "hundred 
days" of the New Deal. It was the first of a number 
of agencies created to cope with one of the most 
desperate and poignant of the social problems 
caused by the Depression — massive unemploy- 
ment and economic deprivation amongst the na- 
tion's youth. It is impossible to get accurate figures 
on the extent of youth joblessness at the nadir of 
the Depression, but the best estimate would be that 
at least 50 percent of young people between fifteen 
and twenty-four years of age who were in the labor 
market were unemployed. Of these, at least 250,000 
were simply drifting about the country; the writer 
Thomas Minehan labeled them the "boy and girl 
tramps of America." Millions more were mired in 
hopeless poverty and apathy, without the means 
even to complete their education. Franklin D. Roo- 
sevelt had built his election campaign in 1932 
around his faith in the future. Clearly he had to do 
something quickly to alleviate the deprivation and 
the scarring of the generation who would inherit 
the future. 

There was also an urgent need to confront a 
scar of a different kind-the havoc that generations 
of waste and exploitation had wreaked on the 
American landscape. Large-scale forest destruction 
and the resultant soil and wind erosion had created 
a potential environmental catastrophe. Roosevelt 
had a life-long interest in conservation. More than 
most he understood the urgency of repairing the 
ravaged environment, and he was determined to 
use his office to do so. Thus the CCC was in one 



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CIVILIAN ( N S E R V A T 



N 



CORPS ( C C C ) 



"V 




A CCC unit from Idaho arrives at a camp near Andersonville, Tennessee, in October 1933 to assist in reforestation work on the 
Clinch River watershed. National Archives and Records Administration 



sense a catalyst by which two squandered re- 
sources, young men and the land, were brought to- 
gether in an attempt to save both. 

The idea of putting young men to work in the 
woods was not new. The philosopher William 
James had long been an enthusiastic advocate of 
such a program, and various European govern- 
ments had established conservation camps for their 
unemployed. Yet, of all the New Deal agencies, the 
CCC bore the new president's personal stamp, ex- 
pressing both his conviction in the superior quali- 
ties of rural life and his concern for halting the de- 
struction of America's natural environment. 
Roosevelt had outlined his plans during the cam- 
paign, and once inaugurated he moved quickly to 
act on them. The enabling legislation quickly 
passed through Congress, and on March 31 became 
law: The CCC was born. 



The new agency's administrative structure was 
extremely simple. The need for speed was para- 
mount, hence the decision to work through existing 
federal departments rather than set up a completely 
new structure. The CCC would be open to young 
men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five 
who were already on the relief rolls. They would be 
enrolled in camps or companies of two hundred 
men each, put to work on conservation tasks, and 
paid $30 monthly, $25 of which went straight home 
to their families. The men were to be initially en- 
rolled for six months, but enrollment could be re- 
newed for up to two years. The Department of 
Labor had the responsibility of selecting the enroll- 
ees, and the War Department transported them to 
the camps, which it administered, while the depart- 
ments of Agriculture and the Interior supervised 
the actual work projects. Coordinating the whole 



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CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS ( C C C ) 




Members of a CCC unit in Idaho display beavers they captured in 1938. The animals, which were destroying crops, were 
relocated to a forest watershed area, where their presence would aid conservation efforts. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



endeavor was a director and a small central office 
staff. Roosevelt's choice as director was Robert 
Fechner, a conservative southern-born labor leader, 
who was appointed, in part, to allay American Fed- 
eration of Labor (AFL) disquiet at CCC wage scales. 
Fechner was hardly a typical New Dealer, but he 
ran the CCC efficiently until his death in 1939. He 
was succeeded by his deputy James J. Mclntee, also 
of the AFL. 



THE CCC BEGINS 

Mobilization began quickly, and given the scale 
of the enterprise, it proceeded with surprising 
smoothness. By July 1 nearly 300,000 young men 
were already at work in more than 1,300 CCC 
camps. Moreover, those eligible for enrollment had 
already been extended. On April 14 it was decided 
to enroll fourteen thousand native Americans of all 
ages, and a month later the president directed that 
250,000 World War I veterans should also be en- 
rolled, again regardless of age. Many of the veterans 



had marched in 1932 with the Bonus Army, which 
President Herbert Hoover had ordered dispersed at 
gunpoint; now a new president gave them a chance 
to work in the woods instead. The contrast was not 
lost. Finally, the CCC enrolled twenty-five thou- 
sand local woodsmen to help with the projects. 

Once the CCC had been mobilized, Fechner 
and his staff began to think about possible policy 
developments. An early decision was to add an ed- 
ucation program under the general direction of the 
commissioner for education, George F. Zook. A di- 
rector of CCC education was appointed in Decem- 
ber 1933 and given the responsibility of developing 
a suitable education program for the camps. The 
program was initially challenging, and the War De- 
partment opposed it, yet a prime measure of its suc- 
cess was that within three years thirty-five thou- 
sand enrollees had learned to read and write, and 
one thousand high school diplomas had been 
awarded, as well as thirty-nine college degrees. 



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N 



CORPS ( C C C ) 




Members of a CCC unit put up fencing in Greene county, Georgia, in 1941. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, 
FSA/OWI Collection 



In January 1934, buoyed by both the CCC's ini- 
tial success and the extremely favorable public reac- 
tion to it, the president decided to expand the pro- 
gram. Enrollment grew steadily, peaking in 
September 1935 with more than 500,000 enrollees 
in 2,514 camps. Numbers were slowly reduced 
thereafter, partly because a second youth agency, 
the National Youth Administration (NYA), had 
been created in 1935, but also because of Roose- 
velt's increasing desire to cut spending. The efforts 
to close camps in the interest of economy, however, 
were often thwarted by local politicians, who were 
anxious not to lose the $5,000 to $10,000 spent 
monthly by camps in the local market, and the at- 
tendant community goodwill that resulted. 



The CCC was the most popular of all the New 
Deal agencies, enjoying wide bipartisan political 
support. The corps was supported by those directly 
connected to it — the communities where the camps 
were established and the enrollees and their fami- 
lies. But the CCC was also popular with millions of 
ordinary Americans who received no direct benefits 
from it, but liked its image; most Americans could 
easily recognize the value of the work performed, 
while the idea of young men working with their 
hands in the wilderness appealed to the romantic 
and nostalgic imagination of a nation whose presi- 
dent had recently announced the closing of its last 
frontier. Ironically, the only group dubious about 
the corps was the liberal left, usually the New 



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CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS ( C C C ) 



Deal's most vocal supporters, whose members were 
disturbed by the military's dominant presence in 
the camps. 

The CCC was extremely effective. Though as- 
sociated in the public mind with reforestation, CCC 
enrollees were actually engaged in a myriad of 
tasks. They battled forest fires, developed camping 
grounds and park trails, improved grazing lands, 
fought soil erosion, protected wildlife (particularly 
in the nation's wetlands), constructed dams and ir- 
rigation ditches, and preserved and restored histor- 
ical sites. Still, reforestation was the corps' most im- 
portant task, and its contribution to the nation's 
environment was crucial, best measured by a single 
statistic. Of all the trees planted on public lands be- 
tween 1789 and 1942, more than 75 percent were 
planted by the CCC. 

The CCC conserved human beings along with 
the landscape. Its enrollees benefited physically 
from the hard work and healthy living, while also 
gaining a deeper perspective on their country. 
Many of them had traveled far from home to go to 
camp because many of the reforestation projects 
were located in western states. There they met and 
worked alongside people from many different eth- 
nic or regional backgrounds. 

White enrollees, however, were unlikely to find 
themselves living and working alongside black 
youths, and to some of those critical of the corps, 
this was its most serious shortcoming. The 1933 act 
that created the CCC contained a clause stating 
specifically that there should be no discrimination 
"on account of race, color or creed" in the selection 
of enrollees. Yet within a few weeks it was obvious 
that these provisions were being ignored, especially 
by southern selection agents. Black youths, despite 
the desperate nature of their poverty, were simply 
being passed over, and Department of Labor offi- 
cials had to threaten to stop all selection in the 
South before local agents, reluctantly, began to 
comply. In addition, local white communities in 
many parts of the country were inclined to protest 
if a black camp was established nearby, in contrast 
to their enthusiastic welcoming of white corpsmen. 
This was a national rather than a regional response, 
although southern communities were generally less 
hostile to black camps than communities in other 



regions, especially the Rocky Mountain states. 
Eventually, Fechner and his staff evolved a policy 
covering black enrollment. There was to be strict 
segregation in the CCC; as far as possible, black 
men would not be sent out of their home states, 
black camps would not be forced on local commu- 
nities, and blacks would be selected according to 
their ratio in the general population (one in ten) 
and not according to need. Fechner, a conservative 
southerner, had no intention of engaging in social 
engineering, and though most black enrollees 
clearly benefited from their time in the CCC, it 
never provided them with the opportunities avail- 
able to white members. They were not allowed the 
latitude of movement accorded white enrollees, 
command in black camps was firmly retained in 
white hands, and unlike its sister agency, the NYA 
(also directed by a southerner, the liberal Aubrey 
Williams), Fechner made no attempt to move 
against prevailing racial attitudes. The CCC did not 
fail its black enrollees; it simply ignored their partic- 
ular circumstances and needs. 



THE LAST YEARS 

In January 1937 Roosevelt, fulfilling a campaign 
promise and in accordance with his strong personal 
wish, recommended that the CCC become a per- 
manent agency of government, and legislation to 
effect this was introduced in March. It was never 
passed, for though the ensuing debate showed that 
bipartisan support for the agency remained strong, 
Congress was reluctant to concede that it should 
become more than a relief measure. Moreover, after 
Roosevelt's court-packing bill poisoned the legisla- 
tive atmosphere, legislators decided to hand the 
president a rebuff by refusing to make permanent 
his pet project. Congress eventually renewed the 
program for three more years. 

Beginning in 1939, the CCC slowly lost its im- 
portance as the economy started its long-awaited 
revival. Enrollee and camp numbers were steadily 
reduced, particularly as the demand for munitions 
and war materials absorbed the remaining pockets 
of unemployment. Fechner's successor, James 
Mclntee, did what he could to meld the corps' ac- 
tivities into the nation's defense needs, but the de- 
mand for the abolition of all government spending 



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not directly relevant to the winning of the war be- 
came too strong to resist. In 1941, Congress created 
a Joint Committee on Non-Essential Federal Ex- 
penditures, charging it with recommending the 
elimination of all non-essential bodies. In Decem- 
ber 1941 it recommended an end to the CCC. The 
president fought to save the corps, but to no avail. 
In June 1942 the Senate finally concurred with an 
earlier House resolution to deny further funding to 
the agency, and the CCC was abolished. 

Although the CCC came to an end, it was cer- 
tainly not forgotten. Both the California Conserva- 
tion Corps, established in 1979, and the Wisconsin 
Conservation Corps, established in 1983, used the 
New Deal agency as their model, and for good rea- 
son. Despite its relatively high cost, the CCC added 
far more to the national wealth than the sum spent 
on it, not to mention the benefits to the health and 
morale of otherwise jobless young men. In its nine- 
year existence, nearly three million young men had 
passed through this essentially makeshift agency. 
Moreover, by the time of the CCC's abolition the 
United States was at war, and CCC members had 
received valuable experience in the military life- 
style, which the Army was able to build upon. More 
importantly, the members of the CCC made a gen- 
uine contribution to the heritage of every American 
in the billions of trees they planted or protected, the 
parks and recreation areas they developed, and the 
millions of acres they saved from soil erosion or 
flooding. 

See Also: BOY AND GIRL TRAMPS OF AMERICA; 

CONSERVATION MOVEMENT; HUNDRED DAYS; 
NEW DEAL. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cole, Olen, Ir. The African-American Experience in the Ci- 
vilian Conservation Corps. 1999. 

Harper, Charles P. The Administration of the Civilian Con- 
servation Corps. 1939. 

Holland, Kenneth, and Frank E. Hill. Youth in the CCC. 
1942. 

Salmond, lohn A. The Civilian Conservation Corps, 
1933-1942: A New Deal Case Study. 1967. 

Iohn A. Salmond 



CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL 
LIBERTIES 

The Great Depression is not remembered as a time 
of major advances in human rights, yet during the 
1930s significant steps were taken in both civil 
rights and civil liberties: The U.S. Supreme Court 
established important protections for criminal de- 
fendants; Congress granted new powers to labor 
unions; and the civil liberties of unpopular groups 
were strengthened. 

In the case of the "Scottsboro boys," the most 
infamous legal controversy of the decade, the Su- 
preme Court demonstrated a newfound concern for 
the rights of accused criminals and a willingness to 
challenge judicial racism in the South. This case in- 
volved nine African-American males ranging in age 
from sixteen to twenty who were arrested in March 
1931 near Scottsboro, Alabama, and charged with 
raping two white women. The young men were 
hastily tried and eight were sentenced to death. Al- 
though a lawyer was present at their trial, he was 
neither competent nor given time to prepare a de- 
fense. Activists who investigated the case found 
that the evidence against the young men was flim- 
sy. The women who were their chief accusers were 
of dubious character, their testimony was inconsis- 
tent, and one later recanted her accusations. Inter- 
national Labor Defense retained Samuel Leibowitz 
to pursue the Scottsboro boys' appeals and mount- 
ed a worldwide campaign on their behalf. 

Leibowitz petitioned the Supreme Court for re- 
lief and in Powell v. Alabama (1932) it ordered a new 
trial because the Scottsboro boys had been denied 
effective counsel, violating their right to a fair trial. 
The young men were tried a second time in 1934. 
Again they were convicted and sentenced to death 
and again their appeal reached the Supreme Court. 
In Norris v. Alabama (1935) the justices unanimous- 
ly overturned their convictions on the grounds that 
African Americans had been excluded from the 
jury. 

The Court further strengthened the rights of 
the accused in Brown v. Mississippi (1936). Here the 
justices rejected murder charges against three black 
men whose convictions were based solely on co- 
erced confessions. In fohnson v. Zerbst (1938) the 



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Court ruled that indigent federal defendants were 
entitled to legal counsel. Twenty-five years later 
this right was extended to all defendants in Gideon 
v. Wainwright (1963). 

When it came to voting rights the Supreme 
Court was less courageous. In Nixon v. Condon 
(1932) the justices invalidated the whites-only 
Texas Democratic primary election, ruling that 
states cannot discriminate against voters on the 
basis of race. But when the state legislature gave 
political parties complete authority over primaries, 
the Court approved. In Grovey v. Townsend (1935) 
it ruled that parties were voluntary associations and 
thus allowed to discriminate. This decision would 
be reversed nine years later in Smith v. Allwright 
(1944). The Court further demonstrated its reluc- 
tance to meddle in political affairs by upholding the 
constitutionality of poll taxes in Breedloue v. Suttles 
(1937). 

During the 1930s the National Association for 
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fo- 
cused much of its energy on passage of a federal 
anti-lynching law. Senators Robert F. Wagner of 
New York and Edward Costigan of Colorado intro- 
duced such a bill in 1934, but maneuvering by 
southern opponents blocked it from being consid- 
ered by the full Senate. The NAACP executive sec- 
retary, Walter White, sought President Roosevelt's 
support for the bill, but Roosevelt was unwilling to 
antagonize powerful southern legislators: "If I 
come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will 
block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep 
America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk." 
In 1937 another anti-lynching bill sponsored by 
New York Representative Joseph Gavaghn passed 
in the House 277 to 120. A Gallup poll reported that 
70 percent of Americans favored such legislation, 
but southern senators launched a filibuster and pre- 
vented a vote. Although Alabama's Tuskegee Insti- 
tute recorded the lynching of twenty-four African 
Americans in 1933, this number steadily dwindled 
until only two such atrocities were logged in 1939. 
The NAACP was responsible for much of this de- 
cline. 

In education, racial separation was the rule, but 
during the 1930s a small crack appeared in the wall 
of segregation. Donald Murray applied for admis- 



sion to the University of Maryland Law School in 
1934. When his application was refused, Thurgood 
Marshall brought suit arguing that Murray should 
be admitted since Maryland provided no opportu- 
nities for blacks to study law. Baltimore City Court 
Judge Eugene O'Dunne agreed and Murray entered 
law school in September 1935. 

In 1938 Charles Houston argued a similar case. 
Lloyd Gaines had applied to the University of Mis- 
souri Law School. Missouri also provided no legal 
education for black students. In Missouri ex. rel. 
Gaines v. Canada (1938) the Supreme Court ordered 
the state to admit Gaines. Although the justices 
were not yet willing to repudiate "separate but 
equal," the Gaines decision was the first step on the 
road to Brown v. Board of Education (1954). 

African Americans enjoyed few civil rights dur- 
ing this decade, but they built a foundation for fu- 
ture gains. In the words of Robert S. McElvaine, au- 
thor of The Great Depression (1984), "The rebirth of 
that dream of true racial equality . . . was the real 
achievement of the New Deal years in race rela- 
tions." 

Without question, workers and organized labor 
enjoyed the greatest expansion of rights during the 
1930s. Three major pieces of legislation were re- 
sponsible for this progress: the Norris-La Guardia 
Act (1932), the National Industrial Recovery Act 
(1933), and the National Labor Relations Act 
(1935). Each of these bills, using different language, 
guaranteed workers the right to organize unions 
and bargain collectively with employers. Observers 
wondered whether the Supreme Court would fol- 
low its longstanding pro -business bias and strike 
down these laws. In the case of Schechter Poultry 
Corp. v. United States (1935), the Court invalidated 
most provisions of the National Industrial Recovery 
Act, including section 7(a), which covered union or- 
ganizing. However, in five separate 1937 decisions 
the Court upheld key provisions of the National 
Labor Relations Act, finding that the ability of 
workers to organize and engage in collective bar- 
gaining was "a fundamental right." 

Subsequent decisions further expanded work- 
ers' rights. In Senn v. Tile Layers Union (1937) the 
Court recognized that picketing was a form of free 
speech protected by the Constitution. This decision 



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was broadened in Thornhillv. Alabama (1940). Afri- 
can Americans picketing stores as part of a "don't 
buy where you can't work" campaign received sim- 
ilar protection in New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Gro- 
cery (1938). In Hague v. Congress of Industrial Orga- 
nizations (1939) the Court struck down a Jersey City 
anti-union ordinance requiring permits to hold 
public meetings or distribute literature in public 
places. Labor's rights were also strengthened by the 
Senate in 1936 when it established a committee 
under the chairmanship of Senator Robert M. La 
Follette, Jr., "to make an investigation of violations 
of the rights of free speech and assembly and undue 
interference with the right of labor to organize and 
bargain collectively." 

In several important cases the Supreme Court 
expanded the rights of free speech and assembly. In 
Stromberg v. California (1931) the Court overturned 
the conviction of a counselor at a Communist youth 
camp for displaying a red flag. A few weeks later, 
in Near v. Minnesota, it ruled that the First Amend- 
ment free press guarantee protected even the publi- 
cation of a malicious anti-Semitic scandal sheet. In 
1933 New York federal court Judge John Munro 
Woolsey struck a blow against censorship by ruling 
that James Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) was not ob- 
scene. In Dejonge v. Oregon (1937) the Supreme 
Court overturned the conviction of a speaker at a 
Communist sponsored rally. Writing for a unani- 
mous court, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes 
said that the state could not make "mere participa- 
tion in a peaceable assembly and a lawful public 
discussion . . . basis for a criminal charge." The 
Court relied on a somewhat different logic when it 
rejected the conviction of Communist Party orga- 
nizer Angelo Herndon, who was given a twenty- 
year sentence for violating a Georgia anti- 
insurrection statute. In Herndon v. Georgia (1937) 
the majority opinion held that speech could not be 
punished "by reason of its supposed dangerous 
tendency even in the remote future." 

The Supreme Court also considered religious 
freedom cases with mixed results. In Lovell v. City 
of Griffin (1938) the Court ruled unconstitutional a 
local ordinance used to prevent Jehovah's Witness- 
es from distributing religious tracts on city streets. 
The Court, however, was not willing to extend this 



protection to other areas. In Minersville School Dis- 
trict v. Gobitis (1940) it upheld the expulsion of two 
Pennsylvania students who refused to join in a 
compulsory salute to the flag in keeping with their 
religious beliefs. In the face of surprisingly strong 
public criticism, the justices admitted they had 
erred and three years later the Court reversed itself. 

Meanwhile, developments in Congress indicat- 
ed growing intolerance for radical political beliefs. 
In 1938 the House Select Committee on Un- 
American Activities, under the leadership of Repre- 
sentative Martin Dies, began a decades-long hunt 
for subversive influences. Its sensational public 
hearings became a platform for wild accusations of 
Communist infiltration in labor unions and New 
Deal agencies with a chilling effect on free speech. 

During the Depression there were important 
gains, especially for organized labor. But the picture 
was not uniformly sanguine: the Jim Crow system 
remained in place in the South; African Americans 
would have to wait a quarter of a century before 
gaining full civil rights; and an anti- Communist 
crusade that would erode civil liberties began. With 
respect to civil rights, the 1930s were most signifi- 
cant for establishing the basis for advances that 
would be fully realized in later decades. 

See Also: ANTL-LYNCHING LEGISLATION; 

INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE (ILD); LA 
FOLLETTE CIVIL LIBERTIES COMMITTEE; 
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE 
ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE 
(NAACP); SCOTTSBORO CASE; SUPREME COURT. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Braeman, John. Before the Civil Rights Revolution: The Old 
Court and Individual Rights. 1988. 

Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. 
1969. 

Howard, John R. The Shifting Wind: The Supreme Court 
and Civil Rights from Reconstruction to Brown. 1999. 

Walker, Samuel. In Defense of American Liberties: A Histo- 
ry of the ACLU, 2nd edition. 1999. 

Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade against Lynch- 
ing, 1909-1950. 1980. 

Paul T. Murray 



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CIVIL 



WORKS 



ADMINISTRATION 



( C W A ) 




Men employed by the Civil Works Administration clean and paint the dome of the Denver capitol building in 1934. National 

Archives and Records Administration 



CIVIL WORKS ADMINISTRATION 
(CWA) 

The Civil Works Administration (CWA), created in 
the fall of 1933 and disbanded the following spring, 
was the first, public employment experiment of the 
New Deal. At its peak in January of 1934, CWA em- 
ployed approximately four million workers. The 
program initiated many projects that later were ab- 
sorbed by the Works Progress Administration 
(WPA, 1935 to 1941). Perhaps most importantly, 
CWA took several million relief recipients off of the 
federal "dole" and gave them employment and reg- 
ular wages. 



The CWA reflected the values of Franklin D. 
Roosevelt and his relief administrator Harry Hop- 
kins, both of whom favored employment over di- 
rect relief. Both feared that the federal relief pro- 
gram (FERA) would institutionalize a permanent 
national "dole." During the summer of 1933, the 
New Deal had reduced the federal relief caseload 
significantly and forced some states to finance a 
larger share of the relief burden. But both the ca- 
seload and federal expenditures threatened to rise 
again during the coming winter. In late October, 
Hopkins's assistant Aubrey Williams prevailed on 
Hopkins to propose a dramatic expansion of public 
employment. The program would take large num- 



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bers of "employable" recipients off the relief rolls 
and also employ several million unemployed work- 
ers who were not on relief. The program would be 
financed by the large unexpended balances of the 
New Deal's slow-moving public works program, 
the PWA. Hopkins presented the plan to Roosevelt 
on October 29. The president stunned Hopkins by 
immediately accepting the extraordinary proposal. 
The CWA was one of the most dramatic policy ex- 
periments of the New Deal era. Between November 
1, when the program was announced, and Decem- 
ber 15, approximately three and a half million 
workers were placed on hastily constructed federal 
projects. In mid-November, a large portion of fed- 
eral resources was devoted entirely to issuing the 
first CWA paychecks. Although civil works drew on 
the staff and resources of the federal relief program, 
state Civil Works administrations hired engineers, 
efficiency experts, and professionals in the field of 
labor relations, making the program much more 
like public employment than work relief. Workers 
were paid regular wages and were not supervised 
by social workers. 

During its brief lifetime CWA workers built ap- 
proximately 500,000 miles of roads and worked on 
thousands of schools, airports, and playgrounds. 
Reflecting a gendered division of labor, CWA em- 
ployed women in primitive workshops, sewing gar- 
ments for the unemployed. Although civil works 
absorbed many projects from work relief programs 
established earlier in the Depression, a key goal of 
CWA was to move beyond traditional "made work" 
to projects of permanent value. The program's pio- 
neering "Civil Works Service" program for "white 
collar" professionals produced surveys of coast- 
lines, harbors, and public buildings. The CWA em- 
ployed artists, musicians, and actors on projects 
that were precursors to the more well known WPA 
arts projects. 

The CWA was enormously popular. Hopkins 
later estimated that approximately ten million 
workers "walked up to a window and stood in line, 
many of them all night, asking for a [CWA] job." 
The program also generated significant support in 
Congress for a permanent federal employment pro- 
gram. But the growing political support for CWA 
alarmed may New Deal officials, who feared that 



public employment would become an expensive 
"habit" and create a permanent drain on the federal 
treasury. Fiscal conservatives within the New Deal, 
led by Bureau of the Budget Director Lewis Doug- 
las, successfully lobbied Roosevelt to discontinue 
the program in the early spring of 1934. 

The mercurial history of CWA once led histori- 
ans to view the program as a noble but haphazard 
experiment, plagued by corruption and inefficiency. 
Recent research, however, has suggested that proj- 
ects were relatively well run, free of graft, and rep- 
resented a significant improvement over traditional 
"made work." Perhaps most important, the CWA 
experiment greatly increased support for public 
employment, creating pressure both within the 
New Deal and in Congress for the administration 
to end the general relief grant program and launch 
the WPA in 1935. 

See Also: HOPKINS, HARRY; NEW DEAL; WORKS 
PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bremer, William W. "Along the American Way: The New 
Deal's Work Relief Programs for the Unemployed." 
The Journal of American History 62 (1975): 636-652. 

Charles, Searle F. Minister of Relief: Harry Hopkins and the 
Depression. 1963. 

Mcjimsey, George. Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and 
Defender of Democracy . 1987. 

Schwartz, Bonnie Fox. The Civil Works Administration: 
The Business of Emergency Employment in the New 
Deal. 1984. 

Salmond, lohn. Southern Rebel: The Life and Times of Au- 
brey Williams. 1983. 

Singleton, Jeff. The American Dole: Unemployment Relief 
and the Welfare State in the Great Depression. 2000. 

Walker, Forrest. The Civil Works Administration: An Ex- 
periment in Eederal Work Relief, 1933-1934. 1979. 

Jeff Singleton 



CLASS 

The Great Depression had a significant impact on 
class relations in the United States. Although the 
Depression did not create class divisions, it did help 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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to magnify the divisions that already existed. The 
working class, the group most likely to criticize cap- 
italism as immoral, was joined by growing ranks of 
middle-class Americans who not only sympathized 
with those in the working class but also began to 
question the system that had caused so much grief. 
These class divisions became a battle over values. 
As historian Robert S. McElvaine explains in his 
book The Great Depression (1984), the working class 
and middle class valued the ideals embodied in co- 
operative individualism, calling for more equity, co- 
operation, ethics, and justice in the economic sys- 
tem, while elite Americans remained wedded to the 
ideal of acquisitive individualism, which was gener- 
ally amoral, self-interested, and competitive. 

While motion pictures certainly provided an 
opportunity for people to escape from the economic 
and emotional hardships of the Depression, many 
of the films also offered critical windows on to that 
very world. Many of the most popular gangster 
films of the era, including Little Caesar (1930) and 
The Public Enemy (1931), offered critiques of unbri- 
dled acquisitive individualism. Other films, includ- 
ing I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and 
Dead End (1937), offered more explicitly stinging 
critiques of the amoral marketplace that had rav- 
aged the lives of millions of moviegoers. One sign 
of the growing influence of the state in society is the 
fact that films in the post-1933 era increasingly por- 
trayed the federal government as a moral institu- 
tion capable of addressing real questions of inequity 
and injustice. 

While President Roosevelt proved adept at 
using class rhetoric to forge his New Deal coalition, 
he also found himself pushed further to the left by 
grassroots militancy on the streets and in the voting 
booths. In 1934, workers in San Francisco and Min- 
neapolis engaged in successful general strikes with 
a great deal of support from the middle class. The 
1934 congressional elections were a victory not only 
for Democrats but for those who were politically 
much further to the left than Roosevelt himself. 
Moreover, the popularity of governors Floyd Olson 
of Minnesota, who was elected on the Farmer- 
Labor Party ticket in 1930, and Philip La Follette of 
Wisconsin, who helped to bring that state's Social- 
ist and Progressive parties together in 1935, was a 



clear sign that many working-class and middle - 
class Americans were willing to consider radical al- 
ternatives. And perhaps most important, the phe- 
nomenal popularity of Louisiana senator Huey 
Long and "Radio Priest" Charles Coughlin, both of 
whom gathered a great deal of support from mil- 
lions of lower-middle-class Americans tenaciously 
trying to hold on to their status, was a clear sign 
that the early New Deal alone could not satiate the 
appetite of an increasingly discontented, vocal, and 
class-conscious (albeit not necessarily in the Marx- 
ist sense) populace. 

The growing influence of working-class Ameri- 
cans who questioned the morality of the market 
helped to convince Roosevelt that his political fu- 
ture lay with meeting their demands legislatively 
and not just rhetorically. The fruits of this influence 
were apparent in the most significant legislation of 
the second New Deal, including the 1935 National 
Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the legal 
right to bargain collectively and offered govern- 
ment oversight with the creation of the National 
Labor Relations Board. Congress also passed the 
Social Security Act in 1935, which provided unem- 
ployment insurance and old-age pensions to work- 
ers and their dependents. And finally, in 1938 Con- 
gress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which 
established minimum wages, maximum working 
hours, and child labor laws. All of these acts, al- 
though not completely supported by organized 
labor, insured that questions of equity would be- 
come a part of the emerging welfare state. In other 
words, the state would no longer simply protect 
property; rather, it would recognize class differ- 
ences and attempt to broker those differences. 

One of the most significant developments re- 
garding class relations during the Great Depression 
was the creation of the Committee for Industrial 
Organization (later called the Congress of Industri- 
al Organizations, or CIO) in 1935. While United 
Mine Workers president John L. Lewis became the 
organization's first leader, it is clear that the impe- 
tus for industrial unions arose from below, among 
the ranks of industrial workers who had been ex- 
cluded from the craft-oriented American Federa- 
tion of Labor (AFL). Although the CIO is best re- 
membered for organizing mass production 



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workers, it is also important to remember that it 
represented not just an organizational shift, but an 
ideological one as well. Unlike the AFL, which 
often excluded racial and ethnic minorities, the CIO 
unions confronted racism and segregation by invit- 
ing African Americans, eastern and southern Euro- 
pean immigrants, and other ethnic Americans into 
their organizations. The CIO also pioneered in the 
use of new tactics, including sit-down and slow- 
down strikes, which paved the way for unionization 
in some of the nation's most powerful industries, 
including most famously General Motors. Howev- 
er, the CIO grew increasingly conservative by the 
end of the decade by helping to contain grassroots 
militancy within the parameters set up by the state 
for union organizing and bargaining. 

Although the Great Depression exacerbated 
class differences between the working and elite 
classes, it also helped to remake the working class 
itself. As historian Lizabeth Cohen argues in her 
book Making a New Deal (1990), thousands of im- 
migrant and ethnic Americans who had previously 
identified primarily with their ethnic communities 
came to see themselves in class terms. Certainly 
this process had begun before the decade of the 
Depression, as thousands of immigrants participat- 
ed in a burgeoning national consumer culture and 
experienced the homogenizing influences of wel- 
fare capitalism during the 1920s. However, during 
the Depression, thousands of immigrant and ethnic 
Americans were disappointed by the inability of 
their own communities — from churches to ethnic 
banks to mutual aid societies — to meet the needs 
of their members. Increasingly, ethnic Americans, 
many of whom had joined CIO unions and had 
begun voting for the first time, began to look to- 
ward their unions and the state to address their 
needs. 

Social scientists, who had largely ignored class 
as a conceptual tool to explain society before 1929, 
grew increasingly interested in analyzing American 
society in class terms during the Great Depression. 
In their 1929 study Middletown, sociologists Robert 
Lynd and Helen Lynd played a pioneering role in 
developing the concept of class. Although they re- 
lied largely on a notion of class that revolved 
around income and occupation, they also paid close 



attention to social behavior, individual expecta- 
tions, and consumption patterns. In Muncie, Indi- 
ana, they identified two main classes — a business 
class and a working class. In a later study, Middle- 
town in Transition (1937), they further refined their 
definition of class by identifying six main classes. 
Based on these studies, the Lynds warned that ei- 
ther American democracy would transform the 
economy or that the economy, as represented by 
big business, would overwhelm and take over 
American democracy. 

Though less well known than the Lynds, social 
scientist W. Lloyd Warner also played an important 
role in creating new conceptions of class to explain 
American society. After taking part as a consultant 
in a study of industrial fatigue among workers at 
the Western Electric Plant in Hawthorn, Illinois, 
Warner began his own investigation into class rela- 
tions in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Like the 
Lynds, Warner identified six classes; however, he 
focused more on the cultural and social compo- 
nents of class by highlighting the important role 
that housing, neighborhoods, source of income, so- 
cial contacts, and voluntary activity played in creat- 
ing class divisions. While Warner largely accepted 
the necessity of class divisions because of the com- 
plex division of labor in modern industrial society, 
he nonetheless asserted that opportunity and mo- 
bility remained essential to maintaining a demo- 
cratic nation and ideals. 

See Also: AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); 
CASTE AND CLASS; CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL 
ORGANIZATIONS (CIO); SOCIAL SCIENCE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bernstein, Irving. A Caring Society: The New Deal, the 
Worker, and the Great Depression. 1985. 

Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers 
in Chicago, 1919-1939. 1990. 

Fox, Richard Wightman. "Epitaph for Middletown: Rob- 
ert S. Lynd and the Analysis of Consumer Culture." 
In The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in 
American History, 1880-1980, edited by Richard W. 
Fox and T. J. lackson Lears. 1983. 

Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle. The Rise and Tall of the 
New Deal Order, 1930-1980. 1989. 

Gilkeson, John S., Jr. "American Social Scientists and the 
Domestication of 'Class' 1929-1955." Journal of the 
History of the Behavioral Sciences 31 (1995): 331-346. 



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COHEN 



B E N 



A M I N 



Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in 
America, 1920-1935. 1994. 

Jacobs, Meg. "'Democracy's Third Estate': New Deal Pol- 
itics and the Construction of a 'Consuming Public.'" 
International Labor and Working-Class History 55 
(1999): 27-51. 

Kelley, Robin. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists 
During the Great Depression. 1990. 

Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, 
and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-century 
America. 2001. 

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 
1929-1941, rev. edition. 1993. 

Vittoz, Stanley. New Deal Labor Policy and the American 
Industrial Economy. 1987. 

Kathy Mapes 



COHEN, BENJAMIN V. 

Benjamin Victor Cohen (September 23, 1894-Au- 
gust 15, 1983) was a well-known lawyer, public ser- 
vant, author, and New Dealer. Born in Muncie, In- 
diana, to a wealthy family, Cohen received a 
bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 
1914, a doctorate in jurisprudence from the Univer- 
sity of Chicago Law School in 1915, and a doctorate 
in judicial science from the Harvard Law School in 
1916. While at Harvard, Cohen met Felix Frankfurt- 
er, who became his mentor. Frankfurter, in turn, 
was the protege of Louis Brandeis, who was best 
known for his commitment to the small business 
ideal. Brandeis's ideas and Frankfurter's influence 
would have a great impact on Cohen's career. 

After graduation from Harvard, Cohen served 
as Judge Julian Mack's legal secretary in the federal 
circuit court system. In 1917, Cohen began working 
for the U.S. Shipping Board and, between 1919 and 
1922, he worked for the American Zionists. By 
1922, Cohen had decided to enter private practice 
while continuing to serve gratis for the National 
Consumers League and helping Frankfurter pre- 
pare a minimum-wage bill for women. By 1933, 
Cohen had achieved the confidence of his mentor, 
and Frankfurter recommended him to Franklin D. 
Roosevelt for service in his New Deal. 

Working closely with fellow Frankfurter pro- 
tege Thomas Corcoran, Cohen helped to draft a 



number of important New Deal laws in 1933 and 
1934, including the Truth-in-Securities Act and the 
Securities Exchange Act. Cohen also worked as 
legal counsel for Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes. 
Cohen's importance in New Deal legislation con- 
tinued to grow, especially after he worked on the 
1935 Public Utilities Holding Company Act, which 
regulated large utility corporations. Again working 
alongside Corcoran, Cohen contributed his legal 
expertise to such New Deal laws as the Rural Elec- 
trification Act (1935) and the Fair Labor Standards 
Act (1938). 

Cohen's political reputation was bruised when 
he became identified with Roosevelt's 1937 court- 
packing plan. Instead of working behind the 
scenes, Cohen now became a public figure subject 
to criticism by New Deal opponents. Also, his asso- 
ciation with court packing identified him even more 
with Tommy Corcoran who was already being la- 
beled as one of Roosevelt's political "hatchet" men. 

As World War II erupted, Cohen helped the 
president implement the Lend-Lease plan, which 
gave aid to countries fighting the Axis Powers. 
Cohen also served as legal counsel to America's 
wartime ambassador to Great Britain, John G. Wi- 
nant. As the war drew to a close, Cohen participat- 
ed in the Dumbarton Oaks conference, which set 
the stage for the formation of the United Nations. 
Cohen then served from 1948 to 1952 as a member 
of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. general assembly. 
Thereafter, Cohen retired to private life, although 
he remained active in Washington affairs. A private, 
humble man, Benjamin Cohen was a brilliant legal 
expert who used his talents to advance not only the 
New Deal, but world peace and disarmament. 

See Also: CORCORAN, THOMAS G.; FRANKFURTER, 
FELIX; SECURITIES REGULATION. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Lash, Joseph. Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the 
New Deal. 1988. 

Lasser, William. Benjamin V. Cohen: Architect of the New 
Deal. 2002. 

Schwartz, Jordan A. The New Dealers: Power Politics in the 
of Roosevelt. 1993. 

Michael V. Namorato 



186 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



COLLECTIVE 



R G A I N I N 6 



COLLECTIVE BARGAINING 

Collective bargaining, which is considered to be the 
main purpose of labor unions today, first gained 
permanent government sanction in the New Deal 
era. Collective bargaining is defined by the U.S. De- 
partment of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics as 
the process by which "representatives of employees 
(unions) and employers determine the conditions 
of employment through direct negotiation, normal- 
ly resulting in a written contract setting forth the 
wages, hours, and other conditions to be observed 
for a stipulated period." Since the founding of the 
American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886, 
unions had sought to bargain collectively. This 
method worked for unions when they were power- 
ful enough to bargain directly with employers, or in 
times of national emergency, such as during World 
War I, when the federal government decided that 
the best interests of the nation were served by col- 
lective bargaining. It was not until the onset of the 
Great Depression, however, that a permanent gov- 
ernment body was created to promote collective 
bargaining agreements. 

Senator Robert Wagner of New York was the 
leading politician in the promotion of collective 
bargaining. Wagner advocated expanding the gov- 
ernment's role in planning the economy of the 
United States. As a part of the National Industrial 
Recovery Act, which allowed companies within tar- 
geted industries to form legal cartels and set prices 
and production quotas, Wagner insisted upon the 
insertion of section 7a, which guaranteed employ- 
ees the right to join unions of their own choosing 
and to bargain collectively. This was the first time 
that the government claimed the obligation to play 
a constructive role in managing industrial relations. 
The creation of this legislation was spurred by a bill 
introduced by Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, and 
drafted by the AFL, which would have created a 
thirty-hour workweek; although the National In- 
dustrial Recovery Act undermined that effort, the 
AFL enthusiastically endorsed the Act, section 7a in 
particular. 

Soon after enactment of the legislation, the Na- 
tional Labor Board (NLB) was formed to adjudicate 
labor disputes. The NLB had members drawn from 



industry, labor, and government. Wagner hoped 
the NLB would serve as a mediator between labor 
and management, but neither labor nor manage- 
ment was enthusiastic about this development. 
William M. Leiserson, who was appointed the 
NLB's secretary, warned Wagner that reliance upon 
mediation as a first step would simply reproduce 
the conflict within the NLB, which is indeed what 
happened. Leiserson recommended to Wagner that 
the NLB become an arbitral body that only consid- 
ered matters of policy, and that a separate body of 
mediators be established, which is the direction to- 
ward which the NLB slowly evolved. The NLB is- 
sued rulings regarding the behavior of the two sides 
in the course of collective bargaining, but it did not 
mediate disputes itself. The NLB declared that each 
side had obligations that it had to meet during the 
collective bargaining process — management had to 
meet and bargain with employee representatives 
and sign written contracts, and unions had to pres- 
ent grievances and demands to the employer before 
striking. By obliging management to meet with rep- 
resentatives of employees, the NLB began to devel- 
op the idea of majority rule within union represen- 
tation elections, which it began to oversee. 

In response to the strike wave of 1934, howev- 
er, it became apparent to the Roosevelt administra- 
tion that the NLB was ineffective. After obtaining 
passage from Congress of public resolution 44, in 
which Congress gave to the president the power to 
establish one or more labor boards for a one-year 
period, Roosevelt created the National Labor Rela- 
tions Board (NLRB), which had the authority to 
hold hearings and make findings of fact concerning 
violations of section 7a. Despite these changes, it 
became clear that new legislation was needed, and 
in 1935 the National Labor Relations Act, more 
popularly known as the Wagner Act, was passed. 
This act authorized the NLRB to oversee union 
elections in order to determine majority representa- 
tion of employees by unions. The act also autho- 
rized the NLRB to investigate "unfair labor prac- 
tices" by both employers and unions, and to seek 
injunctive relief from the courts while these investi- 
gations were ongoing. This induced both employ- 
ers and unions to seek collective bargaining agree- 
ments in signed contracts. Industrial strife was not 
ended by this legislation; numerous strikes took 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



187 



COLLIER 



JOHN 



place throughout the second half of the New Deal 
era, including the famous sit-down strike in Flint, 
Michigan, in early 1937. A structure was put in 
place, however, which eventually diminished the 
violence that had characterized strikes in earlier 
eras. 

See Also: AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); 
CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS 
(CIO); NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT OF 
1935 (WAGNER ACT); NATIONAL LABOR 
RELATIONS BOARD (NLRB); ORGANIZED 
LABOR; WAGNER, ROBERT F. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bernstein, Irving. The New Deal Collective Bargaining Poli- 
cy. 1950. 

Dickman, Howard. Industrial Democracy in America: Ideo- 
logical Origins of National Labor Relations Policy. 1986. 

Tomlins, Christopher L. The State and the Unions: Labor 
Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in 
America, 1880-1960. 1985. 

United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor 
Statistics. Glossary. Available at: www.bls.gov/bls/ 
glossary.htm 

United States National Labor Relations Board. Home- 
page at: www.nlrb.gov 

Gregory Miller 



COLLIER, JOHN 

John Collier (May 4, 1884-May 8, 1968) was com- 
missioner of Indian affairs from 1933 to 1945. Col- 
lier championed Native American concerns and ad- 
vocated legislation under the New Deal banner to 
alleviate their suffering. Serving under Secretary of 
the Interior Harold L. Ickes, Collier, an astute pro- 
moter and publicist, held the commissionership of 
Indian affairs for twelve years, the longest reign in 
that division's history. During that time, a new con- 
cept of self-government emerged that delineated 
the federal government's approach to American In- 
dian policy and forever changed the way Native 
Americans defined themselves. 

A reformer of federal policy toward Native 
Americans, Collier was born in Atlanta, Georgia. 



He graduated from Atlanta High School, studied at 
Columbia University, worked as civic secretary of 
the People's Institute in New York City, edited the 
Civil Journal, which sanctioned progressive urban 
reform, and established the Home School, a Utopi- 
an experiment saturated with John Dewey's theo- 
ries. After watching Native American dances at 
Taos, New Mexico, in 1920, Collier recognized the 
importance of preserving tribal life. He taught soci- 
ology at San Francisco State College in the early 
1920s and then accepted an appointment as re- 
search agent for the Indian Welfare Committee of 
the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Op- 
posed to the Bursum Bill, named for U.S. Senator 
Holm O. Bursum of New Mexico, which would 
have terminated Pueblo water and land rights with- 
out proper remuneration, Collier successfully cam- 
paigned for its defeat. In 1923, one year before Con- 
gress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act, Collier 
organized and began serving as executive secretary 
of the American Indian Defense Association. 

A lobbyist in the nation's capital for a decade, 
Collier promulgated his views in various ways. He 
favored the termination of the land allotment sys- 
tem, supported the revamping of the Indian Bureau 
in an attempt to improve services and avoid mis- 
management, and advocated the cognizance and 
freedom of Native American cultures and the right 
of self-rule. Collier urged federal credit for reserva- 
tions, accepted Native religious independence, en- 
dorsed the Indian Oil Act of 1927, wrote essays for 
American Indian Life, and emphasized the necessity 
for conserving tribal resources. 

Collier's criticisms forced the Interior Depart- 
ment under Secretary Hubert Work and Indian Af- 
fairs Commissioner Charles Henry Burke to request 
an outside organization, the Brookings Institution, 
to examine the Indian Bureau. A task force led by 
Lewis Meriam submitted a report, The Problem of 
Indian Administration, issued in 1928. It concurred 
with some of Collier's suggestions, recommended 
an increase in federal appropriations for Native 
Americans, and proposed ending land allotment. 
Touring western reservations to investigate Native 
American living conditions and criticizing Interior 
Department officials under Secretary Ray L. Wilbur 
for not implementing the Meriam Report, Collier 



188 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



COLLIER 



JOHN 



kept himself visible and vocal during President 
Herbert Hoover's administration. 

In April 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt 
selected Collier to serve as commissioner of Indian 
affairs. With this appointment, Roosevelt offered a 
New Deal to Native Americans and provided Col- 
lier, who had an ally in First Lady Eleanor Roose- 
velt, with the opportunity to put his ideas into prac- 
tice. Almost immediately changes occurred for 
Native Americans. Collier approved congressional 
legislation to compensate Pueblos whose lands had 
been lost to encroaching white settlers. He encour- 
aged the dissolution of the Board of Indian Com- 
missioners, ended the selling of Native trust land, 
and by limiting missionary work at Native Ameri- 
can schools, he affirmed the right of freedom of reli- 
gion for native peoples. Active in advancing Native 
American education and civil liberties, Collier sur- 
faced as a dedicated and competent public official 
during the Great Depression. 

The most important piece of Native American 
legislation that passed Congress under Collier's 
stewardship was the Indian Reorganization Act of 
1934, which marked a major turning point in the re- 
lationship between Native Americans and the Unit- 
ed States government. It signaled a fundamental 
reversal of federal policy. Instead of forcing Native 
Americans to forsake their traditions for new lives 
on farms or cities, the 1934 act, also known as the 
Wheeler-Howard Bill, conceded their right to exist 
as a separate culture. Tribes were allowed to form 
their own governments, and reservations continued 
to be strongholds of Native identity. The main pro- 
visions of the Indian Reorganization Act were to re- 
store to Native Americans management of their as- 
sets, prevent further depletion of reservation 
resources, build a sound economic foundation for 
the people of the reservations, and return to Native 
Americans local self-government on a tribal basis. 
The measure also established federal revolving 
credit to foster economic development and scholar- 
ships to encourage education. Government officials 
vigorously pursued the objectives of the bill until 
the outbreak of World War II. 

Other reforms in Collier's New Deal for Native 
Americans included the creation in 1935 of an Indi- 
an Arts and Crafts Board within the Interior De- 



partment to market the production and distribution 
of Native goods. The Johnson-O'Malley Act of 1934 
offered general federal assistance to some Native 
American students to attend public schools and 
permitted the Indian Office to contract with the 
states to provide education, health, and welfare ser- 
vices to Natives on reservations within their bor- 
ders. The Indian Civilian Conservation Corps en- 
listed Natives in relief programs. Collier also 
secured funds for Native service activities from the 
Public Works Administration. In fact, New Deal 
agencies funded 29 percent of Native service ex- 
penditures in 1934. 

Despite his lofty aspirations, Collier frequently 
suffered setbacks. He met with native opposition to 
certain regulations and proposals and encountered 
criticism from Congress. Secretary of War Henry 
Stimson repudiated Collier's suggestion that the 
government create separate Native American mili- 
tary units for wartime purposes, preferring an inte- 
grated service during World War II. These and 
other problems enveloped Collier at times during 
his tenure. 

Collier envisioned a time when Native Ameri- 
can tribes would have their own governmental in- 
stitutions to replace the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 
He believed that consolidation of individual and 
communal land under a tribal government was the 
means by which to achieve this independence. Puz- 
zled by the lack of native support for the Indian Re- 
organization Act, Collier learned that his plans for 
consolidation offended tribes who had come to 
value personal ownership of land, some of whom 
angrily accused the commissioner of communism. 

Following his resignation as commissioner of 
Indian affairs in January 1945, three months prior 
to the death of President Roosevelt, Collier became 
president of the Institute of Ethnic Affairs in Wash- 
ington, D. C. Later he taught sociology and anthro- 
pology at the City College of New York, pursued re- 
search on Native America, and wrote newspaper 
columns. In 1964 Collier received a distinguished 
service award from the Interior Department headed 
by Stewart L. Udall. Collier died in Taos, New Mex- 
ico, having left a significant impression on govern- 
ment relations with Native Americans during the 
Great Depression. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



189 



COMICS 



See Also: INDIAN NEW DEAL; INDIAN 

REORGANIZATION ACT OF 1934; NATIVE 
AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Collier, John. The Indians of the Americas. 1947. 

Collier, John. Papers. Yale University Library, New 
Haven, Conn. 

Deloria, Vine, Jr., ed. The Indian Reorganization Act: Con- 
gresses and Bills. 2002. 

Kelly, Lawrence C. The Assault on Assimilation: John Col- 
lier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform. 1983. 

Parman, Donald. The Navajos and the New Deal. 1976. 

Philp, Kenneth R. John Collier's Crusade for Indian Reform. 
1977. 

Taylor, Graham D. The New Deal and American Indian 
Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorgani- 
zation Act, 1934-45. 1980. 

Leonard Schlup 



COMICS 



The comics had been a familiar daily distraction for 
Americans ever since Richard Outcault's The Yellow 
Kid debuted in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 
1896. But it was during the Depression decade that 
they truly earned an enduring place in American 
culture, not only in the newspapers but also in the 
pulp magazines known as comic books. Still com- 
monly known as "the funnies," comics of the 1930s 
actually branched out into genres of adventure, 
crime, and superhero fantasy. Generally dismissed 
as escapist entertainment of little social value, 
comic books in fact exerted a powerful influence on 
the popular imagination. They confronted the poli- 
tics, contradictions, and social dislocations of the 
Great Depression in a way that young readers espe- 
cially responded to. They presented a means for 
those readers to purchase entry into uniquely ap- 
pealing fantasy worlds. And in the process they 
helped to invent the concept of commercial youth 
culture. 

With a daily audience in the millions, newspa- 
per comics were the property of powerful and 



mostly conservative syndicates like the Chicago Tri- 
bune, United Features, and William Randolph 
Hearst's King Features. Popular funnies such as 
Popeye, Mutt and Jeff, and/oe Palooka dealt in apoliti- 
cal slapstick humor, sometimes with vague populist 
undertones. But the Tribune's serialized adventure 
strip Little Orphan Annie featured the benevolent 
corporate billionaire, Daddy Warbucks, and rankled 
the Roosevelt administration with its attacks on the 
New Deal. Other comic strips, such as Buck Rogers, 
Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and The Phantom, offered he- 
roic fantasies set in future times, distant worlds, and 
remote jungles — places where injustice could be re- 
dressed and order restored without challenging the 
status quo at home. 

But there was plenty of domestic disorder else- 
where in the comics page. Based on the FBI's popu- 
larized crusade against organized crime, Chester 
Gould's Dick Tracy was an unusually streetwise 
strip featuring an angular-jawed detective and a 
wonderfully grotesque rogues gallery. The quintes- 
sential Depression-era comic strip, Dick Tracy 
picked up where the Hollywood gangster films of 
the early 1930s left off, and it played to the popular 
taste for urban violence and mayhem. 

In 1933 the Eastern Color Printing Company 
published the pioneering Funnies on Parade. Featur- 
ing reprinted newspaper comic strips on pulp paper 
bound together under a slick cover with a ten-cent 
price tag, it launched a new publishing trend soon 
to be called comic books. By 1935 some comic 
books began to feature original material not owned 
by the syndicates. None of these made much of a 
commercial impact until 1938, when National Peri- 
odical's (later known as DC Comics) Action Comics 
hit the newsstands featuring on its cover a cos- 
tumed superhero named Superman. The creation 
of teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Super- 
man immediately broadened the popularity of 
comic books and gave the medium its distinct iden- 
tity. Within a year, Superman's comic books were 
selling close to a million copies per month. His suc- 
cess led very quickly to a proliferation of costumed 
heroes, including Batman, Captain Marvel, Green 
Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Captain America. 

Unlike their more conservative elders in the 
newspapers, comic books proved very adaptable to 



190 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



COMICS 



idealistic, absurdist, and culturally subversive mate- 
rial aimed directly at youth sensibilities. Most cre- 
ators working in the industry were young urban 
sons of immigrants with liberal politics and populist 
social values. Based in and around New York City, 
the fledgling comic book industry comprised novice 
but enthusiastic artists and writers, experienced il- 
lustrators down on their luck, and businessmen 
who shared an "anything-for-a-buck" philosophy 
of publishing. Resulting from this unusual associa- 
tion was a comic-book image of Depression-era 
America, crude and outrageous, yet oddly sincere 
and hopeful as well. 

The superheroes symbolized American ideals 
filtered through the cynical reality of the 1930s. 
Typically cast as "champions of the oppressed," 
colorfully costumed heroes aligned themselves 
squarely on the side of common people. Batman 
apprehended crooks who eluded the police and the 
courts on technicalities. Superman's enemies in- 
cluded greedy stockbrokers, heartless mine- 
owners, and wicked munitions manufacturers. The 
Green Lantern protected poor citizens from mali- 
cious corporate leaders and their crooked lawyers. 
By acting as a benevolent outside force to redress 
the power imbalance between virtuous common 
people and abusive corporate interests, su- 
perheroes championed the interventionist and col- 
lectivist spirit of the New Deal. Comic books im- 
plicitly, and sometimes explicitly, endorsed 
President Roosevelt's leadership and identified the 
enemies of the New Deal as the enemies of the na- 
tion. 

Garish and direct, the entry of comic books into 
American discourse was the cultural equivalent to 
a sock on the jaw. Whereas adults generally read 
and adored the newspaper funnies — some of which 
were already being hailed as national treasures — 
comic books had a polarizing effect on the public. 
Even as they won legions of young fans, comic 
books sometimes left their parents bewildered and 
concerned. Critics accused them of inducing eye- 
strain, degrading cultural sensibilities, and desensi- 
tizing children towards violence. Comic books thus 
pointed toward a new era of "generation gaps" di- 
vided along lines of cultural preference. Initially re- 
garded as a fad for young people in need of Depres- 




National Periodical's Action Comics, featuring a superhero 
named Superman, hit the newsstands in 1938. Within a year, 
Superman comic books were selling close to one million copies 
per month. This young fan was photographed in 1942. Library 
of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI 
Collection 



sion-era escapism, few would have predicted that 
these comics would still be a vital part of American 
culture into the twenty-first century. 

See Also: CARTOONS, POLITICAL; HUMOR; 
SUPERMAN. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Benton, Mike. Superhero Comics of the Golden Age: The Il- 
lustrated History. 1992. 

Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and 
Klay. 2000. 

Feiffer, Jules. The Great Comic Book Heroes. 1965. 

Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 
1890-1945. 1998. 

Goulart, Ron. The Adventurous Decade. 1975. 

Gould, Chester. Dick Tracy: The Thirties, Tommy Guns, 
and Hard Times. 1978. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



191 



COMMODITY CREDIT CORPORATION 



( C C C ) 



Harvey, Robert C. Children of the Yellow Kid: The Evolu- 
tion of the American Comic Strip. 1999. 

Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transforma- 
tion of Youth Culture in America. 2001. 

Bradford W. Wright 



COMMODITY CREDIT 
CORPORATION (CCC) 

The boost in the farm economy in mid-1933 occa- 
sioned by early New Deal efforts in monetary re- 
form and commodity reduction was threatened by 
a bearish fall slump unless significant amounts of 
cash could be quickly infused into farmers' pockets. 
Demands for inflated currency and above-market 
government loans reflected panic from both the 
Congress and the farm belt, especially the cash- 
deprived cotton South. 

The Roosevelt administration showed no panic 
but acceded to a suggestion apparently made by 
Oscar G. Johnston, a big-time cotton planter from 
Mississippi and finance director of the Agricultural 
Adjustment Administration (AAA), that the gov- 
ernment make ten-cent-per-pound non-recourse 
loans to cotton farmers who agreed to participate 
in the New Deal's 1934 cotton reduction program. 
Such a loan would be slightly less than actual or 
spot market prices. The controversial non-recourse 
feature, which Jerome Frank, head of the AAA's 
Legal Division, thought was outrageous and a dan- 
gerous precedent, freed the borrower from any lia- 
bility if prices fell. In such a case, the government 
would possess title to the cotton, but nothing more. 
When President Franklin Roosevelt told Jesse 
Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corpora- 
tion, to provide for the loans, a new agency, the 
Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), was created 
to make them. With Congress out of session the 
CCC was authorized by Executive Order 6340 and 
chartered under the laws of Delaware on October 
17, 1933. The quasi-public CCC was incorporated 
by Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, Trea- 
sury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, and Oscar John- 
ston from the AAA. The new agency represented a 
creative legal and fiscal response to a very serious 



economic threat to the cotton economy in the fall 
of 1933. Millions of loan dollars soon flowed into 
the cotton belt covering approximately two-and-a- 
half million new bales, thus permitting orderly 
marketing by producers. In fact, by early 1934, 
prices rose above the loans, vindicating the early 
process. 

Developed to dispense funds to producers and 
support normal lending institutions, the CCC soon 
helped rescue commodities other than cotton. Ac- 
cording to Commodity Credit's own internal study, 
its loans throughout the Depression (October 1933 
to June 1940) pumped nearly $900 million into the 
cotton economy, more than $470 million into corn, 
nearly $167 million into wheat, more than $46 mil- 
lion into tobacco, and smaller amounts into figs, 
pecans, raisins, peanuts, and other crops. The result 
was an increase in commodity prices — nearly dou- 
bling cotton and tobacco prices, even more for corn, 
and dramatic increases for other commodities. The 
balance sheet registered a mere $26 million loss 
during that time. Negatively, in some years, the 
CCC made loans excessively above market levels 
which led to the amassing of huge carry-over com- 
modities; only World War II relieved the pressure 
and avoided a potential disaster. Positively, by em- 
ploying a pragmatic mixture of government inter- 
vention and market forces, the CCC promoted price 
stability and orderly commodity marketing. In 
doing so, it quietly became an excellent antidote to 
poverty in the Great Depression and one of the 
most effective institutions to emerge from the New 
Deal. 

See Also: FARM POLICY; FEDERAL SURPLUS 
COMMODITIES CORPORATION; 
RECONSTRUCTION FINANCE CORPORATION 
(RFC). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Benedict, Murray R. Farm Policies of the United States, 
1790-1950: A Study of Their Origins and Development. 
1953. 

Benedict, Murray R., and Oscar C. Stine. The Agricultural 
Commodity Programs: Two Decades of Experience. 
1956. 

Jones, Jesse, and Edward Angly. Fifty Billion Dollars: My 
Thirteen Years with the RFC (1932-1945). 1951. 



192 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



COMMUNICATIONS AND THE 



PRESS 



Nelson, Lawrence J. King Cotton's Advocate: Oscar G. 
Johnston and the New Deal. 1999. 

New York Times, January 9, 1941. 

Records of the Commodity Credit Corporation. Record 
Group 161. National Archives, Washington, D.C. 

Lawrence J. Nelson 



COMMUNICATIONS ACT OF 1934 

The congressional architects of federal policy regu- 
lating communications were determined to not 
make the mistakes Congress had made in the de- 
velopment of the railroads. In that case Congress 
had invited corruption by distributing lands to the 
owners of the railroads, and aided in what became 
a continuing problematic relationship between pri- 
vate ownership of railroads and the industry's pub- 
lic service function. 

The Communications Act of 1927 was an an- 
nouncement by progressives that the federal gov- 
ernment would own and administer the airwaves. 
The 1927 legislation established an experimental 
commission to oversee communications; the Com- 
munications Act of 1934 made that body, the Fed- 
eral Communications Commission (FCC), perma- 
nent. The Communications Act of 1927 was built 
upon the belief that the new technology of radio 
would serve the public by facilitating national edu- 
cation and the dissemination of valuable informa- 
tion collected by the federal government, such as 
weather reports to aid agriculture. The act also ad- 
dressed the potential use of radio in transportation, 
and anticipated that seagoing vessels, for example, 
would come to rely on radio communication in that 
same way the railroads had relied on the telegraph. 

The Communications Act of 1934 — a forty- 
page document that was compiled after a single day 
of hearings — reaffirmed the FCC's authority and 
the federal government's control, but it also ad- 
dressed the relationship between local radio sta- 
tions and new national networks, a relationship 
that would produce confusion and political conflict 
for years to come. Later additions to the 1934 act 
extended the government's responsibility for public 
education and the dissemination of news, and pro- 



vided for licensing with controls and limits that 
were politically useful. These and later amend- 
ments to the Communications Act of 1934 have 
continued to wrestle with the evolving relationship 
between the communications industry and the fed- 
eral government. Try as they might, the progres- 
sives who had shaped the Communications Act of 
1927 reached the same point their predecessors had 
reached in their effort to require national control 
over the railroads. By providing for local ownership 
of radio stations, the authors of the Communica- 
tions Act of 1934 continued the debate between 
local independence and national control that had 
tormented the railroads. 

See Also: COMMUNICATIONS AND THE PRESS; 
RADIO. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

McChesney, Robert W. Telecommunications, Mass Media, 
and Democracy: The Battle for Control of U.S. Broad- 
casting, 1928-1935. 1993. 

Paglin, Max D. A Legislative History of the Communications 
Act of 1934. 1989. 

Rosen, Philip T. Modern Stentors: Radio Broadcasters and 
the Federal Government, 1920-1934. 1980. 

Barry Dean Karl 



COMMUNICATIONS AND THE 
PRESS 

Modern communications had congealed during the 
1920s. Fashion and design, news, film, radio, pro- 
motion, and popular culture became intertwined 
and profitable as corporate entities. They projected 
public excitement about modern consumer culture, 
often from New York and Los Angeles, while 
slighting regional and ethnic variety. The conden- 
sation of news, seen in the newly established Read- 
er's Digest, Time Magazine, the tabloid press, and the 
fast paced newsreels, exuded a gauzy glorification 
of the modern that often mocked traditional values 
while ostensibly speaking for the "democratic mar- 
ket." 

With the Great Depression, the political stakes 
related to the corporate definitions of news and 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



193 



COMMUNICATIONS AND T H E PRESS 



rrwt. 




■w&w 



Depression-era headlines in the San Francisco Examiner, photographed by Dorothea Lange in January 1939. Library of Congress, 
Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



prevalent cultural values took on sharper relief and 
more urgency. The sliding economy devastated the 
communications industry, while business slipped in 
public esteem. Movie attendance was off by a quar- 
ter and many of the major studios declared bank- 
ruptcy. Newspaper circulation was down; advertis- 
ing revenue was off 45 percent. In this context, 



however, the consequences of bringing sound and 
sight together for the first time in feature films and 
newsreels were far reaching but subtle. Half of 
American homes had a radio by the mid 1930s. 
Warren Susman has written that "sound helped 
mold uniform national responses; it helped create 
or reinforce uniform national values and beliefs in 



194 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



COMMUNICATIONS AND THE 



PRESS 



a way that no previous medium had ever before 
been able to do. Roosevelt was able to create a new 
kind of Presidency and a new kind of political and 
social power through his brilliant use of the medi- 
um." 

Franklin Roosevelt's ability to make news was 
reinforced by his adept use of press conferences (he 
held 337 in his first term alone) and fireside chats. 
Photographers collaborated by not featuring him as 
a man without the use of his legs. Rivals such as 
Senator Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin 
competed with Roosevelt for attention through 
commercial radio, and all of them received thou- 
sands of letters from listeners each week. 

The National Industrial Recovery Act, through 
its codes of fair competition, put the stamp of ap- 
proval on media oligopolies in 1933. The next year 
Roosevelt signed the momentous Communications 
Act, which updated the 1927 Radio Act and created 
the Federal Communications Commission. Corpo- 
rate media gained a largely compliant commission 
and what was lost in the legislative rush was any 
significant place for noncommercial or educational 
broadcasting. As Robert McChesney has shown, 
NBC and a gaggle of lawyers and lobbyists re- 
framed questions about the value of noncommer- 
cial stations so that network control of broadcast 
frequencies was made to look patriotic. Educational 
radio was effectively limited, and commercial 
broadcasters were given free use of the public air- 
waves with little financial return to the public or 
control by regulators. That structure has dominated 
American cultural life and the communications in- 
dustry with few challenges ever since. 

Modern propaganda was being developed in 
Germany during the same years that New Dealers 
experimented with forms of mass persuasion. 
America's limited efforts resulted in controversy, 
such as the response to Pare Lorentz's pathbreak- 
ing Resettlement Administration documentary The 
Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), which highlighted 
the plight of those in the Dust Bowl and implicitly 
called for greater federal assistance. Republicans 
decried its message as overly partisan in an election 
year. 

Reporting on social issues took on new urgen- 
cy, as writers traveled about the land as never be- 




A boy in Chicago sells the March 21, 1942, issue of The 
Chicago Defender, a leading African-American newspaper. 
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI 
Collection 



fore. They developed a passion for documenting 
concrete facts and facing authentic misery by ob- 
serving conditions firsthand, then translating their 
concerns into powerful writing, seen notably in the 
work of Edmund Wilson, Lorena Hickok, and 
James Agee, and in magazines such as Survey 
Graphic and Life. The documentary form expanded 
through the widespread use of photojournalism, 
under both government auspices and commercial 
syndicates. Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke- 
White, Walker Evans, and Paul Strand all galva- 
nized public attention through the sensitivity and 
intimacy of their photographs. The picture of pov- 
erty described in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes 
of Wrath (1939) was so powerful that it was spun off 
as a feature film, although director John Ford gave 
the story a more conservative slant. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA Of THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



195 



COMMUNICATIONS AND T 



PRESS 



Newspaper chains, largely controlled by 
ideologically conservative owners, featured editori- 
als that bristled with anti-Roosevelt invective, while 
their news columns often dished out the New Deal 
press releases. The larger chains included those 
controlled by William Randolph Hearst, Roy How- 
ard, and Colonel Robert McCormick. New maga- 
zines created during the Depression years, includ- 
ing Life, Look and Fortune, all featured compelling 
photo essays. 

Interpretive reporting, columnists, and special- 
ized experts became more widely read in the 1930s 
as well. Louis Stark of the New York Times became 
the preeminent expert on labor relations. Promi- 
nent political columnists included Walter Lippman 
and David Lawrence. Dorothy Thompson wrote on 
international affairs for the Herald Tribune. Drew 
Pearson initiated his popular political gossip col- 
umn. Americans could read the right-wing vitriol of 
Westbrook Pegler or the more gentle counsel of 
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's column "My Day." 

Censorship of news stories, feature films, and 
literature included such examples as the banning of 
Henry Miller's book Tropic of Cancer (1934). The 
Catholic Legion of Decency pressured Hollywood 
to adopt the Production Code in 1934. Yet in 1931, 
a landmark Supreme Court decision, Near v. Min- 
nesota, had overturned state gag laws as unconsti- 
tutional forms of prior restraint, thus strengthening 
First Amendment guarantees. 

Depression-era promotional strategies, the 
measurement of the public taste, and altered de- 
signs for consumer goods were masterfully ex- 
plored in two books by Roland Marchand. He notes 
how advertising appeals often reinforced consum- 
ers' guilt over their economic failure as personal 
rather than systemic while championing products 
to make them more successful or attractive job ap- 
plicants. Public relations efforts sought to identify 
corporations as patriotic community builders rather 
than union busters. Opinion surveys were becom- 
ing institutionalized, most often identified through 
the work of George Gallup or Elmo Roper and their 
organizations. 

The prevailing view of communications has 
long told a story of growing homogenization of the 
public through the mass media. Propaganda 



studies that began emanating from universities in 
larger numbers by the 1930s reinforced such a view. 
Yet in recent years, scholars have focused on resis- 
tance to mainstream media by workers, ethnic 
groups, and diverse regional affinities. The continu- 
ing attraction of "race movies" and the black press, 
the regional theaters promoted by the Federal The- 
atre Project, and the work of regional muralists, 
such as Thomas Hart Benton, all helped promote 
diverse local contexts, ideas, and images. Spanish- 
language radio had its first female host in 1932 
when Maria Latigo Hernandez became host of a 
show called La Voz de las Americas, a daily afternoon 
program on KABC in San Antonio. Hernandez 
used the show as a platform for civil rights and 
other local issues. That same year the Japanese 
American Citizens League, organized in 1929 in 
California, first published Pacific Citizen, aimed at 
combating anti-Japanese sentiment in the United 
States. 

Labor unions initiated their own newspapers, 
journals, and documentary film units during the 
1930s. The Film and Photo League was created in 
the early 1930s by radical documentary filmmakers, 
some of whom were associated with the Commu- 
nist International. The League covered strikes, hun- 
ger marches, racism, and other issues of social ineq- 
uity that were often ignored by the mainstream 
media. Upton Sinclair, the famous writer and critic, 
ran for the governorship of California in 1934 and 
lost, but he aroused a strong constituency and the 
powerful wrath of the conservative movie moguls, 
who used newsreels and a major media campaign 
to bury his candidacy. In Lords of the Press (1938), 
journalist George Seldes attacked William Ran- 
dolph Hearst and groups like the National Associa- 
tion of Manufacturers for assisting Spain's Francis- 
co Franco, Germany's Adolf Hitler, and Italy's 
Benito Mussolini. 

Americans were soon drawn to the crackling 
urgency of Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts describ- 
ing the London bombings. Yet fundamental ques- 
tions addressing the democratization of informa- 
tion and the oligarchic power of commercial media 
raised by Seldes and others had largely been fi- 
nessed during the previous decade, and the new 
wartime climate would obfuscate them even more. 



196 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



COMMUNIST 



R T Y 



See Also: ADVERTISING IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION; 
COMMUNICATIONS ACT OF 1934; FEDERAL 
COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION (FCC); 
HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY; 
RADIO. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Best, Gary Dean. The Critical Press and the New Deal: The 
Press Versus Presidential Power, 1933-1938. 1993. 

Carlebach, Michael L. American Photojournalism Comes of 
Age. 1997. 

Emery, Michael, and Edwin Emery. The Press and Ameri- 
ca: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 6th edi- 
tion. 1988. 

Fielding, Raymond. The March of Time, 1935-1951. 1978. 

Jowett, Garth. Film: The Democratic Art. 1976. 

Lange, Dorothea, and Paul Schuster Taylor. An American 
Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties. 
1939. 

Marchand Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Mak- 
ing Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. 1985. 

Marchand, Roland. Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise 
of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American 
Big Business. 1998. 

Marzolf, Marion. Civilizing Voices: American Press Criti- 
cism, 1880-1950. 1991. 

McChesney, Robert W. Telecommunications, Mass Media, 
and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. 
Broadcasting, 1928-1935. 1993. 

Mitchell, Greg. The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sin- 
clair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of 
Media Politics. 1993. 

"The 1930s in Print: Magazines." America in the 1930s. 
American Studies at University of Virginia. Available 
at: www.xroads.virginia.edu/&thksim;1930s/PRINT/ 
magazines.html 

Ponder, Stephen. Managing the Press: Origins of the Media 
Presidency, 1897-1933. 1999. 

Roffman, Peter, and Jim Purdy. The Hollywood Social 
Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the 
Depression to the Fifties. 1981. 

Rorty, James. Our Master's Voice: Advertising. 1934. 

Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation 
of American Society in the Twentieth Century. 1984. 

William, Stott. Documentary Expression and Thirties Amer- 
ica. 1973. 

Winfield, Betty Houchin. FDR and the News Media. 1990. 

Gregory W. Bush 



COMMUNIST PARTY 



The Communist Party of the United States 
(CPUSA) dominated the Left during the 1930s and 
was in the forefront of struggles for social change. 
From the beginning of the Great Depression to the 
onset of World War II, the party enjoyed unprece- 
dented influence and attained its highest member- 
ship totals. With added contingents of fellow trav- 
elers and numerous sympathizers, the Communist 
Party had considerable impact on reform and pro- 
test movements of the time. 

Central to the Communist Party's growth and 
stature was its quick and ready response to the im- 
mediate needs and concerns of the masses of peo- 
ple to conditions stemming from the country's eco- 
nomic crisis. During the period, the party either 
initiated or substantially contributed to several 
highly visible grassroots struggles, among them the 
agitation on behalf of the unemployed, the fight for 
black rights, the antifascist campaign, and the 
unionization of workers. 

A number of factors coalesced to place the party 
in a favorable position to assume a leading role in 
Depression-era struggles. Internally, the factional 
fighting that had occupied the party for much of the 
1920s was settled with the expulsion of party leader 
Jay Lovestone and the ascension of a three-man 
secretariat consisting of William Z. Foster, William 
Weinstone, and Earl Browder. The leadership was 
further stabilized in 1934 with the election of 
Browder as general secretary; Browder led the party 
for the remainder of the 1930s and through the war 
years, directing policies and activities with a mini- 
mum of dissension. Moreover, the party had a 
functional base from which to launch its cam- 
paigns, and a skilled and disciplined cadre of expe- 
rienced workers. Through the Trade Union Educa- 
tional League and its successor, the Trade Union 
Unity League, party members had worked diligent- 
ly to organize workers and gained credibility as de- 
termined and forthright fighters. The party had 
other established wings with solid reputations, in- 
cluding the International Labor Defense (ILD) and 
the Young Communist League, and quickly formed 
others to appeal to specific groups. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



197 



COMMUNIST PARTY 



Additionally, the party's critique of capitalism 
meant that it was ideologically armed to deal with 
the economic cataclysm. "Third period" analysis 
(first articulated at the Sixth World Congress of the 
Communist International [Comintern] anticipated 
a crisis in Western capitalism and predicted eco- 
nomic collapse followed by a revolutionary up- 
swing. Accordingly, Communists expected to seize 
the time, aggressively assume leadership, and lead 
the disgruntled masses in a radical working-class 
movement. By virtue of its political stance, the party 
offered explanations and alternatives and was 
poised for its anticipated vanguard role. 

Despite the opportune circumstances, the 
party's sectarianism hindered its effectiveness. In 
accordance with third period analysis, the Commu- 
nist Party saw itself as the leading light of the 
movement and thus disdained alliances and coali- 
tions with groups with similar interests and con- 
cerns. Party rhetoric was vociferous in attacks on 
reformists and other radicals, whom it wildly la- 
beled as enemies of the working class and "social 
fascists." Hence, Communist stridency precluded 
any cooperation with likeminded progressives and 
for the first half of the decade kept the party isolat- 
ed from the mainstream of American liberalism. 

Despite its sectarian stance, the party's accom- 
plishments were substantial. In March of 1930, 
Communists launched an unemployment cam- 
paign with nationwide demonstrations. Nearly half 
a million people in over thirty cities answered the 
call, with an estimated 100,000 participating in New 
York alone. The party followed up with the organi- 
zation of unemployed councils and the staging of 
local and national demonstrations. The party's pro- 
gram included demands for emergency relief, un- 
employment insurance, no evictions, and a seven- 
hour workday and five-day workweek. Through the 
councils, communist organizers called attention to 
the plight of the unemployed, obtained some con- 
crete benefits for them, and gave political voice to 
suffering masses. 

In addition to its activities with the unemployed 
the party expanded its outreach to African Ameri- 
cans. In keeping with the mandates of the Sixth 
World Congress, which defined blacks as an op- 
pressed nation within a nation requiring special at- 



tention, the CPUSA was intent on representing it- 
self as the party of black Americans. In 1932 (and 
again in 1936 and 1940) an African American, 
James W. Ford, was the vice-presidential nominee 
on the Communist Party ticket. Beyond symbolic 
gestures, Communists aggressively recruited blacks 
and courageously entered the hostile South, where 
they attempted to organize blacks and whites to- 
gether in defiance of law and etiquette. Facing con- 
siderable peril, in 1931 they helped form a share- 
croppers union in Alabama that sought better 
conditions and fairer treatment for agricultural 
workers. 

The party probably made its greatest inroads 
with blacks through the ILD's vigorous defense of 
black prisoners. The group's long-running cam- 
paign surrounding the "Scottsboro Boys," nine 
black youths convicted of raping two white women 
in Alabama in 1931, attracted worldwide attention 
and contributed greatly to the party's image as a 
militant opponent of racism and discrimination. 

By the end of 1934, the party had began moder- 
ating its tone and moving closer to cooperation 
with other groups. The Seventh World Congress of 
the Comintern affirmed the shift in mid-1935 with 
its call for a united front of democratic forces to 
combat the growing threat of fascism. Attacks on 
liberals and socialists ceased as the CPUSA sought 
alliances with groups that it had formerly assailed. 
This new policy, the People's or Popular Front (later 
rechristened the Democratic Front), was reflected 
in support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and 
New Deal policies, the abandonment of dual 
unionism, and generally a less doctrinaire and sec- 
tarian posture. In the wake of this changed attitude, 
the CPUSA took the lead in uniting its National 
Student League with the Socialist Student League 
for Industrial Democracy in 1935 to form the Amer- 
ican Student Union (ASU). The ASU combined ac- 
tivism on college campuses with involvement in 
labor, antifascist, and civil rights issues. In the 
South, the ASU had its close counterpart in the 
Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), a federa- 
tion of black youth groups brought together by 
young African -American Communists in 1937. 
With a base originally in Richmond, Virginia, the 
SNYC spread to several southern states, where it 
spearheaded labor and civil rights initiatives. 



191 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS ((10 



The Popular Front's most enduring success was 
in the area of labor. John L. Lewis, head of the 
Committee for (later Congress of) Industrial Orga- 
nizations (CIO), relied heavily on experienced and 
skilled Communist organizers when he undertook 
the task of unionizing the mass productions indus- 
tries. Communists and others strongly linked to the 
party could be found at nearly every level of the 
early CIO and came to dominate a number of CIO 
unions. 

The CPUSA's successful foray into mainstream 
progressive movements came to an abrupt halt with 
the 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression treaty. Al- 
though membership was largely unaffected, Demo- 
cratic Front alliances dissolved because the party's 
shift from collective security to neutrality seemed a 
betrayal of its previously principled stand against 
fascism. The party sought to resurrect its former al- 
liances during the 1940s, but its credibility had been 
undermined and its image badly tarnished. 

See Also: ALABAMA SHARECROPPER'S UNION; 

AMERICAN STUDENT UNION; BROWDER EARL; 
FOSTER WILLIAM Z.; INTERNATIONAL LABOR 
DEFENSE (ILD); POPULAR FRONT; SCOTTSBORO 
CASE; SOUTHERN NEGRO YOUTH CONGRESS 
(SNYC). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Draper, Theodore. Roots of American Communism. 1957. 

Draper, Theodore. American Communism and Soviet Rus- 
sia: The Formative Period. 1960. 

Klehr, Harvey, and John Earl Haynes. The American Com- 
munist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself. 1992. 

Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism: The 
Depression Decade. 1984. 

Ottanelli, Fraser M. The Communist Party of the United 
States: From the Depression to World War II. 1991. 

Gwen Moore 



CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL 
ORGANIZATIONS (CIO) 

Dismal working conditions for millions of Ameri- 
can industrial laborers inspired the creation of the 



CIO. Originally called the Committee for Industrial 
Organization, the CIO began in November 1935 as 
a reformist movement within the American Federa- 
tion of Labor (AFL), which had traditionally fo- 
cused on organizing skilled workers, such as elec- 
tricians and carpenters, into their own trade unions. 
The AFL had made only halfhearted efforts to orga- 
nize the millions of workers in such basic industries 
as steel, automobiles, rubber, and meatpacking. 
These industrial workers had almost universal com- 
plaints about the general climate of job insecurity 
during the Great Depression, the lack of any mean- 
ingful input concerning their working conditions, 
and the arbitrary power of their foremen to hire, 
fire, and transfer. For most workers, having so little 
control over their lives proved to be humiliating and 
degrading. Anyone who was fortunate enough to 
work at an industrial job during the Depression had 
to accept long hours and the increasingly fast pace 
of the machinery. The combination proved to be ex- 
hausting, and often dangerous. If workers spoke up 
or complained, they risked losing their jobs, with no 
recourse. 



ORIGINS 

The CIO sought to change the balance of power 
in American factories. Three presidents of existing 
AFL unions — John L. Lewis of the United Mine- 
workers (UMW), David Dubinsky of the Interna- 
tional Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and Sid- 
ney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing 
Workers — pushed hardest for the creation of the 
CIO and offered resources from their union trea- 
suries to support the cause. Lewis's UMW had a di- 
rect interest in organizing the steel industry, be- 
cause large steel companies owned a significant 
percentage of the nation's coal mines. Dubinsky 
and Hillman saw potential in linking the fortunes 
of industrial workers, through the CIO, with Frank- 
lin Roosevelt's New Deal. All early CIO leaders 
feared that unrest among American workers, if not 
harnessed in positive ways, could be channeled into 
potential Communist or fascist movements. 

Industrial workers had made their discontent 
obvious after the passage in 1933 of Roosevelt's 
National Industrial Recovery Act, which was de- 
signed primarily to allow businesses to regulate 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



199 



CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (CIO) 




Members of the CIO's Ford Local 600 carry flags and banners in Detroit's 1942 Labor Day parade. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division. FSA/OWI Collection 



themselves out of the Great Depression, but which 
also contained a clause (section 7a) that guaranteed 
American workers the right to organize into unions 
without interference from their employers. 
Throughout 1934, hundreds of thousands of labor- 
ers, across industries and across regions, went on 
strike to claim their legal right to join unions, many 
of which were affiliates of the AFL. In most cases, 
however, employers ignored the law and fought 
hard, often violently, against their employees. 
Many leading union supporters lost their jobs, 
while the federal government did nothing to pre- 
vent or punish these blatant violations of the Na- 
tional Industrial Recovery Act. The prospects for 
widespread gains for organized labor fizzled with 



the 1934 organizing defeats. But what would be- 
come of the unrest that prompted the uprisings? 
Lewis, Dubinsky, and Hillman hoped that it could 
be funneled into effective industrial unions within 
the AFL, making organized labor a significant na- 
tional political force. The AFL's leadership, howev- 
er, did not share this vision, and very shortly after 
its creation the CIO began to operate, for all practi- 
cal purposes, as an independent labor organization. 



AMBIGUOUS BREAKTHROUGHS 

Two months after the Supreme Court declared 
the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitu- 
tional in May 1935, President Roosevelt signed the 



ZOO 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS ((10 



National Labor Relations Act — also known as the 
Wagner Act, after its chief sponsor, Senator Robert 
Wagner from New York — which once again guar- 
anteed American workers the right to join unions 
without employer opposition. Workers were un- 
derstandably wary. Likewise, while CIO officials 
appreciated the symbolic importance of the bill, 
they had no illusions that business owners would 
obey it. CIO leaders also faced the difficult task of 
convincing workers that the CIO was serious about 
supporting them, and that it had the power to stand 
up to intransigent managements. 

In February 1936, rubber workers at Goodyear 
Tire in Akron, Ohio, forced these dynamics into the 
open with their fight for long-simmering demands: 
a measure of control over both their hours and their 
method of payment, and protection for union activ- 
ists, who were being fired in violation of the Wag- 
ner Act. The struggle was far more complex than 
simply workers versus management. The CIO com- 
peted for the workers' allegiance with an AFL 
union and with Goodyear's company union, which 
was not an independent bargaining agent and 
which should have been outlawed under the Wag- 
ner Act. Rubber workers set the pace in this conflict, 
largely rejecting the AFL, but not entirely content 
with their alternatives. The CIO hoped to harness 
the workers' anger and use it to establish a perma- 
nent union with a collective bargaining agreement 
with Goodyear, but the company was still far 
stronger than any union. In late March, Goodyear 
offered minor changes in working hours, but re- 
fused to sign a formal contract. This was an ambig- 
uous result, like many of the CIO's experiences in 
the 1930s. The rubber workers were not crushed, 
which was a major triumph when compared with 
earlier years, but by no means did the CIO create 
a solid institutional base in Akron, and rubber 
workers were without either a collective bargaining 
agreement or any other means to resolve their 
grievances. 

The CIO also sought to organize steelworkers, 
who shared common complaints about the arbi- 
trary power of foremen, but who also had experi- 
enced numerous routs at the hands of manage- 
ment, most recently in 1934. Steel was the heart of 
American industrial might, however, and there 



were half a million potential steelworker union 
members. Girding for battle, the CIO created the 
Steel Workers' Organizing Committee (SWOC) in 
June 1936. Funded primarily by Lewis's UMW, 
SWOC ignored any AFL claims to jurisdiction over 
skilled steelworkers and began mass organizing. 

While still technically part of the AFL, the CIO 
now operated independently and faced strong op- 
position from its parent organization. The CIO also 
acted on its own by supporting President Roosevelt 
in his successful bid for reelection in 1936. Whether 
or not they were influenced by the CIO's endorse- 
ment, most working-class Americans voted for 
Roosevelt, and CIO leaders hoped that this display 
of political power would help protect the fledgling 
industrial union movement. 

The CIO's fortunes rose with the success in 
early 1937 of the famous Flint, Michigan, sit-down 
strike against General Motors (GM). Although it 
appears that most autoworkers in Flint desired 
greater control over their working lives, only a few 
were willing to risk their livelihoods by openly as- 
sociating with a unionization drive sponsored by 
the upstart United Auto Workers (UAW). By orga- 
nizing workers to stay inside factories rather than 
to picket outside them, UAW activists neutralized 
much of the power that GM (or any other intransi- 
gent employer) traditionally wielded in such con- 
flicts. A police assault on the sit-down strikers 
would damage company property, and it was im- 
possible to operate machines with strikebreakers 
while strikers occupied the plant. Although the Su- 
preme Court would later declare the sit-down tactic 
to be an unconstitutional violation of a company's 
property rights, for a brief period, refusing to leave 
factories tipped the balance of power in labor con- 
flicts. The CIO was not involved in the day-to-day 
conduct of the Flint strike. Lewis, however, person- 
ally negotiated with GM and government officials 
to broker the final settlement. As a result, the CIO 
gained much favorable publicity and the UAW be- 
came one of its largest and most important affili- 
ates. The UAWs first agreement, however, proved 
to be more important for its symbolism than its 
substance. GM pledged to recognize the UAW as 
its labor force's sole bargaining agent for six 
months, but much remained unclear about what 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE G R E A F DEPRESSION 



201 



CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (CIO) 



concrete differences that would bring in labor- 
management relations. 

With an eye toward GM's loss of market share 
during the Flint sit-down strike — the economy was 
experiencing a minor upswing in the midst of the 
Depression — U.S. Steel president Myron Taylor 
unexpectedly settled with SWOC in early March 
1937. Once again, the agreement was an ambigu- 
ous triumph. U.S. Steel employees won a wage in- 
crease and a forty-hour workweek, but SWOC did 
not extract the right to be the sole bargaining agent 
for the company's workers. Nevertheless, the CIO 
benefited from having won any concessions at all 
from the nation's largest steelmaker, which had re- 
buffed all previous organizing campaigns. The fol- 
lowing month, Chrysler Corporation signed a labor 
agreement with the UAW-CIO, and the Supreme 
Court declared the Wagner Act constitutional. 
Hundreds of thousands of workers across the coun- 
try, from a staggering variety of jobs, soon joined 
ClO-affiliated unions. There was certainly reason to 
be hopeful about the future of the CIO's industrial 
union project. 



DAUNTING CHALLENGES 

However, there were also ominous develop- 
ments. Ford Motor Company violently resisted 
UAW organizing efforts, and the Roosevelt admin- 
istration failed to enforce the Wagner Act. Likewise, 
smaller steel companies fought successfully, some- 
times lethally, against SWOC's efforts to complete 
organization in steel. These campaigns drained re- 
sources from the CIO, which, despite increasing its 
institutional presence around the country, was 
often unable to offer adequate support to the mass- 
es of hopeful workers in other industries who had 
recently joined unions. The CIO also relied heavily 
on organizers, and top leaders in a few affiliated 
unions, who were members of the Communist 
Party. Communist union activists, perhaps a quar- 
ter of the CIO organizing staff, were essential to the 
industrial union mission and appear almost without 
exception to have placed their commitment to 
workers above their party allegiances. Yet the pres- 
ence of Communists in the CIO made the organiza- 
tion vulnerable to red-baiting politicians and indus- 
trialists. During the Depression years, however, top 



CIO officials shrugged off such attacks and utilized 
the Communists' talents. 

The biggest threat to the CIO proved to be the 
deep recession that began in late 1937. Industrial 
employment plummeted, severely reducing union 
membership and dues payments. When it officially 
split from the AFL in November 1938 — changing its 
name to the Congress of Industrial Organiza- 
tions — the CIO was far weaker than it had been a 
year earlier. The recession further emboldened 
anti-union employers like Ford and Republic Steel 
to flaunt the Wagner Act, the AFL continued its 
counterattack against what it considered to be the 
CIO's renegade operations, and John L. Lewis as- 
sumed increasing, often erratic, control of the CIO 
while still leading the UMW. It is unclear how many 
workers still belonged to CIO unions in late 1938, 
but it seems certain that the numbers were far 
lower than those released by CIO officials. 

As the defense buildup for World War II 
brought the nation out of the Great Depression, the 
CIO's prospects for survival increased dramatically. 
The war years, indeed, would bring relative institu- 
tional stability, but with many constraints on union 
behavior. The central question continued to be 
whether or not industrial unionism, through the 
CIO, could maintain a lasting presence and im- 
prove the lives of millions of American workers. 
The jury remained out as the Depression ended. 
The alternative, however, seemed to be the grim, 
arbitrary autocracy that had prompted unioniza- 
tion. Adding to the complexity, while the CIO 
sought better lives for masses of Americans, the 
working class itself was not united. Improving op- 
portunities for all workers would require serious 
challenges to racial and gender discrimination, hi- 
erarchies that were dear to many members of CIO 
unions. The CIO, indeed, faced daunting chal- 
lenges. 

See Also: AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); 
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING; DUBINSKY, DAVID; 
HILLMAN, SIDNEY; LEWIS, JOHN L.; NATIONAL 
LABOR RELATIONS ACT OF 1935 (WAGNER 
ACT); SIT-DOWN STRIKES; STEEL WORKERS' 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE (SWOC); UNITED 
AUTOMOBILE WORKERS (UAW); UNITED MINE 
WORKERS OF AMERICA (UMWA). 



Z02 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



CONSERVATION 



MOVEMENT 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bernstein, Irving. The Turbulent Years: A History of the 
American Worker, 1933-1941. 1970. 

Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers 
in Chicago, 1919-1939. 1990. 

Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Warren Van Tine. John L. Lewis: 
A Biography. 1977. Abridged edition, 1987. 

Faue, Elizabeth. Community of Suffering and Struggle: 
Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 
1915-1945. 1991. 

Fine, Sidney. Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 
1936-1937. 1969. 

Fraser, Steven. Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the 
Rise of American Labor. 1991. 

Halpern, Rick. Down on the Killing Roor: Black and White 
Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-1954. 1997. 

Hodges, James A. New Deal Labor Policy and the Southern 
Cotton Textile Industry, 1933-1941. 1986. 

Irons, Janet. Testing the New Deal: The General Textile 
Strike of 1934 in the American South. 2000. 

Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Commu- 
nists during the Great Depression. 1990. 

Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. Black Detroit and the 
Rise of the UAW. 1979. 

Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Long- 
shoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. 1988. 

Preis, Art. Labor's Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO. 
1964. 

Ruiz, Vicki. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican 
Women, Unionization, and the California Tood Process- 
ing Industry, 1930-1950. 1987. 

Zieger, Robert H. The CIO: 1935-1955. 1995. 

Daniel Clark 



CONSERVATION MOVEMENT 

Popular wisdom has it that in times of scarcity or 
economic contraction the relative luxury of land or 
resource conservation loses its viability and appeal. 
Yet, during the Great Depression, the conservation 
movement, which had reached an apogee during 
the Progressive era, continued within a core of or- 
ganizations and especially within the federal gov- 
ernment to evolve as the New Deal linked conser- 
vation projects with its relief programs. 

The Depression in agriculture that accompa- 
nied the end of World War I had drawn the atten- 



tion of economists and agricultural planners to the 
challenges of inefficient agriculture and overpro- 
duction. Agricultural economists and politicians 
had spent the 1920s casting about for a solution to 
deflated commodity prices, and most had been at- 
tracted to the idea of parity price controls and gov- 
ernment intervention in the marketing of agricul- 
tural surpluses. Yet, with the onset of nationwide 
Depression in 1929, and especially by 1931, many 
of the most progressive of the nation's planners and 
agricultural economists had begun to discuss land 
utilization and overproduction as the most pressing 
concerns facing American agriculture. The leading 
thinkers of this latter group, M. L. Wilson, Rexford 
G. Tugwell, Henry A. Wallace, and L. C. Gray, en- 
tered the upper ranks of the agricultural establish- 
ment after the inauguration of Franklin D. Roose- 
velt, and they were pivotal in determining federal 
conservation policy during the Depression. The 
principal accomplishments of the conservation 
movement during the 1930s took place mostly 
within the programs of federal government through 
the coordination of forward-thinking policymakers. 

FEDERAL CONSERVATION PROJECTS 

Tugwell suggested in 1934 that the moment for 
action on conservation measures had arrived, not 
only because of the national emergency and its eco- 
nomic causes, but also because of the new leader- 
ship in which the American people had placed their 
trust. Roosevelt was a natural leader for conserva- 
tionist thinking in government because of his con- 
cern for the conservation of resources and the effi- 
ciency of agriculture and forestry, which he had 
demonstrated during his career as a farmer and 
politician in New York state. In a speech in Mont- 
gomery, Alabama, in January 1933 the incoming 
president encompassed many of his ideas about 
conservation and planning: "We have an opportu- 
nity of setting an example of planning not just for 
ourselves but for the generations to come, tying in 
industry and agriculture and forestry and flood pre- 
vention, tying them all into a unified whole ... so 
that we can afford better opportunities and better 
places for living for millions of yet unborn, in the 
days to come." 

The continuation of the conservation move- 
ment during the Great Depression was most evi- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



203 



CONSERVATION 



MOVEMENT 




¥■ 



Conseroation workers plant trees in 1937 to promote reforestation in support of the Withlacoochee Land Use Project in Florida. 

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



dent in federal land use planning, and the conser- 
vation projects of the New Deal were deeply rooted 
in progressive ideas about efficient land use that 
had characterized the early twentieth century. Sig- 
nificant among these was the identification and re- 
tirement of so-called submarginal land (agricultural 
land unsuited for the purposes for which it was 
being used), a project that began in divisions of the 
Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and 
the Federal Emergency Relief Administration 
(FERA). Retiring surplus, unprofitable farmland 
from production had been an element of New 
York's land use planning programs under Governor 
Roosevelt during the 1920s, but not until the New 
Deal did federal agencies embrace the idea of pro- 
moting similar reforms in land use. In 1935, the 



Tugwell's Resettlement Administration took over 
the land utilization and land retirement work of the 
AAA and FERA, and attempted, in spite of wide- 
spread opposition, to conserve human and natural 
resources through the reorganization of the agricul- 
tural landscape. 

Another corrective conservation measure, the 
Shelterbelt Project, was in part a response to the 
dust storms of the mid-1930s. The Shelterbelt was 
designed to include the planting of over two hun- 
dred million trees along the country's 100th meridi- 
an as a means of moderating drought and reducing 
dust storms, thus protecting crops and livestock. 

Soil conservation was no less important to the 
prevention of dust storms and agricultural ineffi- 



Z(H 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T TUT GREAT DEPRESSION 



CONSERVATION 



MOVEMENT 



ciency, and shortly after $5 million was allotted to 
erosion control in 1933, Ickes created the Soil Ero- 
sion Service (SES) in the Department of Interior, 
where it developed into an agency committed to 
spreading the use of such techniques as contour 
plowing and strip farming. With a 1934 study the 
SES drew attention to the plague of erosion, report- 
ing that within the United States only 578 million 
of over two billion acres were unaffected by soil 
loss. In March 1935 the SES was transferred to the 
Department of Agriculture and renamed the Soil 
Conservation Service. In 1936, in response to the 
growing awareness of the destructive powers of 
erosion, Congress passed the Soil Conservation 
and Domestic Allotment Act, which offered in- 
ducements to farmers for replacing soil-draining 
commercial crops like cotton, wheat, or corn with 
grasses and legumes that returned nutrients to the 
soil and remained rooted in the soil yearlong. This 
legislative descendent of the AAA linked conserva- 
tion to the earlier aims of reducing production, and 
it gave soil protection a permanent place in govern- 
ment. 

Regional planning was no less important a part 
of the federal agenda during the New Deal, and the 
Tennessee Valley Authority (TV A) embodied re- 
gional planning through the development of dams 
that provided flood control and generated electrici- 
ty, the construction of new highways, and agricul- 
tural reforms that combined to transform the eco- 
nomic life of the region. Though no other regions 
received as much reorganization as the Tennessee 
Valley, this model of intensive regional planning in- 
formed national policies elsewhere. 

The nation's forests were another subject of 
widespread interest among government officials, 
and the Forest Service's 1933 National Plan for 
American Forestry recommended that the federal 
government begin purchasing cutover and tax- 
delinquent land. As a consequence, between 1933 
and 1936 the federal government doubled the size 
of the national forest system. 

Work in the national forests was performed in 
large part by one of Roosevelt's, and the nation's, 
favorite New Deal programs, the Civilian Conser- 
vation Corps (CCC), which was designed as a ref- 
uge for the millions of unemployed young men be- 



tween the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Corps 
enrollees worked on both private and public land, 
constructing trails, reforesting national parks and 
forests, working to prevent erosion, and fighting 
forest fires, among dozens of other pursuits. The 
CCC's work offered tangible proof of the federal 
government's interest in the conservation of both 
human and natural resources, and as it offered new 
opportunities to the nation's young men it fur- 
thered the conservation agenda dramatically in the 
years preceding World War II. 

With the national appeal of programs like the 
CCC and the growing attention in government to 
conservation issues, the historic conflict between 
the Department of Agriculture and the Department 
of Interior over programs and power continued. 
During the 1930s Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. 
Wallace and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. 
Ickes battled for control over the New Deal conser- 
vation projects. Both administrators saw the logic of 
combining the conservation functions of govern- 
ment in one department, but both also sought con- 
trol over the programs. Ickes sought to change the 
name of the Department of the Interior to the De- 
partment of Conservation and Works, with an as- 
sociated swapping of bureaus with Agriculture, but 
Wallace refused, arguing that the functions of for- 
estry and soil conservation belonged with other ag- 
ricultural pursuits in his department. Ultimately, in 
1935 and 1936, both President Roosevelt and Con- 
gress refused to consolidate the government's con- 
servation programs into one department, and the 
distribution of conservation bureaus through the 
several departments remains to the present. 



BEYOND GOVERNMENT 

Outside government, such advocacy groups as 
the Sierra Club similarly worked during the De- 
pression to forward their agenda of expanding and 
preserving national parks, forests, and monuments, 
like Death Valley, Kings Canyon, and Olympic Na- 
tional Park. A newcomer to the conservation move- 
ment during the Depression was the Wilderness 
Society, founded by a small group of wilderness ad- 
vocates who rejected the growing automobility of 
recreation and devoted themselves to the preserva- 
tion of wilderness. One of the founding members, 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



205 



CONSERVATIVE ( A E I T I N 



Benton MacKaye, who worked for the TVA during 
the early 1930s, had been a primary advocate for the 
creation of the Appalachian Trail. MacKaye was 
concerned that the natural areas for which conser- 
vation activists had worked during the 1920s were 
being threatened by unprecedented government 
intrusion into conservation and recreational devel- 
opment. The Wilderness Society campaigned 
against the government's make -work programs, 
such as the Shenandoah National Park's Skyline 
Drive, which brought tourists — and their cars — to 
the wildest parts of the nation's parks and forests. 

By the end of the 1930s, hundreds of millions 
of acres of land had come under federal manage- 
ment and been improved by the labor of relief 
workers. The subsidies and supervision provided to 
agriculture and public lands through the various 
federal agencies meant that the landscapes of pro- 
duction and recreation had changed, with conser- 
vation being a new and fundamental aspect of agri- 
cultural and land-management policy within the 
federal government. 

See Also: CEVELIAN CONSERVATION CORPS (CCC); 
RESETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION (RA); 
SHELTERBELT PROJECT; SOIL CONSERVATION 
SERVICE (SCS); TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY 
(TVA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Clements, Kendrick A. Hoover, Conservation, and Con- 
sumption: Engineering the Good Life. 2000. 

Cohen, Michael P. The History of the Sierra Club, 
1892-1970. 1988. 

Cronon, William. "Landscapes of Abundance and Scar- 
city." In The Oxford History of the American West, ed- 
ited by Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and 
Martha A. Sandweiss. 1994. 

Lehman, Tim. Public Values, Private Lands: Farmland Pres- 
ervation Policy, 1933-1985. 1995. 

Merchant, Carolyn. Earthcare: Women and the Environ- 
ment. 1995. 

Nixon, Edgar 13., ed. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Conserva- 
tion, 1911-1945, Vol. 1: 1911-1937. 1957. 

Pisani, Donald. "Natural Resources and the American 
State, 1900-1940." In Taking Stock: American Govern- 
ment in the Twentieth Century, edited by Morton Kel- 
ler and R. Shep Melnick. 1999. 

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Coming of the New Deal. 
1959. 



Steinberg, Ted. Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American 
History. 2002. 

Sternsher, Bernard. Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal. 
1964. 

Sutter, Paul S. Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automo- 
biles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. 
2002. 

Swain, Donald C. Federal Conservation Policy, 1921-1933. 
1963. 

Williams, Michael. Americans and Their Forests: A Histori- 
cal Geography. 1989. 

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 
1930s. 1979. 

Sara M. Gregg 



CONSERVATIVE COALITION 

The roots of a conservative coalition opposing the 
New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt can be traced 
back to shifts in the major parties that predated the 
1930s. As early as 1920, the Republican Party had 
jettisoned much of its progressive wing and defined 
itself as a more ideologically homogenous, conser- 
vative organization anchored in New England, the 
Midwest, and the West. The Democrats of the 
1920s, for their part, were not a unified liberal party, 
but an ideological muddle of rural southerners and 
urban northerners, anti-alcohol drys and anti- 
Prohibition wets, nativists and immigrants, and 
Protestants and non-Protestants. Hungry to regain 
national power they had lost since the Wilson 
years, the Democrats' gratitude for Franklin Roose- 
velt's victory in 1932 encouraged short-term unity 
within the president's party in Congress during the 
first hundred days. But as early as 1934, the emer- 
gence of the American Liberty League, with its sup- 
port from not only Republicans but also past Dem- 
ocratic leaders such as 1928 presidential nominee 
Al Smith, showed the potential for a bipartisan co- 
alition of conservatives unified in support of states' 
rights, anticommunism, opposition to federal taxa- 
tion and spending, and resistance to organized 
labor and civil rights. 

As Roosevelt's programs increasingly redefined 
the national Democrats in the 1935-1936 period as 
a party championing the interests of the urban, in- 



Z06 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



CONSUMERISM 



dustrial working class, some veteran Democratic 
lawmakers from the South openly resisted the shift. 
Conservatives from both parties fought vainly 
against the Wagner Act (National Labor Relations) 
and Social Security Acts, and Senator Carter Glass 
of Virginia led successful efforts to water down the 
president's "soak-the-rich" Wealth Tax Act of 1935. 
Roosevelt's 1936 landslide re-election appeared to 
foretell a pending rout of his remaining conserva- 
tive adversaries in Congress, but the unpopularity 
of the president's "court-packing" bill in 1937 and 
the onset of a major economic recession reinvigo- 
rated conservative critics in both parties. During the 
1937 session, an ever-more-formal partnership be- 
tween southern Democrats and congressional Re- 
publicans, both often representing traditionalist 
white, rural constituencies, began to flex its legisla- 
tive muscle. 

In the "Conservative Manifesto" of December 
1937, written mainly by North Carolina Democrat 
Josiah Bailey, anti-New Deal legislators from both 
parties attacked the sit-down strikes launched by 
organized labor, demanded lower taxes and a bal- 
anced federal budget, endorsed states' rights and 
private property rights, and attacked relief pro- 
grams for fostering permanent dependency. With 
the exceptions of a watered-down Wagner- Steagall 
National Housing Act in 1937 and the Fair Labor 
Standards Act the following year, most Roosevelt 
domestic initiatives floundered. When the presi- 
dent tried to reverse his political fortunes by work- 
ing to defeat his conservative Democrat nemeses in 
party primaries, the voters repudiated him, return- 
ing anti-New Deal senators Ellison Durant, "Cot- 
ton Ed" Smith of South Carolina, Walter George of 
Georgia, and Millard Tydings of Maryland to 
Washington, and giving Republicans their greatest 
gains since 1928. 

For all intents and purposes, the New Deal era 
had ended by 1938. Texas congressman Martin 
Dies led the House Un-American Activities Com- 
mittee in headline-grabbing hearings alleging 
Communist influence in New Deal programs and 
the labor movement. Conservatives killed anti- 
lynching legislation, and pushed through passage 
of the Hatch Act, prohibiting federal employees, in- 
cluding relief workers, from participation in politi- 



cal campaigns. As the danger of world war deep- 
ened by the late 1930s, the conservative coalition's 
asking price for its cooperation with the executive 
branch on foreign policy was the winding down of 
the New Deal — a price the Roosevelt administra- 
tion increasingly paid. During World War II and for 
several decades after, as Cold War fears of commu- 
nism at home and abroad mushroomed and civil 
rights emerged as an even more central and divisive 
national issue, bipartisan coalitions of conservative 
lawmakers would continue to act as a powerful 
brake on liberal presidential initiatives. 

See Also: AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE; ELECTION 
OF 1938; NEW DEAL; RECESSION OF 1937; 
SUPREME COURT "PACKING" CONTROVERSY 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Allswang, John. The New Deal and American Politics. 1978. 

Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Tox. 
1956. 

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American Peo- 
ple in Depression and War. 1999. 

Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 
New Deal, 1932-1940. 1963. 

Patterson, James T. Congressional Conservatism and the 
New Deal. 1929-1945. 1967. 

Robert F. Burk 



CONSUMERISM 

In the 1920s, America became a modern consumer 
society. The number of automobiles, radios, refrig- 
erators, and other new appliances exploded as fac- 
tories introduced mass production techniques and 
advertisers developed new ways of selling these 
goods. But reformers feared that modern consum- 
ers found themselves powerless in the face of ma- 
nipulative advertising, mass technology, and a 
maldistribution of income. Consumers could no 
longer judge the quality of packaged, technically 
complex items simply by taste, touch, or smell, nor 
could they bargain over prices. Those concerns gave 
rise to a consumer movement in the 1920s. The 
movement began with the publication of Stuart 
Chase and F. J. Schlink's Your Money's Worth 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



207 



CONSUMERISM 



(1927), a best-selling book that exposed false ad- 
vertising and adulteration of nationally advertised 
brand-name goods. In response to this book's suc- 
cess, Chase and Schlink established Consumers' 
Research, the country's first product-testing agen- 
cy. Although the organization had only several 
thousand members, the idea that consumers need- 
ed help in reforming modern capitalism gained 
widespread acceptance during the Great Depres- 



The Depression led to the creation of new gov- 
ernmental agencies dedicated to protecting con- 
sumers. Facing economic devastation and dire 
need, consumers wanted more for their money. 
Though the economy experienced massive defla- 
tion, not all prices declined as fast as wages, espe- 
cially as large corporations sought to maintain 
prices and cut production as an attempt to stabilize 
profits. In addition, many manufacturers resorted to 
cheapening the quality of products as a way to cut 
costs. But the biggest problem that consumers faced 
during the Great Depression was lack of income. 
Indeed, many New Dealers believed that under- 
consumption resulting from a lack of mass purchas- 
ing power caused the Depression. Though capital 
spending fell far more than consumption, the idea 
of underconsumption as the country's main eco- 
nomic problem had widespread popular appeal. 

When President Franklin Roosevelt introduced 
the New Deal, he adopted a purchasing power ra- 
tionale and promised an expansion of governmen- 
tal authority to end underconsumption and in- 
crease purchasing power: "The aim of this whole 
effort is to restore our rich domestic market by rais- 
ing its vast consuming capacity." But the National 
Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Ad- 
justment Act were necessarily inflationary. The Na- 
tional Recovery Administration (NRA) suspended 
antitrust provisions to allow businesses to stabilize 
production and prices. As a result, the NRA codes 
worsened the problem of what New Dealer Gardi- 
ner Means called "administered prices." Section 7a 
of the National Industrial Recovery Act was intend- 
ed to increase wages, but industry noncompliance 
rendered collective bargaining ineffective. The ef- 
forts of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration 
(AAA) to increase the purchasing power of farmers 



by raising commodity prices was also inflationary. 
The initiatives of both the NRA and the AAA led to 
higher prices without substantially increasing na- 
tional income, and higher prices threatened to un- 
dermine public support for the New Deal. As a re- 
sult, Congress created new bodies to look out for 
the interests of consumers and to contain consumer 
protest. 

The creation of the NRA's Consumer Advisory 
Board signaled the incorporation of a progressive 
attitude into the New Deal and the official recogni- 
tion of the importance of consumers to economic 
recovery. The board's first chairman was Mary 
Rumsey. Born in New York in 1881 to E. H. Harri- 
man, a railroad financier, Rumsey grew up in elite 
circles, but she maintained a lifelong interest in so- 
cial welfare. During World War I, Rumsey helped 
organize community councils under the Council of 
National Defense. Those councils played an impor- 
tant role in monitoring wartime prices and served 
as the basis of cooperatives after the war. During 
the 1920s, Rumsey developed close ties to the fe- 
male reform community, and she received her ap- 
pointment to the Consumer Advisory Board at the 
behest of her close friend and roommate Frances 
Perkins. Rumsey, who also had the ear of Eleanor 
Roosevelt, appointed to the board representatives 
from women's groups that were sympathetic to 
consumer issues, including the American Home 
Economics Association, the General Federation of 
Women's Clubs, the National Consumers' League, 
the Women's Trade Union League, the League of 
Women Voters, and the American Association of 
University Women. Rumsey also appointed social 
scientists, such as Gardiner Means, Robert Lynd, 
and Paul Douglas. 

In the AAA, Secretary Henry Wallace created 
the Consumers' Counsel to protect consumer inter- 
ests, and he appointed Frederic Howe as its first 
head. Howe was a leading municipal reformer who 
had long advocated the need for public markets. 
World War I was a formative experience for Howe, 
as it had been for Rumsey. While serving as com- 
missioner of immigration at Ellis Island in New 
York Harbor, Howe wrote The High Cost of Living 
(1917), in which he argued that food monopolies 
paid farmers too little for their products and 



Z08 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



CONSUMERISM 



charged urban consumers too much. As head of the 
Consumers' Counsel, Howe argued that processors 
raised prices more than was necessary to make up 
the value of the processing tax, and thus gouged the 
American public. Howe's theories about monopo- 
listic pricing in the food industry, as well as in other 
important industrial sectors, received support from 
Gardiner Means, who served as Wallace's econom- 
ic adviser. In addition, liberals within the AAA, 
such as Modercai Ezekiel, Louis Bean, and Jerome 
Frank, along with Undersecretary of Agriculture 
Rexford Tugwell, supported the Consumers' Coun- 
sel's attack on high prices, low wages, and degrad- 
ed quality, which they believed to be impediments 
to economic recovery. 

Although the NRA Consumer Advisory Board 
and the AAA Consumers' Counsel were estab- 
lished to diffuse consumer protests, they legiti- 
mized and fueled growing activism. At the policy 
level, they had little impact, but at a popular level, 
they gave administrative endorsement to the idea 
of high prices as profiteering and low wages as eco- 
nomically unsound. In the fall of 1933, the forma- 
tion of the Emergency Conference of Consumer 
Organizations, which represented fifty consumer 
groups, signaled a growing unrest, as did the hun- 
dreds of thousands of letters that citizens sent to 
Washington with details of economic difficulty. Es- 
pecially telling were the thousands of bread wrap- 
pers that consumers sent to demonstrate what they 
believed to be, and what Secretary Wallace had told 
them were, unjustified prices. In response to in- 
creasing agitation, Eleanor Roosevelt invited the 
Emergency Conference of Consumer Organiza- 
tions to the White House for a high profile meeting 
on consumer problems. One of the most vocal rep- 
resentatives, Leon Henderson, condemned the 
Consumer Advisory Board as ineffective. As the di- 
rector of the remedial loan division for the Russell 
Sage Foundation, Henderson saw first-hand how 
economic necessity drove low-income wage earn- 
ers into the grips of loan sharks. After the White 
House meeting, NRA administrator Hugh Johnson 
hired Henderson as an advisor on consumer prob- 
lems. He was soon promoted to the post of chief of 
the NRA research and planning division, a position 
he used to continue his attack on high prices and 
low wages. 



New Deal consumer advocates pushed for 
three programs. First, they sought to organize 
county consumer councils to create a consumer 
movement. In response, the NRA created the Bu- 
reau of Consumer Economic Education under the 
direction of economist Paul Douglas and undercon- 
sumption theorist William Trufant Foster. The bu- 
reau established councils in two hundred counties; 
each council included home economists and county 
agents, as well as housewives, wage earners, and 
farmers of modest means. These councils, along 
with women's clubs, churches, labor unions, and 
other organized groups, received new government 
publications on consumer issues. The Consumers' 
Counsel, for example, sent out tens of thousands of 
copies of Consumers Guide, which listed average 
prices for basic goods like meat, milk, and bread, 
and urged consumers not to pay more. Second, in 
addition to grassroots organizing, consumer advo- 
cates pushed for an end to price fixing in NRA 
codes. Finally, consumer advocates called for a gov- 
ernment system of quality standards to provide 
consumers with essential product information. The 
Consumer Advisory Board hired well-known soci- 
ologist Robert Lynd and consumer advocate Caro- 
line Ware to investigate the possibility of govern- 
ment-imposed grade labeling on the theory that 
even if consumers were not well organized, they 
could benefit from knowing more about the goods 
they purchased. Demands for better standards cul- 
minated in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic 
Act of 1938 that required better product labeling 
and extended the Food and Drug Administration's 
regulation to the cosmetic industry. 

New Deal rhetoric aroused consumers who felt 
entitled to fair prices and good quality, especially 
during a time of serious economic need. In the 
spring of 1935, when record-breaking droughts 
caused a shortage of cattle, consumers protested 
rising meat prices. In cities across the country, 
housewives formed High Cost of Living Commit- 
tees to demand price cuts on meat, milk, and bread. 
Regardless of the real causes for price increases, 
these angry consumers blamed food monopolies 
and demanded justice in the marketplace. Some of 
this movement's leaders came from the country's 
most politically radical groups, including the Com- 
munist Party, but many of the movement's follow - 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



209 



C L I D 6 E 



CALVIN 



ers were ordinary housewives having a hard time 
making ends meet. The League of Women Shop- 
pers, for example, was a Popular Front organization 
that gained a middle-class following during the 
meat crisis by mobilizing housewives against price 
increases. In Detroit, Mary Zuk, another radical ac- 
tivist, led housewives on a meat boycott while also 
helping to form the United Auto Workers. 

By the late 1930s, business was forced to ac- 
knowledge the presence of a growing consumer 
movement as testified by the popularity of Con- 
sumers' Research and the spread of consumer boy- 
cotts. Business Week argued that the business com- 
munity should support the demands of consumer 
groups for a Department of the Consumer as a way 
to keep track of this burgeoning threat. The mobili- 
zation for World War II bolstered the consumer 
movement. Both New Deal consumer advocates 
and grassroots organizations staffed the newly cre- 
ated Office of Price Administration (OPA), which 
was set up to curb wartime inflation. Its first admin- 
istrator was Leon Henderson, who implemented a 
national system of price controls, rationing for fair 
distribution, and government grade labeling. To 
enforce compliance, the OPA set up "little OPAs" 
in every community. These boards were the heirs of 
the NRA county councils. Though not the Depart- 
ment of the Consumer that advocates had desired, 
the OPA pushed for many of the programs that had 
been at the heart of the consumer movement dur- 
ing the Depression. 

See Also: ADVERTISING IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION; 
HENDERSON LEON; NATIONAL RECOVERY 
ADMINISTRATION (NRA); SCIENCE AND 
TECHNOLOGY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Angevine, Erma, ed. Consumer Activists: They Made a Dif- 
ference, a History of Consumer Action Related by Lead- 
ers in the Consumer Movement. 1982. 

Campbell, Persia. Consumer Representation in the New 
Deal. 1940. 

Glickman, Lawrence. "Lhe Strike in the Lemple of Con- 
sumption: Consumer Activism and Twentieth- 
Century American Political Culture." Journal of 
American History 88 (2001): 99-128. 

lacobs, Meg. "'Democracy's Lhird Estate': New Deal Pol- 
itics and the Construction of a 'Consuming Public.'" 



International Labor and Working-Class History 55 
(1999): 27-51. 

Orleck, Annelise. '"We Are that Mythical Lhing Called 
the Public': Militant Housewives during the Great 
Depression." Feminist Studies 19 (1993): 147-172. 

Sorenson, Helen. The Consumer Movement: What It Is and 
What It Means. 1941. 

Meg Iacobs 



COOLIDGE, CALVIN 

Calvin Coolidge (July 4, 1872-January 5, 1933) was 
vice president of the United States in the adminis- 
tration of President Warren G. Harding and be- 
came president upon Harding's death on August 2, 
1923. Elected in his own right the next year, Coo- 
lidge served a full term, until March 4, 1929. 

Coolidge was born and raised in Plymouth 
Notch, Vermont, a tiny locality, and after gradua- 
tion from Amherst College in Massachusetts he 
moved to nearby Northampton, where he read for 
the law in a local law office. Passing the bar at the 
age of twenty-five he soon turned to Republican 
politics and thereafter occupied a series of local of- 
fices, eventually ascending to the houses of the 
state legislature, the mayoralty of Northampton, 
and lieutenant governor and governor of Massa- 
chusetts. 

In the politics of Massachusetts Coolidge was 
by no means a conservative and took interest in is- 
sues of workers' rights, voting for them during the 
Progressive era. He came to believe, however, that 
social and economic legislation had advanced too 
rapidly and he withdrew his support of it. As gover- 
nor of Massachusetts he chose to reorganize the 
state's bureaucracy, abolishing dozens of depart- 
ments in the name of efficiency. 

It was the Boston police strike of 1919 that cata- 
pulted Coolidge into national prominence. His 
statement that "There is no right to strike against 
the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time" 
caught the attention of the nation. 

As vice president Coolidge was almost invisi- 
ble, so much so that when he became president the 



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CALVIN 




Calvin Coolidge with labor leader Mary Harris "Mother" Jones in 1924. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division 



nation's reporters at first were at a loss to define his 
personality, not to mention his economic ideas, and 
took refuge in descriptions of "Silent Cal." They 
predicted a tight-fisted chief executive of pure Ver- 
mont lineage. To be sure, Coolidge's economic 
ideas were largely the truisms and prejudices of the 
time. He was against government spending to 
stimulate the economy. He appears to have agreed 
with Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon 
that taxation, institutional and personal, should be 
held at a minimum, not to stimulate spending but 
to encourage investment, especially by wealthy 
Americans. He and Mellon agreed that the wealthy 
needed to take chances in investment while low- 
income citizens should invest cautiously, in only 
the most conservative ways. 



During Coolidge's years in the presidency the 
expenditures of the federal government hovered 
around $3.3 billion. In 1923 the top five percent of 
the population received 22.89 percent of the na- 
tional income and in 1929 it received 26.09 percent. 
Married couples with incomes below $3,500, a very 
comfortable income for the time, paid no taxes 
(leaving only 2.5 million taxpayers). 

The above arrangements were no prescription 
for the debacle of the stock market in 1929 and the 
subsequent Great Depression. The best that can be 
said for President Coolidge's leadership was that he 
followed the nation's leaders, business and finan- 
cial, who beheld ever higher plateaus of prosperity. 
The president did not give much attention to the 
Federal Reserve System, presuming that everything 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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CORCORAN 



M A 5 




President Calvin Coolidge signing the tax bill in February 1926. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division 



was all right, and when the system moved timidly 
against the speculation already visible in 1927, he 
did nothing. Against the rising numbers of holding 
companies and investment trusts he said little be- 
yond telling a press conference in January, 1926, 
that he had spoken with William Z. Ripley of Har- 
vard University, who was complaining about hold- 
ing company excesses. The president advocated in- 
stallment buying, saying it was better than allowing 
credit at his father's Vermont store. He offered no 
criticism of the rise of brokers' loans, relating that 
they were not too large, a remark that lifted stock 
prices the next day. 

Not long before Coolidge died, he told a report- 
er friend that he had lived beyond his time — the 
Great Depression was then reaching its lowest 
point — which was true enough. 

See Also: CAUSES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION; 
MONETARY POLICY; REPUBLICAN PARTY; 
TAXATION. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ferrell, Robert H. The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. 1998. 

Fuess, Claude M. Calvin Coolidge: The Man from Vermont. 
1940. 

McCoy, Donald R. Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President. 
1967. 

Sobel, Robert. Coolidge: An American Enigma. 1998. 

Robert H. Ferrell 



CORCORAN, THOMAS G. 

Thomas Gardiner Corcoran (December 29, 
1900-December 6, 1981) was an ebullient New 
Deal legislative draftsman and presidential confi- 
dant. Born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Corcoran 
overcame anti-Irish prejudices to graduate at the 
head of his class at Brown University and the Har- 
vard Law School, and to clerk for Supreme Court 



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C S T I G A N 



EDWARD 



Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. At the Wall 
Street law firm of Cotton & Franklin, Corcoran 
handled securities issues and aimed at making his 
own fortune in the stocks, but he lost badly when 
the market crashed in 1929. In 1932 Corcoran went 
to Washington as a counsel to the Reconstruction 
Finance Corporation (RFC). 

At the start of the Roosevelt administration, 
Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter recruited 
Corcoran, James M. Landis, and Benjamin V. 
Cohen to draft the federal Securities Act of 1933. 
Corcoran spent most of his time keeping peace be- 
tween his brilliant but high-strung collaborators. 
Winning acclaim for their work, the young lawyers 
were dubbed the "Happy Hotdogs" for their pa- 
tron. Afterwards, Landis was appointed to the Fed- 
eral Trade Commission to help enforce the Securi- 
ties Act, while Corcoran joined Cohen to work on 
other legislation. Together they drafted the Securi- 
ties Exchange Act of 1934, the Public Utilities Hold- 
ing Company Act of 1935, and the Fair Labor Stan- 
dards Act of 1938. As a team, Cohen was the more 
innovative thinker, while Corcoran was the ener- 
getic lobbyist for their ideas. Both bachelors at the 
time, Corcoran and Cohen rented a large house in 
Georgetown and made it a social as well as political 
center for other liberal New Dealers. 

Corcoran drew the personal attention of Presi- 
dent Roosevelt, who nicknamed him "Tommy the 
Cork." At social gatherings, Corcoran entertained 
the president by playing the accordion and singing 
Irish ballads. Roosevelt also appreciated his talents 
as a writer. Corcoran drafted Roosevelt's speech ac- 
cepting renomination in 1936, with its memorable 
imagery of a "rendezvous with destiny." On Frank- 
furter's advice, however, Roosevelt kept Corcoran 
and Cohen in their lower-level positions to do utili- 
ty work on a range of New Deal projects rather than 
appoint them to the higher offices they expected. 
Although he worked temporarily in the Treasury 
and Justice departments and frequently at the 
White House, Corcoran spent most of his govern- 
ment service on the RFC's payroll. He loyally sup- 
ported Roosevelt's efforts to enlarge the Supreme 
Court in 1937 and was suspected of being an insti- 
gator of the president's efforts to purge conserva- 
tive Democrats from the party in 1938. 



Corcoran married his secretary, Margaret 
(Peggy) Dowd, in 1940, and had five children. To 
provide for his family he returned to private prac- 
tice, anticipating that Roosevelt would name him 
solicitor general during this third term. But Corco- 
ran had become too controversial and the threat of 
a divisive confirmation fight dissuaded Roosevelt 
from nominating him. Corcoran shifted from New 
Dealer to wheeler-dealer, growing wealthy as a 
Washington lobbyist who represented corporate 
interests on Capitol Hill and at the federal agencies. 
Although he never held another government post, 
he remained close to such prominent politicians as 
Lyndon Johnson. Corcoran's K street office con- 
spicuously displayed photographs of himself and 
Johnson to confirm his status as an insider, along 
with copies of the conservative magazine National 
Review to reassure his clients. 

See Also: COHEN, BENJAMIN V.; FRANKFURTER, 
FELIX; SECURITIES REGULATION. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Corcoran, Thomas G. "Rendezvous with Destiny" (an 
unpublished memoir). Manuscript Division, Library 
of Congress, Washington D.C. 

Lash, loseph P. The Dealers and the Dream: A New Look 
at the New Deal. 1988. 

Niznik, Lynne. "Thomas G. Corcoran." Ph.D. diss., Uni- 
versity of Notre Dame, 1981. 

Donald A. Ritchie 



COSTIGAN, EDWARD 

Edward Prentiss Costigan (July 1, 1874-January 17, 
1939) was a U.S. senator from Colorado from 1930 
to 1936. Born in Virginia, Costigan moved to Colo- 
rado when he was three years old. He became po- 
litically active as a young adult, campaigning for 
William McKinley in the 1896 and 1900 presidential 
elections. After finishing his Harvard degree and 
entering the bar in 1897, Costigan returned to Den- 
ver dedicated to political activism for the underpriv- 
ileged and opposed to the self-interested political 
machines that dominated Colorado politics. 

Frustrated by Republican Party conservatism, 
Costigan helped found the Progressive Republican 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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L I N 



R L E S 



Club of Denver in 1910, which joined the new Na- 
tional Progressive Republican League the following 
year, setting the stage for Theodore Roosevelt's 
third party campaign for the presidency in 1912. 
Costigan took a leading role in that campaign, run- 
ning for governor of Colorado on the Progressive 
ticket and coming in a solid second. 

Costigan's political activism found full expres- 
sion after the Ludlow coal strike in 1914, when he 
successfully acted as defense counsel to the strike 
leaders accused of inciting violence against the 
mine-employed militia. The issue served to crystal- 
lize Costigan's developing views on the need for 
the fair treatment of industrial workers in the new 
age of industrial capitalism. With the decline of the 
progressive movement, Costigan felt he had no 
choice in 1916 but to endorse Democratic President 
Woodrow Wilson for re-election. Costigan was re- 
warded with a place on Wilson's new Tariff Com- 
mission, on which he served until his resignation in 
1928. 

The onset of the Great Depression provided 
Costigan with a campaign issue with which to re- 
turn to active political life. Fighting on the issue of 
Republican paralysis in the face of unprecedented 
nationwide poverty and economic collapse, he won 
a convincing victory as a Democrat in the 1930 Sen- 
ate race in Colorado. 

Costigan was at the forefront of legislative ef- 
forts to create a federal welfare safety net to combat 
the Depression in 1931 and 1932; he participated in 
a conference of progressive legislators in March 
1931 and drew up plans for a joint federal-state 
program of grants-in-aid to the destitute the fol- 
lowing November. The Costigan-La Follette bill 
failed in the Senate, but a less ambitious version 
passed in early 1932. In September 1932 Costigan 
became vice-chairman of a National Progressive 
League, which worked for the election of Franklin 
Roosevelt to the presidency. 

One of the most significant acts of the First 
Hundred Days of the Roosevelt administration in 
1933 was the signing of the Federal Emergency Re- 
lief Act, which was based on the Costigan-La Fol- 
lette proposals. The first allocation of aid under this 
act went to Colorado in recognition of Costigan's 
role in passing the bill. Costigan also drew up plans 



for six billion dollars of federal public works, sup- 
plemented by loans and grants to states for further 
local construction. He was also co-sponsor of an 
unsuccessful anti-lynching bill, and of successful 
efforts to strengthen emergency banking legislation 
by forcing the government to guarantee bank de- 
posits. The strain of his intensive legislative duties 
took its toll: Costigan suffered a stroke in 1934 that 
was to lead to his decision not to seek renomination 
to his Senate seat in 1936. 

See Also: ANTI-LYNCHING LEGISLATION; FEDERAL 
EMERGENCY RELIEF ADMINISTRATION (FERA); 
HUNDRED DAYS. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Feinman, Ronald L. Twilight ofProgressivism: The Western 
Republican Senators and the New Deal. 1981. 

Greenbaum, Fred. Tighting Progressive: A Biography of Ed- 
ward P. Costigan. 1971. 

Ickes, Harold L. The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Vol. 
1: The Tirst Thousand Days, 1933-1936. 1953. 

Rable, George. "The South and the Politics of Antilynch- 
ing Legislation, 1920-1940." Journal of Southern His- 
tory 51 (1985): 201-220. 

Schwarz, Jordan. Interregnum of Despair: Hoover, Con- 
gress, and the Depression. 1970. 

Schwarz, Jordan. The New Dealers: Power Politics in the 
Age of Roosevelt. 1993. 

Wickens, James. Colorado in the Great Depression. 1979. 

Jonathan W. Bell 



COUGHLIN, CHARLES 

Charles Coughlin (October 25, 1891-October 27, 
1979) was a Roman Catholic priest and a radio pio- 
neer who used the new medium to broadcast popu- 
lar but anti-Semitic and isolationist views during 
the Depression. Coughlin was born in Hamilton, 
Ontario, to Thomas and Amelia Mahoney 
Coughlin, pious Catholics who immersed their son 
in the Church. Charles attended Saint Michael's 
College in Toronto, where he established himself as 
a strong student and a talented public speaker. The 
school was run by the Basilan Fathers, an order that 
stressed social action and justice. After graduating 
in 1911, Coughlin entered Saint Basil's Seminary in 
Toronto. He became an ordained priest in 1916. 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



( W L E Y 



MALCOLM 



After seven years teaching at Assumption Col- 
lege outside of Windsor, Ontario, Coughlin was as- 
signed as a parish priest to the Archdiocese of De- 
troit, Michigan. He served as an assistant pastor in 
both Kalamazoo and Detroit before securing his 
own parish in North Branch, Michigan. After six 
months, Coughlin was moved to the growing com- 
munity of Royal Oak, Michigan. Here, in 1926, 
Coughlin arranged for a loan of $79,000 and over- 
saw the building of a new church that would seat 
six hundred congregants. To bolster his new 
church, which was known as the Shrine of the Little 
Flower, Coughlin purchased radio time and began 
broadcasting, at times right from his pulpit. By 
1928, Coughlin's popular shows had attracted nu- 
merous new congregants and pulled in enough 
money to fund the construction of a larger church 
with an 111-foot granite tower. 

Detroit was one of the first cities to feel the ef- 
fects of the Great Depression because the automo- 
bile industry, which was the city's main source of 
employment, was hit hard by the economic down- 
turn. Coughlin's Sunday radio show, which by 1929 
was broadcast by stations in Chicago and Cincin- 
nati as well as Detroit, eased the pain of the De- 
pression for many listeners. In 1930, Coughlin 
signed a deal with CBS to broadcast his Golden Hour 
of the Little Flower to a potential audience of up to 
forty million listeners. When Coughlin's increas- 
ingly controversial views caused CBS to refuse to 
renew his contract in 1931, he established contracts 
with individual radio stations and continued to 
reach millions of listeners. Coughlin's magazine, 
Social Justice, which was launched in 1936 and pub- 
lished until 1942, also claimed six hundred thou- 
sand subscribers. 

Coughlin's early broadcasts were delivered in a 
mainstream rhetorical style. By 1930, however, 
Coughlin's style had changed, and he exhibited a 
growing obsession with the international banking 
industry, which he blamed for many of the nation's 
problems and which he considered the bastion of 
Jews. He initially supported President Franklin D. 
Roosevelt and considered himself, erroneously, to 
be one of Roosevelt's key advisors. But despite the 
efforts of Joseph Kennedy to bring the men togeth- 
er, the relationship was rocky at best. In 1934, 



Coughlin spearheaded the National Union for So- 
cial Justice, which was built around support of an 
annual living wage for workers, greater profit for 
farmers, and central control of the monetary sys- 
tem. Coughlin insisted the group was a lobbying 
organization only and not a third party. Yet in 1936, 
Coughlin, along with Dr. Francis E. Townsend and 
Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, founded the Union Party. 
The party was based on similar principles as the 
NUSJ and supported the presidential bid of William 
Lemke of North Dakota. The party pulled in only 
2 percent of the national vote, greatly hurting 
Coughlin's credibility. By 1938, Coughlin's radio 
broadcasts had become blatantly isolationist and 
anti-Semitic in tone and content, and he expressed 
sympathy for Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. 
Although he continued to attract millions of listen- 
ers, Coughlin bowed to church pressure and 
stopped broadcasting in 1940. Under the order of 
his bishop, Coughlin ceased all political activity by 
1942, although he was allowed to continue serving 
as a parish priest until 1966. He died in Bloomfield 
Hills, Michigan, in 1979. 

See Also: ANTL-SEMLTISM; DLCTATORSHIP, FEAR OF 
IN THE UNITED STATES; ISOLATIONISM; RADIO; 
RELIGION. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Lather 
Coughlin, and the Great Depression. 1982. 

Fraser, Steve. "The 'Labor Question'." In Lhe Rise and 
Lall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, edited by 
Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. 1989. 

Kazin, Michael. Lhe Populist Persuasion: An American His- 
tory. 1995. 

Tull, Charles J. Lather Coughlin and the New Deal. 1965. 

Warren, David. Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Lather 
of Lalk Radio. 1996. 

Lisa Krissoff Boehm 



COWLEY, MALCOLM 

Malcolm Cowley (August 24, 1898-March 28, 1989) 
was a critic, editor, and literary historian, and the 
preeminent chronicler of the 1920s literary genera- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



215 



C P A D I [ WILL 



HOCK 



I H [ 



tion. Born in western Pennsylvania, Cowley grew 
up in Pittsburgh with a number of future literary 
figures, including his lifelong friend, the critic Ken- 
neth Burke. In 1915 Cowley matriculated in Har- 
vard, where he associated with a literary circle that 
included Conrad Aiken and e. e. cummings. De- 
spite being ranked second in his class, Cowley 
withdrew from Harvard to drive a munitions truck 
for the American Field Service in France and later 
served in the U.S. Army. He graduated Phi Beta 
Kappa in 1920. 

Cowley studied French literature at the Univer- 
sity of Montpelier from 1921 to 1922. While there, 
he became friends with, among others, Tristan 
Tzara, Louis Aragon, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude 
Stein, and John Dos Passos. These were the key 
years described in his classic memoir Exile's Return 
(1934). Back in the United States, Cowley did vari- 
ous literary jobs and wrote for the little magazines 
of the day. 

In 1929 Cowley became literary editor of the 
New Republic, the most powerful position of its type. 
As Cowley became more involved with editorial re- 
sponsibilities and political activities, he became a 
leader in the political movement leftward of Ameri- 
can writers. In 1935 he helped organize the League 
of American Writers and became its vice president. 
Cowley was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and 
Joseph Stalin, but conspicuously never joined the 
American Communist Party. He justified the show 
trials, but quickly cut all Communist connections 
after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. After joining the 
Office of Facts and Figures in 1940, Cowley was at- 
tacked for his earlier radical positions and forced to 
resign. 

Cowley made some of the great literary discov- 
eries of his day, most notably John Cheever, Jack 
Kerouac, Ken Kesey, and Larry McMurtry, and his 
championing of William Faulkner led to Faulkner's 
rediscovery. 

After World War II, Cowley became an editor 
at Viking where he made some of the great literary 
discoveries of his day, most notably Jack Kerouac, 
John Cheever, and Ken Kesey, and successfully 
championed the republication of such neglected 
figures as William Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
and Walt Whitman. In his own work, Cowley con- 



tinued to mine the veins begun in Exile's Return in 
such autobiographical works as The Dream of the 
Golden Mountain: Remembering the 1930s (1980) and 
And I Worked at the Writer's Trade, and such critical 
works as After the Genteel Tradition (1964) and A 
Many-Windowed House (1970). 

See Also: LITERATURE. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bak, Hans. Malcolm Cowley: The Tormative Years. 1993. 

Kempf, James Michael. The Early Career of Malcolm Cow- 
ley: A Humanist among the Moderns. 1985. 

Young, Thomas Daniel, ed. Conversations with Malcolm 
Cowley. 1986. 

Mark C. Smith 



CRADLE WILL ROCK, THE 

The Cradle Will Rock, a modernist labor opera pro- 
duced by the Federal Theatre Project, opened on 
June 16, 1937, and immediately made headlines. It 
told the story of the struggle between steel union- 
ism and Mister Mister in Steeltown, USA, and of 
the middle-class members of the Liberty Commit- 
tee who had prostituted themselves to Mister Mis- 
ter. Composer Marc Blitzstein's opera effectively 
combined vernacular speech and diverse musical 
styles to tell a compelling story of the pressures on 
professionals, artists, small business people, and 
union leaders to sell out, but also of the ultimate tri- 
umph of a powerful working-class movement. 

Opening night came just two weeks after the 
Memorial Day massacre by Chicago police of sup- 
porters of the Steel Workers' Organizing Commit- 
tee. Conservative opposition to the New Deal was 
rising in the wake of the sit-down strikes and Presi- 
dent Roosevelt's 1937 court-packing proposal. 
Works Progress Administration (WPA) arts project 
workers in New York conducted a one-day work 
stoppage on May 27, 1937, and some theater people 
and audiences sat down to protest threatened cuts. 
Responding to conservative pressures, however, 
the WPA announced a 30 percent staffing cut in the 
New York project, and, in a move aimed at The Cra- 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



CRIME 



die Will Rock, a suspension in the opening of any 
new play, musical performance, or art gallery before 
July 1, 1937. 

Determined to see the play performed, 
Blitzstein, director Orson Welles, and producer 
John Houseman planned a performance at the 
Venice Theatre, twenty-one blocks north of the 
Maxine Elliot Theatre where they had rehearsed 
and expected to open in a benefit performance for 
the left-wing Downtown Music School. Performers 
Will Geer and Howard da Silva led a march up- 
town. Officials of the Musicians Union and Actors 
Equity had told their members that they could not 
perform, and nonprofessional relief workers feared 
being cut off relief if they participated. Houseman 
suggested that Equity members could play their 
roles from the audience without violating union in- 
structions against appearing on stage. As the cur- 
tain went up in the packed house, Blitzstein was on 
stage alone, prepared to perform the entire opera 
himself. As he began to sing the lead female role of 
Moll, however, Olive Stanton, a relief worker, 
joined in and sang her part from her place in the 
audience. Most other cast members followed in 
turn to play their parts from the audience. The play 
was a hit and ran for another two weeks, with the 
actors continuing to perform from the audience 
with the approval of Equity. Welles and Houseman 
staged the play again at their new Mercury Theatre, 
as did amateur theater groups throughout the 
country. The success of The Cradle Will Rock owed 
much to the growth of a new left-wing working- 
class audience. 

The Federal Theatre Project provided the op- 
portunity for the creators of The Cradle Will Rock to 
develop their vision, but it did not share in its tri- 
umph due to the WPA suspension. At its height, 
the Federal Theatre Project staged hundreds of 
classical and contemporary plays, successfully im- 
plementing project director Hallie Flanagan's vision 
of a "relevant theatre." 

See Also: FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT (FTP); 
FLANNAGAN, HALLIE; WELLES, ORSON. 



Flanagan, Hallie. Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre. 
1940. 

Gordon, Eric A. Mark the Music: The Life and Work of 
Marc Blitzstein. 1989. 

Houseman, John. Run-Through: A Memoir. 1972. 

Robbins, Tim, director; Jon Kilik, Lydia Dean Pilcher, and 
Tim Robbins, producers. Cradle Will Rock. 1999. 

Martin Halpern 



CRIME 

In the popular imagination, the Great Depression 
is not seen as an era of violence or of criminality. 
Viewed through the lens of nostalgia, it is thought 
to be a simpler, calmer time. But nothing could be 
further from the truth. The early Depression saw a 
stunning increase in the homicide rate, and was 
one of the most violent periods to that point in 
American history. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, 
criminals also played an important role in American 
culture, with many Americans following their ac- 
tions closely — and, one imagines, identifying with 
them on some level, despite the fear many people 
had of violence or of being a target of crime. 

It is difficult to come by meaningful crime sta- 
tistics for the period before the 1930s. The federal 
government only began to count crime statistics in 
1930, and experts believe that crime was systemati- 
cally underreported early in the century, so it is 
hard to make valid comparisons for property 
crimes, burglaries, robberies, rapes, and other crim- 
inal activity between the Great Depression and ear- 
lier periods. The significant exception is the murder 
rate. During the early part of the twentieth century 
the murder rate in the United States rose from 1.2 
homicides per 100,000 people in 1900 to 6.8 in 1920. 
Between 1920 and 1930, it climbed again, reaching 
8.8 in 1930 — a higher murder rate than in the 
1970s. In the early 1930s it reached a high point for 
the entire century, peaking at 9.7 homicides per 
100,000 people in 1933, and declining afterwards 
for the rest of the decade. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of 
American Culture in the Twentieth Century. 1996. 



THE CRIMINAL AS BUSINESSMAN 

Why was American society so violent in the 
1920s and early 1930s? The most generally accepted 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



217 



(RIME 





/''' ■'" 





The FBI's most wanted criminals in 1934 included (clockwise from top left) John Dillinger, Arthur Barker, Charles Arthur "Pretty 
Boy" Floyd, Homer Van Meter, Alvin Korpis, and Baby Face Nelson. Bettmann/CORBIS 



explanation is that rampant violence was one of the 
unexpected consequences of prohibition, the ban 
on producing, distributing, or selling intoxicating 
beverages that began with the Eighteenth Amend- 
ment to the Constitution in 1919 and the Volstead 
Act the next year. Bound by the fiscal conservatism 
of the times, the federal government quickly found 
that it was all but impossible to enforce prohibition. 
Alcohol intended for any variety of commercial or 
industrial purposes was re-distilled and sold as 



drinking liquor, produced in shops that employed 
sweated labor. People smuggling alcohol from 
other countries did a brisk business. In 1925 alone, 
prohibition agents shut down 172,000 illegal alco- 
hol shops. 

Most important, however, was the rise of a $2 
billion illegal industry of producing and selling al- 
cohol, run by organized crime. Paralleling the rise 
of the corporation, organized crime became big 
business during the prohibition years. Contracts 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



CRIME 



between producers, distributors and salesmen 
could not be enforced through any courts, and the 
market was highly competitive. So the bootleggers 
sought to make their agreements stick and elimi- 
nate their competitors through shootings, beatings, 
threats, and other kinds of violence. Often, Italian 
and Irish immigrants ran these criminal organiza- 
tions, and for many they represented one of the few 
chances working-class ethnics had to make phe- 
nomenal amounts of money and join the American 
elite. Despite the extreme violence of the gangs, for 
many working-class Americans — especially those 
who resented prohibition — the wealth and notori- 
ety of the ethnic mobs became a point of identifica- 
tion and pride. 

The Torrio-Capone gang in Chicago was the 
model for this new kind of organized crime. A few 
months after the passage of the Volstead Act, Fran- 
kie Yale of Brooklyn, New York, executed one of 
Chicago's preeminent mobsters, James "Big Jim" 
Colosimo. Legend has it that Johnny Torrio, one of 
Colosimo's henchmen, hired Yale to commit the 
murder so that Torrio could diversify the gang from 
brothels and illegal gaming into the purchase and 
sale of liquor. Torrio brought in a group of hired 
guns from Brooklyn, one of whom was Alphonse 
"Al" Capone. Capone was one of the most colorful 
characters in Chicago's underworld. A young man 
who listed his occupation on his business cards as 
"secondhand furniture dealer," he ran the Chicago 
gang's business to the tune of two hundred gang- 
related murders a year in Chicago in the mid-1920s. 
He was very open with reporters and the press — 
who covered him enthusiastically — about his role 
in murders, such as that of Dion O'Banion, a neme- 
sis of the Torrio-Capone gang, in 1924. The rivalry 
between the Torrio-Capone gang and the 
O'Banions reached its peak with the St. Valentine's 
Day massacre of 1929, when members of the Ca- 
pone gang dressed as police officers slaughtered 
seven unarmed O'Banions. When Capone finally 
was brought down for income tax evasion, federal 
investigators estimated that his organization's an- 
nual income from liquor, prostitution, loan- 
sharking, extortion, slot machines, and gambling 
was $70 million. He was truly the big businessman 
of the crime world, and his power seemed to mirror 
that of corporations during the 1920s. 



With the stock market crash of 1929 came reve- 
lations of corporate malfeasance often not captured 
in crime statistics. The great crash may have made 
it appear to ordinary Americans that some kind of 
massive criminal operation was afoot — how else 
could all that money simply vanish? But while ordi- 
nary speculation and irresponsible lending deci- 
sions were primarily responsible for driving stock 
prices sky-high during the bubble, there were spec- 
ulative "bull pools" and insider trading operations. 
There were also white-collar criminals like Ivar 
Kreuger, a Swedish mogul who ran the Interna- 
tional Match Company, which sold $150 million 
worth of stock before being revealed as little more 
than Ponzi scheme in the crash. 



THE CRIMINAL AS FOLK HERO 

The early 1930s saw a dramatic acceleration of 
violent crime — murders, robberies, and kidnap- 
pings alike. The late days of prohibition may have 
been one cause, and the social dislocation of the 
Depression another. The baby of aviation celebrity 
Charles A. Lindbergh was kidnapped and mur- 
dered. Businessmen were kidnapped and held for 
ransom. The Barker-Karpis Gang stole $240,000 
from the Cloud County Bank at Condordia, Kansas. 

But the imagination of the American public was 
especially captivated in the early 1930s by a pair of 
robbers who drove the back roads of Texas, holding 
up banks and stores: Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Par- 
ker. The young duo met in 1930, as the Depression 
swept across the country. Parker, born to a poor 
family in West Dallas, had waited tables as a teen- 
ager in the late 1920s as her first marriage fell apart. 
Barrow had grown up in a desperately poor family 
outside of Dallas, and was involved in car theft and 
robbery as a teen in the late 1920s. They met, fell 
in love, and — though separated for two years by 
imprisonment — embarked in 1932 on a series of 
bank robberies and hold-ups at stores such as the 
Piggly Wiggly, which would lead to the deaths of 
twelve people and the wounding of several more. 

Bonnie and Clyde were on the run for a year 
and a half, driving aimlessly through Texas, Kansas, 
Oklahoma, and Arkansas (Barrow wrote a letter to 
Henry Ford, telling him that the Ford was the best 
car ever made), committing robberies and killing 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ZI9 



(RIME 



police officers and paying occasional visits to family 
members, to whom they were deeply attached. In 
May 1934, they were ambushed and shot in Louisi- 
ana. Bonnie was twenty-three years old at the time 
of her death, and Clyde was twenty-five. Quickly, 
they became legends. Before being killed, Bonnie 
had already started to contribute to the story of 
their nihilistic romance, writing "The Ballad of Bon- 
nie and Clyde" and other poems in the country- 
ballad tradition celebrating her hopeless life on the 
road. After their deaths, crowds gathered around 
the ambush site to seek bits of the bullets that had 
killed them, and their funerals were mass public 
events. 

Bonnie and Clyde were not the only violent 
criminals to gain a public following. There were 
other bank robbers and criminals who became al- 
most like folk heroes in the early 1930s. Charles Ar- 
thur "Pretty Boy" Floyd was the son of a tenant far- 
mer, born in Georgia and raised in Arkansas. He 
stole from banks and acquired the status of a Robin 
Hood figure, with the desperation of a small farmer 
in the Great Depression. George "Machine Gun" 
Kelly gained his notoriety by kidnapping Charles F. 
Urschel, an Oklahoma City oil millionaire. John 
Dillinger, scion of a strict Indianapolis grocer, be- 
came a juvenile delinquent at an early age, leading 
a child gang known as the Dirty Dozen. The Dil- 
linger Gang was one of the best known bank- 
robbing gangs of the early 1930s. It flaunted au- 
thority and mocked the F.B.I, and the police, and 
the gang members claimed legitimacy by present- 
ing themselves as the people's thieves. As Henry 
Pierpont, one member of the gang, said, "I stole 
from the banks who stole from the people." F.B.I, 
agents shot Dillinger down in front of Chicago's Bi- 
ograph Theater in the summer of 1934. He had had 
plastic surgery while on the run, however, and as 
befits a larger than life legend, there were many 
people who doubted that he had really died. 

Although it is difficult to know why certain fig- 
ures attract so much more cultural attention than 
others, it does seem that in the late 1920s and early 
1930s, each historical era had the criminals best 
suited to it. For people in the business-crazed world 
of the late 1920s, there was little to separate legiti- 
mate business from crime. Figures like Al Capone 



dramatized the violent competition of the free mar- 
ket and represented the anarchic dimensions of 
market hysteria. In the early years of the Depres- 
sion, the evaporation of possibility, the dire poverty 
of unemployment, and the absence of direction ex- 
emplified by the wandering rage of Bonnie and 
Clyde struck a deep chord in people across the 
country, for whom the young, desperate, and 
doomed pair seemed less violent murderers than 
star-crossed lovers, outmatched by the law. The vi- 
olence of the early Depression began to decline 
later in the decade, as liquor became legal once 
again, mob activity declined, and political activism 
began to replace the fear and uncertainty of the 
early 1930s. But the spike in violence of the early 
1930s should make people who rhapsodize about 
the calm and social cohesion of the past think twice, 
for the chaos and criminality of the era — both its fa- 
mous criminals and its less well-known high crime 
rate — easily match the crime waves of the more re- 
cent past. 

See Also: "BALLAD OF PRETTY BOY FLOYD"; 

BONNIE AND CLYDE (BONNIE PARKER AND 
CLYDE BARROW); CAPONE, AL; HEROES; LAW 
ENFORCEMENT; PROHIBITION. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Allen, Everett S. The Black Ships: Rumrunners of Prohibi- 
tion. 1979. 

Bureau of the Census, U.S. Dept. of Commerce. Histori- 
cal Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 
1970. 1975. Reprint, 1989. 

Court TV's Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods. 
Available at: www.crimelibrary.com 

Helmer, William J., with Rick Mattix. Public Enemies: 
America's Criminal Past, 1919-1940. 1998. 

Kobler, John. Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone. 
1971. 

Milner, E. R. The Lives and Times of Bonnie and Clyde. 
1996. 

Parrish, Michael E. Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity 
and Depression, 1929-1941. 1992. 

Loland, John. The Dillinger Days. 1963. 

Lreherne, John. The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde. 
1984. 

Wallis, Michael. Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles 
Arthur Tloyd. 1992. 

Kim Phillips -Fein 



220 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



C U M M I N 6 S 



M E R 



CROSBY, BING. See MUSIC; RADIO. 



See Also: COMMUNIST PARTY; FOSTER, WILLIAM Z., 
LITERATURE; POPULAR FRONT; SOCIALIST 
PARTY. 



CULTURE AND THE CRISIS 

Culture and the Crisis: An Open Letter to the Writers, 
Artists, Teachers, Physicians, Engineers, Scientists, and 
Other Professional Workers of America was an influ- 
ential pamphlet-manifesto issued in 1932 by the 
League of Professional Groups. Its immediate goal 
was to boost support among American profession- 
als for the Communist Party's 1932 presidential 
ticket of William Z. Foster and James W. Ford. The 
pamphlet maintained that the Communist candi- 
dates alone acknowledged the collapse of capital- 
ism behind the suffering of the Great Depression. 
The pamphlet struck a more distinctive note in ar- 
guing that only a Communist America would allow 
professionals freedom in the studio, classroom, or 
lab. Professionals composed a social class in their 
own right, one distinct from the class of "muscle 
workers" and that of the "irresponsible business 
men." The economic crisis presented this class of 
professional "brain workers" with the historic op- 
portunity to join with their "true comrades," the 
muscle workers, and to liberate themselves from 
"false money-standards." 

Historians justly remember Culture and the Cri- 
sis for signaling the radical turn of American litera- 
ture in the early 1930s. Sherwood Anderson, Mal- 
colm Cowley, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, 
Waldo Frank, Langston Hughes, and Edmund Wil- 
son were among the fifty-two signatories willing to 
declare their intent to vote Communist. No less sig- 
nificant, however, is the pamphlet's trailblazing ef- 
fort to theorize the rise of a technical-intellectual 
"New Class" in modern society, a central concern 
of social theory beginning in the 1970s. Culture and 
the Crisis is also notable for predicting the focus on 
the political economy of culture that would charac- 
terize the Popular Front years of 1935 to 1939, and 
for announcing what Michael Denning calls the 
"cultural front" of mid-century America, "the ter- 
rain where the Popular Front social movement met 
the cultural apparatus during the age of the CIO" 
(Congress of Industrial Organizations). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Tront: The Laboring of 
American Culture in the Twentieth Century. 1996. 

Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States, 
1900-1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Soci- 
ety, rev. edition. 1992. 

William J. Maxwell 



CUMMINGS, HOMER 

Homer Stille Cummings (April 30, 1870-September 
10, 1956) was the attorney general of the United 
States from March 4, 1933, to January 2, 1939. Born 
in Chicago, he took his undergraduate and law de- 
grees from Yale University in New Haven, Con- 
necticut. He developed a successful trial practice in 
Stamford, Connecticut, founding the firm of Cum- 
mings and Lockwood in 1909. Always active in 
Democratic politics, Cummings was a floor leader 
in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, and 
was rewarded with the attorney generalship. 

While in office Cummings sponsored a number 
of reforms, which included establishing uniform 
rules of practice and procedure for the federal 
courts and expanding the functions of the Federal 
Bureau of Investigation. He secured legislation 
beefing up federal authority over firearms and such 
interstate crimes as kidnapping and bank robbery, 
and his penal reforms included the establishment 
of the penitentiary at Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. 
Yet while he successfully defended the administra- 
tion's monetary policy in the "gold clause" cases, 
his department was unable to replicate the feat in 
cases challenging such central New Deal programs 
as the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Ag- 
ricultural Adjustment Act. These frustrations 
prompted President Roosevelt to instruct Cum- 
mings to draft the ill-fated Court-packing bill, 
which was introduced in 1937. 

History's judgment of Cummings's tenure has 
not been altogether favorable. Many prominent 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



221 



C U R R I E 



U C H L I N 



New Dealers criticized the quality of legal work 
produced by Cummings's staff. The department, 
they complained, was staffed with too many politi- 
cal appointees and too few able lawyers. Nor did 
Cummings enjoy the confidence of the justices of 
the Supreme Court. Associate justices Louis Bran- 
deis and Harlan Fiske Stone each expressed to Roo- 
sevelt concern over the department's competence. 
At the height of the Court-packing fight, Chief Jus- 
tice Charles Evans Hughes privately complained to 
New Deal Senator Burton Wheeler that under 
Cummings's supervision New Deal statutes had 
been poorly drafted and the briefs and arguments 
offered in their defense badly drawn and poorly 
presented. Had the office been occupied by a differ- 
ent attorney general, Hughes suggested, the trou- 
bled history of New Deal legislation might have 
been quite different. 

Cummings resigned in January of 1939. He re- 
mained in Washington, where he practiced law 
until his death. 

See Also: LAW ENFORCEMENT; SUPREME COURT 
"PACKING" CONTROVERSY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cushman, Barry. Rethinking the New Deal Court: The 
Structure of a Constitutional Revolution. 1998. 

Irons, Peter H. The New Deal Lawyers. 1982. 

Lash, Joseph P. Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the 
New Deal. 1988. 

Leuchtenburg, William E. The Supreme Court Reborn: 
Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt. 1995. 

Barry Cushman 



CURRIE, LAUCHLIN 



Lauchlin Currie (October 8, 1902-December 23, 
1993) was born in a small fishing village in Nova 
Scotia, Canada, where his father owned a fleet of 
vessels. When his father died in 1906 his family 
moved to the town of Bridgewater, but Currie's 
early schooling also included short periods in Mas- 
sachusetts and California. After two years at 
St. Francis Xavier's University, Nova Scotia 



(1920-1922), Currie studied at the London School 
of Economics (1922-1925) where his teachers in- 
cluded Edwin Cannan, Hugh Dalton, A. L. Bowley, 
and Harold Laski. In 1925 Currie joined Harvard's 
graduate program, where his chief inspiration was 
Allyn Abbott Young. His Ph.D. was on banking 
theory, and he remained at Harvard until 1934 as 
assistant to, successively, Ralph Hawtrey, John H. 
Williams, and Joseph Schumpeter. In 1934 he be- 
came a U.S. citizen and joined Jacob Viner's famous 
"freshman brain trust" at the U.S. Treasury. There 
he outlined an "ideal" monetary system for the 
United States (including a 100 percent reserve 
banking plan) and teamed up with Marriner Eccles 
shortly before the latter became governor of the 
Federal Reserve Board (November 1934). Eccles re- 
cruited Currie as his personal assistant. 

At the Fed Currie drafted what became the 
1935 Banking Act, which created a true central bank 
for the United States with increased control over 
money. At Harvard he had bitterly attacked Fed 
policy, blaming its "commercial loan theory" of 
banking (or real bills doctrine) for monetary tight- 
ening at a time when the economy was already de- 
clining (mid-1929), and then for its passivity in the 
face of mass liquidations and bank failures from 
1929 to 1933. In a January 1932 Harvard memoran- 
dum on anti-Depression policy, Currie and two fel- 
low instructors, Harry Dexter White and Paul T. 
Ellsworth, urged large fiscal deficits, open-market 
operations to expand bank reserves, the removal of 
tariffs, and the relief of inter-allied debts. White, 
another "freshman brain trust" recruit in 1934, be- 
came top adviser (and later the assistant secretary) 
to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. White 
and Currie worked closely in their respective roles 
at the Treasury and Fed, from 1934 to 1939, and also 
after 1939 when President Roosevelt appointed 
Currie as his White House adviser on economic af- 
fairs. 

At the Fed Currie constructed an important 
"net federal income-creating expenditure series" to 
show the influence of fiscal policy in acute Depres- 
sion. When, after four years of recovery, the econo- 
my declined sharply in 1937, he was able to explain 
to President Roosevelt, in an unprecedented four- 
hour interview, how damaging was the declared 



222 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



C W A 



aim of balancing the budget "to restore business 
confidence." This dialogue was part of the "struggle 
for the soul of FDR" between Secretary Morgen- 
thau and Governor Eccles. At first the president 
sided with Morgenthau and disaster followed. Not 
until April 1938, after the worst period of his long 
tenure in the White House, did Roosevelt at last ask 
Congress for more than $3 billion of spending on 
relief and public works. In May 1939 Currie joined 
Harvard's Alvin Hansen in testimony before the 
Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) 
to explain the additions and offsets to the circular 
flow of income and expenditure and the role of gov- 
ernment in stabilizing this flow at full employment. 

As the White House economist from July 1939, 
Currie advised on budgetary policy, social security, 
and peacetime and wartime production plans. In 
March 1940, at the President's request, he prepared 
a lengthy Memorandum on Full Employment Poli- 
cy that attempted to allay the President's fears that 
the large expenditures being planned for defense, 
housing and social security were economically un- 
sound. Currie wrote: "I have come to suspect that 
you are somewhat bothered by the apparent con- 
flict between the humanitarian and social aims of 
the New Deal and the dictates of 'sound econom- 
ics.' I feel convinced that in place of conflict there 
is really complete harmony and for that reason only 
the New Deal can solve the economic problem." 

After a mission to China in January 1941 Currie 
advised that China be added to the lend-lease pro- 
gram, which he then administered. In 1943 and 
1944 he ran the Foreign Economic Administration, 
and in early 1945 he headed a mission to Switzer- 
land to secure the freezing of Nazi assets. After the 



war Currie was one of those blamed for "losing" 
China. It was also alleged that he had participated 
in wartime Soviet espionage. No charges were laid 
and in 1949 and 1950 he headed an important 
World Bank mission to Colombia. He stayed on to 
advise on the implementation of his report. He as- 
sumed Colombian citizenship in 1958 and was the 
country's leading economic adviser until his death 
in 1993. Currie's extensive collected papers are ar- 
chived at Duke University's Special Collections. 

See Also: BRAIN(S) TRUST; ECCLES, MARRINER; 

FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM; MONETARY POLICY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Currie, Lauchlin. The Supply and Control of Money in the 
United States. 1934. 

Laidler, David, and Sandilands, Roger J. "An Early Har- 
vard Memorandum on Anti-Depression Policies." 
History of Political Economy 34(2) (2002): 515-552. 

Sandilands, Roger J. The Life and Political Economy of 
Lauchlin Currie: New Dealer, Presidential Adviser, and 
Development Economist. 1990. 

Sandilands, Roger J. "Guilt by Association? Lauchlin 
Currie's Alleged Involvement with Washington 
Economists in Soviet Espionage." History of Political 
Economy 32(3) (2000): 473-515. 

Stein, Herbert. The Fiscal Revolution in America. 1969. 

Tobin, James. "Hansen and Public Policy." Quarterly 
Journal of Economics 90 (1976): 32-37. 

Roger J. Sandilands 



CURRY, JOHN STEUART. See AMERICAN 
SCENE, THE. 



CWA. See CIVIL WORKS ADMINISTRATION. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



223 




DAVIS, CHESTER 



Born in rural Iowa, Chester C. Davis (November 17, 
1887-September 25, 1975) graduated from Grinnell 
College in 1911 and became a journalist in South 
Dakota and Montana. While editor of the Bozeman 
Weekly Courier, Davis became seriously interested 
in farm issues and his career in journalism yielded 
to agricultural advocacy instead. He became editor 
of the Montana Farmer in 1917, involved himself in 
various agricultural groups, and won gubernatorial 
appointment as Montana's commissioner of agri- 
culture and labor in 1921. 

Sharply analytical, full of reformist ideas, and 
demonstrating patience and executive skill, Davis 
earned the confidence of farmers. In the 1920s, he 
joined farm advocate George N. Peek in the cam- 
paign for national farm parity, a formula designed 
to improve farmers'purchasing power, and worked 
for passage of the doomed McNary-Haugen bills, 
which would have authorized federal acquisition of 
farm commodities. Success proved elusive until the 
onetime Republican joined the farmer-friendly 
New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt in 
1933. 

When George Peek became head of the new 
Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), he 
turned to Davis to run the AAA's Production Divi- 



sion. They were joined by others who saw the 
AAA's task as primarily to raise prices for farm 
commodities, a view not shared by socially con- 
scious liberals in the AAA's Legal Division and 
Consumers Counsel who wanted justice for farm 
tenants. When internecine conflict in the AAA 
forced Peek out by the end of 1933, he was replaced 
by Davis, whose personality seemed better suited to 
mitigate differences within the agency. However, 
more than a year later — in early 1935 — when the 
Legal Division tried to reinterpret a controversial 
section of the AAA's cotton contract for 1934 and 
1935 in favor of retention of the same tenants on 
plantations despite acreage reduction, an angry 
Davis, with the pragmatic support of Secretary of 
Agriculture Henry Wallace, fired a number of liber- 
als in both the Legal Division and Consumers 
Counsel. Both Wallace and Davis knew that the 
agency could not alienate the conservative landlord 
establishment in or out of government. Davis even 
believed that Wallace would be forced out of the 
cabinet if the firings were not sustained. 

Davis left the AAA in 1936 but continued to 
hold a series of federal positions, including mem- 
bership on the Board of Governors of the Federal 
Reserve, War Food Administrator (briefly) during 
World War II, and advisor to the Office of War Mo- 
bilization and Reconversion. Active in postwar 
famine relief and European reconstruction, he also 



225 



DEFICIT SPENDING 



served as associate director of the Ford Foundation, 
working with programs in India and Pakistan. 
Davis retired in the 1950s and died in Winston- 
Salem, North Carolina, in 1975. 

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMIN- 
ISTRATION (AAA); WALLACE, HENRY A. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Conrad, David E. The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of 
Sharecroppers in the New Deal. 1965. 

Davis, Chester C. Columbia Oral History Collection, But- 
ler Library, Columbia University, New York. 

Fite, Gilbert C. George N. Peek and the Fight for Farm Pari- 
ty. 1954. 

Grubbs, Donald H. Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Ten- 
ant Farmers' Union and the New Deal. 1971. 

Nelson, Lawrence. King Cotton's Advocate in the New 
Deal: Oscar G. Johnston and the New Deal. 1999. 

Nelson, Lawrence. "The Art of the Possible: Another 
Look at the 'Purge' of the AAA Liberals in 1935," 
Agricultural History, 57 (1983): 416-435. 

Lawrence J. Nelson 



DEFICIT SPENDING 

The Great Depression marked a turning point in 
America's fiscal history. Prior to the 1930s, balanced 
federal budgets in which tax receipts exceeded ex- 
penditure were the norm, but thereafter they have 
been rare. The unbroken sequence of unbalanced 
budgets that operated from fiscal year 1931 to fiscal 
year 1947 heralded the predominance of deficit 
budgets in the second half of the twentieth century. 
In contrast to the post-World War II period, how- 
ever, Depression-era fiscal policy was only belated- 
ly influenced by the new Keynesian economic theo- 
ries. 

The budget moved from a $734 million surplus 
in fiscal year 1929 to a $2.7 billion deficit in fiscal 
year 1932. President Herbert Hoover initially re- 
garded deficits as a short-term necessity while the 
economy underwent correction. Under his lead, 
Congress cut taxes, increased public-works spend- 
ing, and established loan programs to assist state 
and local public works and state unemployment re- 



lief. These measures were utterly insufficient to 
boost recovery, but Hoover held back from large- 
scale deficit spending for fear of engendering big 
government. Moreover, the tax-increasing Revenue 
Act of 1932 vainly attempted to restore balanced- 
budget orthodoxy so that government borrowing 
would not crowd out business from tight credit 
markets. Its reduction of purchasing power only ag- 
gravated economic decline with the consequence 
that the deficit remained stubbornly high. 

Hoover came under attack most often not for 
the inadequacy of his deficit spending but for its ex- 
cess. Business leaders feared that unbalanced bud- 
gets would have severe inflationary consequences 
if government expanded the money supply to ease 
its borrowing requirements. To the mass public, 
deficits were evidence of government extravagance 
and mismanagement. In the 1932 presidential elec- 
tion, therefore, economic and political consider- 
ations induced Democratic candidate Franklin D. 
Roosevelt to promise that his administration would 
balance the budget. 

The core ideas of what became known as 
Keynesianism — that consumption rather than in- 
vestment drove economic growth and that public 
spending could stimulate mass purchasing power 
when the private economy was in recession — had 
few adherents. In the 1890s, University of Pennsyl- 
vania economist Simon Patten had pioneered the 
idea that increased consumption was the founda- 
tion for economic well-being, a view later promot- 
ed by his students, Wesley Mitchell and Rexford 
Tugwell, and journalist Stuart Chase in the 1920s 
and 1930s. Meanwhile, lay analysts William Truf- 
fant Foster and Waddill Catchings turned the con- 
ventional economic belief that consumption was 
the result of production on its head in a number of 
popular tracts, such as Plenty (1925), Business with- 
out a Buyer (1927), and The Road to Plenty (1928). 
They further contended that government spending 
was the best means to counteract recession when 
many people lacked private income to spend. Brit- 
ish economist John Maynard Keynes promoted 
similar views in works like The Means to Prosperity 
(1933). "Too good to be true — You can't get some- 
thing for nothing," Roosevelt had commented in 
the margin of his copy of The Road to Plenty. He was 



Z26 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DEFICIT 



SPENDING 



similarly unimpressed with Keynes, whom he 
dubbed "a mathematician rather than a political 
economist" after their 1934 meeting. 

Nevertheless, Roosevelt had no more success 
than Hoover in balancing the budget. New Deal 
emergency spending on public works, relief, and 
rural programs drove up federal outlays to $6.6 bil- 
lion in fiscal year 1934 and $8.2 billion in fiscal year 
1936, well above Hoover's largest budget of $4.7 
billion in fiscal year 1932. Tax revenues could not 
cover this expansion in a depressed economy, so 
the deficit grew to $4.3 billion in fiscal year 1936 
compared with $2.6 billion in Hoover's fiscal year 
1933 budget. Ever mindful of his campaign pledge, 
Roosevelt viewed the New Deal deficits as an em- 
barrassment rather than an instrument for recov- 
ery. Accordingly, he repeatedly raised taxes — both 
direct and indirect — and was a reluctant spender. 
Significantly, congressional enactment over the 
presidential veto of a $2.2 billion appropriation for 
immediate payment of the World War I veterans' 
bonus helped make the fiscal year 1936 deficit the 
largest operated by the New Deal. The true mea- 
sure of New Deal fiscal activism was not the actual 
deficit but the full-employment deficit that would 
have accrued had the economy been operating to 
its full potential. This hypothetical index differenti- 
ates between intentional policy and the effect of de- 
pressed economic activity on the tax base. It reveals 
that only four New Deal budgets — fiscal years 1934, 
1936, 1939, and 1940 — operated expansionary defi- 
cits, while the others provided no greater stimulus 
than Hoover's budgets of fiscal years 1930 to 1932. 
Moreover, in contrast to Hoover, Roosevelt could 
have operated larger deficits without fear of driving 
up interest rates because the early New Deal had 
liberated monetary and credit policy from Federal 
Reserve control. 



faced a stark choice of adhering to orthodoxy or 
spending his way out of recession. Conservative 
advisers led by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgen- 
thau insisted that a balanced budget was vital to re- 
store business confidence. Conversely, Federal Re- 
serve chairman Marriner Eccles, a longtime 
advocate of counter-cyclical policy, warned that 
only deficit spending would restore purchasing 
power in the economy. The effort to speed recovery 
by placating business, he told Roosevelt, had 
"borne no fruits in either dollar terms or goodwill." 
Once a lone voice, Eccles now found himself at the 
center of a group of liberal New Dealers whom the 
recession had converted to the same cause. These 
included such cabinet members as Harry Hopkins, 
Harold Ickes, and Henry Wallace, as well as youn- 
ger officials spread throughout the federal bureau- 
cracy, such as Laughlan Currie, Mordecai Ezekiel, 
Leon Henderson, and Aubrey Williams. They 
found theoretical justification in Keynes's recently 
published master work, General Theory of Employ- 
ment, Interest, and Money (1936), which contended 
that in advanced industrial economies permanent 
deficits were needed to boost consumption and full 
employment. 

The battle for the president's ear ended in vic- 
tory for the spenders. Though unconvinced about 
permanent deficits, Roosevelt adopted Keynesian 
remedies against the recession and justified these 
with Keynesian rhetoric. In April 1938 he recom- 
mended that Congress appropriate $3 billion for 
emergency spending and credit programs without 
corollary tax increases to boost "the purchasing 
power of the Nation." Federal spending conse- 
quently rose beyond $9 billion in both fiscal years 
1939 and 1940, and the deficit grew from $0.1 bil- 
lion in fiscal year 1938 to $2.8 billion in fiscal year 
1939. 



In 1937 Roosevelt's fiscal orthodoxy prompted 
his decision to balance the fiscal year 1938 budget 
as an anti-inflation precaution in advance of full re- 
covery. The reduction of federal spending coincided 
with the first collection of the social security taxes, 
which sucked purchasing power from the economy, 
and the tightening of monetary policy. The com- 
bined effect of these three actions tipped the recov- 
ering economy into deep recession. Roosevelt now 



In marked contrast to the early New Deal, the 
later New Deal adopted deficit spending as its prin- 
cipal weapon against recession. Presidential state- 
ments that routinely justified deficits as necessary 
to compensate for underconsumption helped to 
break down the public's antipathy to unbalanced 
budgets. By 1940 important socioeconomic groups, 
including farmers and organized labor, had come to 
regard fiscal activism as essential. Deficit spending 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



227 



DEMOCRATIC PARTY 



also acquired intellectual legitimacy with the grow- 
ing acceptance of Keynesian doctrine among pro- 
fessional economists. However the triumph of the 
new thinking was far from complete. Lacking a 
strategy to determine the requisite level of compen- 
satory finance, the New Deal deficits of fiscal years 
1939 and 1940 were too small to generate full re- 
covery, which had to await the expansion of de- 
fense expenditure in 1941. Moreover, a congressio- 
nal coalition of Republicans and conservative 
Democrats had been emboldened by liberal re- 
verses in the recession-affected 1938 midterm elec- 
tions to enact reductions in New Deal appropria- 
tions in 1939. For this group, deficits had become 
a political evil as the embodiment of big govern- 
ment. 

America's experience in World War II finally in- 
stitutionalized deficit spending as national eco- 
nomic policy. Driven by military needs, the federal 
deficit skyrocketed from $6.2 billion in fiscal year 
1941 to $57.4 billion in fiscal year 1943. The con- 
junction of massive deficits and dramatic growth of 
the economy by 56 percent between 1941 and 1945 
seemingly provided justification of Keynesian theo- 
ry, even in the eyes of business leaders. This was 
the foundation for enactment of the Employment 
Act of 1946, which consolidated Roosevelt's eco- 
nomic legacy. Like New Deal fiscal policy, the legis- 
lation was imprecise and limited, most notably in 
its failure to guarantee full employment. Neverthe- 
less it formally mandated the federal government's 
obligation to combat recession and rising unem- 
ployment and established the president as the 
manager of prosperity. In essence, the priority of 
fiscal policy had changed from protecting capital 
markets in 1932 to protecting and creating jobs by 
1946, and deficit spending had become the essen- 
tial instrument to achieve this new purpose. 

See Also: ECONOMY, AMERICAN; KEYNES, JOHN 
MAYNARD; KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in 
Recession and War. 1995. 

Ippolitto, Dennis S. Uncertain Legacies: Federal Budget Pol- 
icy from Roosevelt to Reagan. 1990. 

Morgan, Iwan. Deficit Government: Taxes and Spending in 
Modern America. 1995. 



Stein, Herbert. The Fiscal Revolution in America, 2nd rev. 
edition. 1996. 

Iwan Morgan 



DEMOCRATIC PARTY 



As the oldest existing political party in the world, 
the Democratic Party of the United States experi- 
enced its most significant expansion in voter regis- 
tration and party organization, consistent electoral 
success in national elections, and fundamental 
changes in its coalition, policy agenda, and ideology 
during the Great Depression. Despite Democratic 
presidential nominee Alfred E. Smith's resounding 
defeat in the 1928 election, there was evidence of 
the potential for a future political realignment fa- 
voring the Democratic Party. Smith was the first 
Democratic presidential nominee in many years to 
win pluralities in the twelve largest American cities. 
He also carried the two most Catholic, urban states: 
Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The presidential 
election of 1928 also stimulated a sharp increase in 
voter registration and turnout among foreign-born 
citizens and the voting-age children of immigrants, 
especially women, who voted overwhelmingly for 
Smith. 

After being nominated for president, Smith had 
designated John J. Raskob, a wealthy, Catholic, 
anti-prohibition or "wet," former Republican and 
General Motors executive, as chairman of the Dem- 
ocratic National Committee (DNC). Through his 
vigorous fund-raising among his business contacts, 
Raskob succeeded in liquidating the DNC's $1.5 
million campaign debt. He also created and fi- 
nanced a full-time publicity division for then DNC. 
Its director, Charles Michelson, researched and 
publicized the policy behavior and statements of 
Republican president Herbert Hoover, the RNC 
chairman, and Republicans in Congress so that 
Raskob and other Democrats could regularly and 
publicly criticize and oppose Republican policies, 
especially after the Great Depression began in late 
1929. 

Nonetheless, Raskob wanted to continue to 
focus the efforts of the Democratic Party in general 



Z28 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DEMOCRATIC 



PARTY 



and the DNC's apparatus in particular on repealing 
the national prohibition of alcohol. By concentrat- 
ing on the prohibition issue, Raskob hoped that the 
Democratic Party would nominate Smith for presi- 
dent in 1932 and adopt a platform as conservative 
and pro-big business as the Republican platform on 
economic issues. Like other conservative Demo- 
crats, Raskob blamed the worsening economic con- 
ditions on excessive spending, bureaucratic bloat, 
and an unbalanced federal budget by the Hoover 
administration. 



FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT 

The major obstacle to Raskob's strategy for the 
1932 presidential election was Democratic governor 
Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. Roosevelt had 
served as assistant secretary of the navy during the 
Woodrow Wilson administration and as the Demo- 
cratic vice presidential nominee of 1920. He had 
also made nominating speeches for Al Smith at the 
1924 and 1928 Democratic national conventions, 
earning Roosevelt the respect of many Catholic 
Democrats. Reluctantly accepting Smith's request 
that he run for governor in 1928, Roosevelt won by 
a narrow margin as Smith decisively lost his home 
state to Hoover. 

Frustrated by his failed efforts throughout the 
1920s to change the national Democratic Party's or- 
ganization, decision-making processes, ideology, 
and future economic platform, Roosevelt used his 
governorship and titular leadership of the New 
York Democratic Party as a role model for his future 
national party leadership as president. In order to 
attract the support of traditionally Republican, rural 
upstate New Yorkers, Roosevelt's policy agenda in- 
cluded property tax relief for farmers, the construc- 
tion of farm-to-market roads, and the development 
of state-sponsored hydroelectric power for rural 
areas. With James A. Farley serving as secretary and 
later chairman of the New York Democratic state 
committee, Roosevelt directed Farley and Secretary 
of State Edward J. Flynn to secure the removal of 
local Democratic chairmen in heavily Republican 
areas who had been collaborating with Republican 
politicians in exchange for patronage. The governor 
also encouraged Farley and Flynn to recruit Demo- 
cratic candidates for state and local offices in order 



to provide contested elections in Republican- 
dominated areas and increase Democratic repre- 
sentation in the Republican-controlled state legis- 
lature. Shrewdly attuned to the power of publicity 
through modern technology, Roosevelt had Farley 
arrange and finance monthly radio broadcasts and 
later, for his 1930 reelection campaign, talking 
movies. 

Reelected governor in 1930 with 62 percent of 
the votes and a winning margin of more than 
167,000 votes in upstate counties, Roosevelt used 
his second term to develop a successful campaign 
for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1932. 
He distinguished himself as the first governor to 
advocate unemployment insurance and old age 
pensions. Roosevelt also educated himself on policy 
issues that were of greater concern in the South and 
West, such as cotton prices, railroad rates, soil and 
forest conservation, flood control, and rural electri- 
fication. Meanwhile, James A. Farley and Roose- 
velt's aide Louis Howe traveled throughout the 
United States, but especially in the South and West, 
to lobby for delegate support for Roosevelt at the 
1932 Democratic national convention. Roosevelt, 
Farley, and Howe assumed that most northern del- 
egates controlled by Catholic Democratic politi- 
cians would probably vote for Smith at the conven- 
tion. Consequently, their strategy was to gradually 
develop a consensus-building yet ideologically di- 
verse coalition of southern conservatives and west- 
ern progressives whose delegates would eventually 
provide Roosevelt with at least the two-thirds ma- 
jority needed for the presidential nomination. But 
this strategy also required the pro-Roosevelt Dem- 
ocrats to discourage and minimize the number of 
favorite son and other minor presidential candida- 
cies at the convention. After they persuaded Speak- 
er of the House John N. Garner of Texas to end his 
presidential candidacy in exchange for the vice- 
presidential nomination, Roosevelt was nominated 
for president on the fourth ballot. 

With approximately one third of the voters 
identified as Democrats in 1932, Roosevelt recog- 
nized the need to attract the votes of disaffected Re- 
publicans, independents, and minor party members 
so that he could win a decisive victory that would 
provide a mandate for major policy changes and for 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



229 



DEMOCRATIC PARTY 



transforming the Democratic Party into the new 
majority party in the two-party system. Therefore, 
Roosevelt rarely used the word Republican in his 
post-convention campaign speeches. His policy 
proposals and the Democratic national platform 
were a dichotomous, contradictory mixture of 
promises to balance the federal budget, reduce bu- 
reaucratic centralization, and protect states' rights, 
but also to provide vigorous presidential leadership 
and more federal intervention to reduce unemploy- 
ment, raise farm prices, and protect Americans 
against the economic abuses and mistakes of banks 
and big business. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican 
president Herbert Hoover with 59 percent of the 
popular votes and carried forty-two states in the 
electoral college. Although about 65 percent of 
black voters supported Hoover, Roosevelt's elector- 
al support from white Republicans and indepen- 
dents was broadly distributed among income levels 
and various ethnic groups and between urban and 
rural areas. Only 25 percent of Roosevelt's plurality 
in 1932 was derived from the nation's twelve largest 
cities. 

From 1932 until 1940, James A. Farley served as 
DNC chairman. Roosevelt agreed with Farley that 
the DNC apparatus and activities should be used to 
promote intra-party harmony at such events as Jef- 
ferson-Jackson Day dinners and through fund- 
raising efforts. For example, the Colored Division, 
a special division of the DNC that concentrated on 
black voters, cultivated the realignment of non- 
southern blacks from the Republican to the Demo- 
cratic Party, but ignored controversial racial issues 
like segregation and the disfranchisement of south- 
ern blacks. Other DNC special divisions, such as 
those for labor, agriculture, and foreign-language 
ethnic groups, were used to promote the expansion 
and diversification of the Democratic coalition dur- 
ing this era. 

By far, though, the most innovative, effective, 
and regularly active special division of the DNC 
from 1932 to 1940 was the Women's Division. Mary 
"Molly" Dewson, director of and later adviser to 
this division, shrewdly realized that Democratic 
women could increase their status and influence in 
the party organization and the Roosevelt adminis- 



tration if they impressed the president, DNC chair- 
man, and other male Democratic politicians with 
their ability to raise funds, distribute publicity, mo- 
bilize voters, and win elections. For example, in the 
1936 election, the DNC Women's Division pro- 
duced and distributed about 80 percent of all Dem- 
ocratic campaign literature. It also published the 
Democratic Digest, a monthly newsletter, and in- 
creased the number of female Democratic cam- 
paign workers from approximately 73,000 in 1936 
to 109,000 in 1940. Dewson used these impressive 
campaign accomplishments and her long-time 
friendships with Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of 
Labor Frances Perkins to lobby and persuade the 
president and Farley to increase DNC funding of 
the Women's Division, the representation of 
women on party committees and at national con- 
ventions, and the number and status of federal jobs 
given to women. By the time of the 1940 election, 
however, Edward J. Flynn replaced the disgruntled 
Farley as DNC chairman, Dewson had left the 
Women's Division, and the DNC's apparatus 
played a smaller role in campaign finances and ser- 
vices. 



NEW DEAL 

Roosevelt hoped that the New Deal's economic 
policies would not only unite and satisfy the voting 
blocs and interest groups that elected him in 1932 
but would eventually persuade enough disaffected 
Republican and independent voters to become 
loyal Democrats so that the Democratic Party 
would become the new majority party in the two- 
party system for a long time. However, after the Su- 
preme Court struck down the National Industrial 
Recovery Act (NIRA) and similar New Deal policies 
that emphasized economic cooperation and plan- 
ning, Roosevelt moved New Deal liberalism and 
the national Democratic Party in a more controver- 
sial, leftist, divisive programmatic and ideological 
direction that favored labor and northern urban 
policy interests and was more antagonistic toward 
big business and upper-income Americans. Roose- 
velt wanted this more liberal, social welfare charac- 
ter of his administration and party to co-opt grow- 
ing grassroots support for various economic protest 
movements, such as those led by Huey Long and 
Francis Townsend, before the 1936 election. Enact - 



Z30 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DEMOCRATIC 



PARTY 



ment of the Social Security Act of 1935 and the 
Wealth Tax Act of 1935 served to satisfy much of 
this demand for a broader redistribution of income 
by the federal government. 

WAGNER ACT OF 1935 

Likewise, Roosevelt's support of the National 
Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act of 1935 helped to 
prevent the possibility of labor unions creating their 
own party for the 1936 election and to attract the 
endorsement of John L. Lewis, a Republican and 
the most powerful labor leader in the nation. De- 
spite growing complaints from southern Democrats 
in Congress that Roosevelt's policies and party 
leadership pandered to blacks, Roosevelt cultivated 
black voters by appointing a so-called black cabi- 
net. This was an informal group of black federal of- 
ficials who tried to reduce racial discrimination in 
the distribution of federal relief benefits and public 
works jobs. For the first time ever, a black minister 
delivered the opening prayer at a Democratic na- 
tional convention in 1936. 

No matter how controversial the New Deal and 
the Democratic Party under Roosevelt had become 
among conservatives and business interests, Roo- 
sevelt's landslide reelection in 1936 confirmed that 
a political realignment had occurred. Roosevelt de- 
feated Alfred Landon, the Republican presidential 
nominee, with more than 60 percent of the popular 
votes and carried all but two states in the electoral 
college. Approximately 65 percent of black voters 
supported Hoover in 1932, but 76 percent of them 
voted for Roosevelt in 1936. In addition, 80 percent 
of Catholics, 90 percent of Jews, and 60 percent of 
low-income, non-southern white Protestants voted 
for Roosevelt in 1936. 



REALIGNMENT 

The fact that these voting statistics signaled a 
partisan realignment, rather than merely a personal 
following for Roosevelt, is evident in the increasing 
number and proportion of non-southern Demo- 
cratic seats in Congress as a consequence of the 
1930 to 1936 congressional elections. In 1920, 82 
percent of the Democratic representatives and 70 
percent of the Democratic senators were southern- 
ers. By 1936, only 35 percent of the Democrats in 



Congress were southerners, and only 23 percent of 
Roosevelt's electoral college votes in that election 
came from the South. Even more ominous for the 
decline of southern influence in the Democratic 
Party, the Democratic national convention of 1936 
repealed the two-thirds rule. This requirement of at 
least a two-thirds majority of delegate votes for 
presidential nominations had, in effect, given the 
South as a region the power to reject any presiden- 
tial candidate objectionable to it, especially on racial 
issues. 

Determined to solidify the policy accomplish- 
ments of the New Deal and to further develop the 
national Democratic Party as a liberal party, Roose- 
velt became embroiled with southern Democrats in 
Congress on two especially divisive issues: the court 
reform bill of 1937 and the Fair Labor Standards Act 
of 1938. Most southern Democrats in Congress op- 
posed Roosevelt on both bills, claiming that his ap- 
parent attempt to "pack" the Supreme Court with 
liberal justices violated the spirit of the Constitution 
and that the minimum wage legislation would un- 
fairly punish the South for its lower labor costs and 
threaten race relations by requiring southern em- 
ployers to pay blacks and whites the same wages. 
Frustrated with the increasing intra-party opposi- 
tion in Congress from southern Democrats, Roose- 
velt decided to dramatically enforce party discipline 
by attempting to "purge" several conservative 
southern Democratic senators by opposing their re- 
nomination in their states' 1938 Democratic prima- 
ries. Roosevelt and his preferred Democratic candi- 
dates failed to defeat any of these senators, and the 
Republicans made substantial gains in the 1938 
congressional elections. 

After the 1938 elections, southern Democrats 
and Republicans in Congress cooperated with each 
other more openly and regularly, especially within 
the committee system, by forming a bipartisan con- 
servative coalition that could prevent, defeat, or 
weaken any new liberal legislation. But the ever 
growing intra-party influence of blacks, labor 
unions, big city mayors, and liberal activists on 
Roosevelt's presidency and the party leadership 
was evident in his creation of the Fair Employment 
Practices Commission (FEPC) by an executive order 
in 1940. The FEPC was authorized to investigate 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



Z31 



D E 



PRIEST 



OSCAR 



and prohibit racial discrimination in hiring by de- 
fense contractors. 

Despite the regional and ideological diversity of 
Democratic support in Congress for Roosevelt's 
pre-Pearl Harbor foreign and defense policies, the 
Democratic national convention of 1940 proved to 
be unusually restless and rancorous because of the 
controversy over the anticipation of Roosevelt's 
nomination for an unprecedented third term. For- 
mer DNC chairman James A. Farley and Vice Presi- 
dent John N. Garner both ran against Roosevelt for 
the presidential nomination. But Roosevelt was 
easily and overwhelmingly renominated on the first 
ballot after Chicago machine politicians organized 
a rousing pro-Roosevelt demonstration. By con- 
trast, Roosevelt's new running mate, Henry A. Wal- 
lace, was nominated by a narrow margin because 
of his reputation among delegates as a politically 
inept former Republican who was outspoken in his 
liberalism on race and other matters. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt was reelected president 
in 1940 with 55 percent of the popular votes and he 
carried thirty-eight states in the electoral college. 
American entry into and participation in World War 
II finally ended the lingering economic effects of the 
Great Depression and slowed the rising southern 
white rebellion against the increasingly liberal, 
northern-dominated national Democratic Party, 
especially on racial issues. Nonetheless, the imme- 
diate political and economic effects of the Great 
Depression stimulated a realignment that enabled 
the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt 
to transform itself into the new majority party with 
a broad, diverse coalition, a new ideology based on 
New Deal liberalism, and a policy agenda that ap- 
pealed to a wide range of voting blocs and interest 
groups that dominated the presidency, Congress, 
policy making, and even the internal politics of the 
Republican Party until the 1970s. 

See Also: DEWSON, MARY (MOLLY); ELECTION OF 
1928; ELECTION OF 1930; ELECTION OF 1932; 
ELECTION OF 1934; ELECTION OF 1936; 
ELECTION OF 1938; ELECTION OF 1940; FARLEY, 
JAMES A.; POLITICAL REALIGNMENT; RASKOB, 
JOHN J.; ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D.; SMITH, 
ALFRED E. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father 
Coughlin, and the Great Depression. 1982. 

Burner, David. The Politics of Provincialism: The Democrat- 
ic Party in Transition, 1918-1932. 1986. 

Burns, lames MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. 
1956. 

Savage, Sean J. Roosevelt: The Party Leader, 1932-1945. 
1991. 

Sundquist, James. The Dynamics of the Party System: 
Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the 
United States. 1973. 

Weiss, Nancy J. Farwell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Poli- 
tics in the Age of FDR. 1983. 

Sean J. Savage 



DE PRIEST, OSCAR 

On April 15, 1929, Oscar Stanton De Priest (March 
9, 1871-May 12, 1951) took the oath of office as 
representative for the First District in Illinois, be- 
coming the first African American elected to the 
U.S. Congress from the North. Born in the Recon- 
struction South in the heyday of enfranchisement, 
De Priest helped to reestablish black citizenship by 
serving Chicago's Loop, Gold Coast, and black 
South Side districts. Soon after De Priest's historic 
victory, the black historian Carter G. Woodson or- 
ganized a $1.50-a-plate banquet for "living con- 
gressmen" that featured three Reconstruction-era 
congressmen and Rep. De Priest. 

Born in 1871, the light-skinned son of former 
slaves from Alabama, De Priest migrated with his 
family to Kansas when he was a child. He ran away 
to Ohio with a white friend at the age of seventeen 
and later began working as a teamster in Chicago. 
De Priest cut his political teeth on the Chicago Re- 
publican Party machine, winning favors from con- 
gressmen, election to the post of Cook County 
Commissioner, and, after building a decorating 
business, a seat on the city council to become Chi- 
cago's first black alderman. When the incumbent 
representative in the district died, De Priest was 
widely assumed to be the frontrunner. The election, 
however, was close, in part because of an untimely 
fraud and vice investigation that ensnared De Priest 



232 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



D E W E V 



M A S 



in controversy. The investigation was dropped due 
to insufficient evidence. De Priest won the 1928 
election by four thousand black votes, but lost vir- 
tually every white vote. 

De Priest won instant recognition as a black 
congressman; he also won notoriety. Before mov- 
ing to Washington, he applied to occupy offices in 
the House of Representatives building, but a senior 
congressman challenged De Priest's assignment. 
Although De Priest graciously conceded, his next 
assignment was also challenged when a southern 
congressman threatened to vacate his offices rather 
than neighbor a black man. Liberals from the Re- 
publican Party came to De Priest's aid. An econom- 
ic conservative in the mold of Booker T. Washing- 
ton, De Priest served his party in a non-ideological 
fashion, although he did address racial issues. He 
lobbied for appropriations for Howard University 
and pensions for ex-slaves. He also lectured at vari- 
ous black functions, and accepted invitations to 
speak on black politics to state legislatures. During 
his term, De Priest's most controversial activities 
concerned desegregation of a congressional dining 
room. Although De Priest was permitted to dine, 
neither his black staff nor black visitors could enter, 
while all whites were welcomed. De Priest intro- 
duced a measure to the floor to integrate the dining 
room but lost in committee by a two (Republicans) 
to three (Democrats) vote. He blasted the decision 
as a betrayal of equal protection. 

De Priest faced a tough reelection in 1934, pri- 
marily because of black disaffection from the Re- 
publican Party. He was opposed by Arthur Wergs 
Mitchell, a well-educated and astute New Deal 
Democrat who employed cartoons and able oratory 
against the De Priest campaign. At one point De 
Priest lost his characteristic calm demeanor and 
sharply criticized the black religious community, 
particularly local Baptists, for bolting to the Demo- 
crats with their promises of relief. Then, given Re- 
publican Party disarray in Chicago, his strategists 
could not regain control of the local machine, sig- 
naling voter disaffection. As part and parcel of the 
realignment of black voters from the Republican 
Party of Frederick Douglass to the New Deal coali- 
tion, Mitchell outpolled De Priest by three thou- 
sand votes in 1934. Bitter with disappointment, De 



Priest conducted several recounts of the ballots, but 
in the end graciously conceded defeat. That year he 
was named Man of the Year by the Chicago Defender 
in recognition of the esteem he received from Afri- 
can Americans. De Priest continued to serve in a 
public capacity until his death in 1951. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; FAUSET, CRYSTAL 
BIRD; MITCHELL, ARTHUR, W. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Greene, Lorenze. "Dr. Woodson Prepares for Negro His- 
tory Week, 1930." Negro History Bulletin 28, no. 8 
(1965): 174-175. 

Mann, Kenneth Eugene. "Oscar Stanton De Priest: Per- 
suasive Agent for the Black Masses." Negro History 
Bulletin 35, no. 6 (1972): 134-137. 

Nordin, Dennis S. The New Deal's Black Congressmen: A 
Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell. 1997. 

Rudwick, Elliot, M. "Oscar De Priest and the Jim Crow 
Restaurant in the U.S. House of Representatives." 
Journal of Negro History 35, no. 1 (1966): 77-82. 

Kevin Mumford 



DEWEY, JOHN. See LEAGUE OF INDEPENDENT 
POLITICAL ACTION. 



DEWEY, THOMAS E. 



Thomas Edmund Dewey (March 24, 1902-March 
16, 1971) was a spectacularly successful prosecutor 
of racketeers, a three-term governor of New York 
state, and a twice unsuccessful Republican presi- 
dential candidate. Born in Owosso, Michigan, the 
son of a local newspaper editor, Dewey graduated 
from the University of Michigan and earned his law 
degree at Columbia University in 1925. Admitted to 
the bar the following year, he was an associate in 
the law firms of Larkin, Rathbone, and Perry (from 
1925 to 1927), and MacNamara and Seymour (from 
1927 to 1931). While pursuing vocal training, he 
met fellow vocalist Frances Ellen Hutt, whom he 
married in 1928. They had two sons. 

Dewey entered public service in 1931 as chief 
assistant to United States attorney for the southern 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



233 



DEWEY 



M A S 



district of New York. Establishing efficient control 
over that office's administrative duties, he soon en- 
tered the courtroom, where he delivered dramatic 
performances anchored in tenacious examination 
of details gleaned from bank and telephone re- 
cords, handwriting analyses, wiretaps, and inter- 
views with hundreds of witnesses. Briefly serving as 
U.S. attorney in 1933, he successfully prosecuted 
bootlegger Waxey Gordon (Irving Wexler) for tax 
evasion. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt 
named a Democrat to the post at the end of the 
year, Dewey established a promising private prac- 
tice. 

Recalled to public service in 1935 by New York 
Governor Herbert Lehman, Dewey was named a 
special prosecutor to investigate organized crime. 
Over the next two and a half years, he earned fame 
as a "rackets buster," winning seventy-two convic- 
tions out of seventy-three cases. Dewey and his 
staff were especially interested in industrial racke- 
teering, where payoffs and bribes added as much as 
20 percent to the cost of living in New York. Since 
1933, Dewey had pursued Dutch Schultz (Arthur 
Flegenheimer), a bootlegger who had moved into 
the "policy" or "numbers" racket, as well as loan- 
sharking. Dewey's staff was gathering evidence to 
prosecute Schultz when the mobster was fatally 
shot only two days before the date Schultz had set 
for Dewey's own assassination. 

While investigating racketeers' involvement 
with prostitution, the special prosecutor's staff de- 
veloped a compelling case against Lucky Luciano 
(Salvatore Luciania, also know as Charley Lucky), 
the capo di tutto capi (boss of all bosses), whose 
major interests involved narcotics and gambling. 
Using his established technique of engaging minor 
miscreants to impugn their superiors, Dewey again 
captured headlines with his successful prosecution 
of Luciano and his co-defendants in 1936. Dewey's 
account of his racket-busting years, part of an in- 
complete autobiography, was published a few years 
after his death as Twenty against the Underworld. 

Dewey entered electoral politics in 1937, win- 
ning the race for district attorney for New York 
County, a post he held until 1943. After a widely 
publicized mistrial, he eventually won the convic- 
tion of Tammany boss Jimmy Hines. Defeated in 



the 1938 New York gubernatorial contest, Dewey 
failed to win the Republican presidential nomina- 
tion in 1940. But in 1942, he was elected governor 
of New York and was reelected in 1946 and 1950. 
His tenure was marked by moderate progressivism, 
fiscal conservatism, efficient administration, and 
careful attention to patronage. Under his leader- 
ship, New York became the first state to legislate 
against racial or religious discrimination in employ- 
ment. He also promoted the development of the 
New York State Thruway. 

In 1944, the Republicans nominated Dewey for 
president of the United States, but incumbent 
Franklin D. Roosevelt won a fourth term. In 1948, 
Dewey again headed the Republican ticket and 
seemed the likely victor. However, Harry S. Tru- 
man's attacks on the record of the Republican- 
dominated eightieth Congress and his now- 
legendary "whistle-stop" campaign out-paced 
Dewey's overconfident middle-of-the road can- 
vass. 

At the end of his third term as governor, Dewey 
returned to private law practice as a member of the 
Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer, and Wood firm 
in New York City. In the 1950s and 1960s, Dewey 
became both elder statesman and kingmaker in the 
Republican Party, where he was a prominent mem- 
ber of the eastern internationalist wing. He was in- 
strumental in Dwight Eisenhower's defeat of Rob- 
ert Taft for the 1952 nomination, and he also 
fostered the political career of Richard M. Nixon. A 
collection of lectures Dewey delivered at Princeton 
University in 1950 was published in 1966 as Thomas 
E. Dewey and the Two-Tarty System. It presaged a re- 
defined Republican Party in the wake of the Gold- 
water debacle in 1964. 

The same meticulous attention to facts and ra- 
tional analysis that brought him fame as a rackets 
buster and wealth in private law practice may well 
account for Thomas E. Dewey's lack of success in 
presidential politics, where the game had come to 
be played in very different terms. 

See Also: CRIME; LAW ENFORCEMENT; REPUBLICAN 
PARTY. 



234 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



D E W S N 



MARY (MOLLY 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Beyer, Barry K. Thomas E. Dewey, 1937-1947: A Study in 
Political Leadership. 1979. 

Dewey, Thomas E. The Case against the New Deal. 1940. 

Dewey, Thomas E. Journey to the Tar Pacific. 1952. 

Dewey, Thomas E. Twenty against the Underworld, edited 
by Rodney Campbell. 1974. 

Donaldson, Gary. Truman Defeats Dewey. 1999. 

Hughes, Rupert. Attorney for the People: The Story of 
Thomas E. Dewey. 1940. 

Smith, Richard Norton. Thomas E. Dewey and His Times. 
1982. 

Stolberg, Mary M. Tighting Organized Crime: Politics, Jus- 
tice, and the Legacy of Thomas E. Dewey. 1995. 

Walker, Stanley. Dewey: An American of this Century. 
1944. 

Susan Estabrook Kennedy 



DEWSON, MARY (MOLLY) 

Mary Williams "Molly" Dewson (February 18, 
1874-October 21, 1962) was one of the most influ- 
ential women in the Democratic Party in the 1930s 
and in Roosevelt's New Deal administration. She 
held numerous posts, including serving as an advi- 
sor to the National Recovery Administration. Dew- 
son's service culminated with a position on the So- 
cial Security Board. 

Dewson graduated from Wellesley College in 
Massachusetts in 1897 with a degree in social work. 
She was first employed by the Domestic Reform 
Committee of the Women's Educational and In- 
dustrial Union, where she provided assistance to 
domestic workers and taught at a housekeeping 
school. In 1900, she took a job with the Massachu- 
setts State Industrial School for Girls, where she 
worked until 1912. This work and several publica- 
tions brought her to the attention of state officials, 
who asked her to help lead an inquiry into mini- 
mum wages for workers in Massachusetts. This 
project led to the nation's first minimum wage law 
in 1912. 

During World War I, Dewson volunteered for 
the American Red Cross, worked with war refugees 
in France, and led the Red Cross Mediterranean op- 



erations by 1918. During the 1920s, Dewson be- 
came involved with political issues in New York, as 
well as at the national level. She worked with Flor- 
ence Kelley to push New York to adopt a minimum 
wage for women and children, and she lobbied suc- 
cessfully to limit the workweek for women to forty- 
eight hours. These efforts brought her to the atten- 
tion of Eleanor Roosevelt. At Mrs. Roosevelt's re- 
quest, Dewson became the organizer of women for 
the Democratic Party, assisting in the campaigns of 
Al Smith in 1928 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1930 
and 1932. 

Due to her success in mobilizing female voters, 
the Democratic National Committee asked Dewson 
to head their Women's Division, a full-time posi- 
tion she used to secure jobs for women throughout 
the government, including Francis Perkins's ap- 
pointment as secretary of labor. Dewson's work in 
this regard stressed the importance of women play- 
ing more prominent roles in the day-to-day work 
of the government and the party. To this end, she 
organized a "Reporter" program, which educated 
women on New Deal issues and had a significant 
impact on the tremendous electoral victory of 1936. 

Due to ill health, Dewson withdrew from poli- 
tics in 1938 and retired to Castine, Maine, with her 
longtime partner, Polly Porter. Dewson was Ameri- 
ca's first female political boss, a reformer who ex- 
panded employment opportunities for women and 
pushed for their equal protection under the law. 

See Also: BETHUNE, MARY MCLEOD; DEMOCRATIC 
PARTY; NATIONAL WOMEN'S PARTY; 
ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Badger, Anthony. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 
1933-1945. 1989. 

Braeman, lohn; Robert Bremner; and David Brody. The 
New Deal, Vol. 1: The National Level. 1975. 

Ware, Susan. Partner and 1: Molly Dewson, Teminism, and 
New Deal Politics. 1987. 

Laura J. Hilton 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



235 



DICTATORSHIP 



DICTATORSHIP 



The response to the problems posed by the Great 
Depression in countries such as Germany, the Sovi- 
et Union, Italy, and elsewhere, was the rise or tight- 
ening of dictatorial regimes to the point that dicta- 
torship was considered by many people to be a 
feasible alternative to liberal democracy during the 
1930s. Certain features characterized these dicta- 
torships: the concentration of power in the hands 
of a single leader, a one-party system with mass 
membership, a secret police prepared to use terror 
as a tool of policy, and a control of the popular 
media to promote the regime's doctrine. These fea- 
tures were certainly all present to varying degrees 
under the Nazi regime in Germany, Communism 
in the Soviet Union, and Fascism in Italy. 

In Germany, against a backdrop of economic 
chaos caused by the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler, 
without ever winning a national election or having 
a popular majority, was appointed chancellor on 
January 30, 1933, just four weeks before Franklin 
Roosevelt took office. Once in office Hitler em- 
ployed the attributes of a dictatorship to remove 
domestic opposition and established the preemi- 
nence of the Nazi Party. He sought to increase in- 
dustrial production, especially through rearmament 
and public works schemes, and so provide work for 
millions of unemployed Germans. Considerable 
scholarly debate exists over how far Hitler intended 
to follow the foreign policy espoused in Mein Kampf 
(1925) or whether he was merely pragmatic in pur- 
suing an expansionist foreign policy during the late 
1930s. In remilitarizing the Rhineland in March 
1936, completing the Anschluss (unification) of Aus- 
tria and Germany in February 1938, and then secur- 
ing the Sudetenland in September 1938, Hitler 
seemed to be rectifying the perceived deficiencies 
of the Treaty of Versailles. This was widely popular 
within Germany and received tacit support abroad. 
Even after Hitler invaded Poland in September 
1939, the quick successes of Nazi Germany in 1940 
made many consider that Hitler's dictatorship pro- 
vided the way ahead. 

Joseph Stalin had become leader of the Soviet 
Union following V. I. Lenin's death in 1924. By 1929 
Stalin had consolidated his leadership, totally over- 



coming opponents within the Communist Party 
and eliminating all organized opposition outside 
the party. In 1928 Stalin embarked the Soviet Union 
upon the first Five-Year Plan. This plan for eco- 
nomic growth through mass industrialization and 
collectivization of agriculture came under the ban- 
ner of "Socialism in One Country" and saw notable 
achievements, such as the establishment of the city 
of Magnitogorsk in the Urals dedicated to steel pro- 
duction. This success and others seemed to show 
that despite Western scepticism, with Stalin as dic- 
tator Communism could avoid the problems of the 
Great Depression. However, the price for economic 
progress in the Soviet Union was extremely high. 
Stalin deported over ten million people to Siberia, 
and purged the Soviet officer corps with disastrous 
effect during World War II. 

In Italy, Benito Mussolini, prime minister since 
1922, tightened the grip of his dictatorship in the 
face of the Great Depression. The policy of the 
"Corporate State," combined employer-employee 
syndicates established during the 1920s, seemed to 
prevent Italy from suffering the worst effects of the 
economic downturn. However, the regime failed to 
wholly implement an integrated economic pro- 
gram, as state investment did not begin until the 
1930s and then only sporadically. Mussolini also 
sought to promote Italian national prestige in for- 
eign affairs, most notably through the invasion and 
subsequent occupation of Abyssinia in 1935. Italy 
was criticized by the League of Nations and this en- 
couraged closer collaboration with Nazi Germany. 
An Axis with Berlin encouraged Mussolini to claim 
that Italy was ready for war, despite Italian industry 
and military being underprepared. Indeed, when 
Mussolini joined the war in June 1940, Italy proved 
a drain on German resources. 

While these three regimes would be devastated 
in different ways during World War II, the era of the 
Great Depression saw the rise of other dictator- 
ships. The Francisco Franco regime in Spain began 
in 1936 and overcame the republicans in the Span- 
ish civil war by 1939 with the support of Germany 
and Italy. Franco modeled his regime on Mussoli- 
ni's corporate state under a single party (the Fa- 
lange), and remained in office until his death in 
1975. Other dictatorships were also established 



Z36 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DICTATORS 



I P 



f E A R 



T IN 



UNITED 



STATES 



during this era in South America. The influence of 
Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, although receiving tacit 
approval from the United States, became increas- 
ingly dictatorial during the period, as did the regime 
of President Getulio Vargas, who had assumed 
power in Brazil in 1930. 

Whatever the fate of the dictatorships of the 
1930s their most remarkable feature was their 
physical and intellectual control over their own 
populations, which in the case of Stalin and Hitler 
allowed for the mass slaughter of millions of peo- 
ple. 

See Also: DICTATORSHIP, FEAR OF IN THE UNITED 
STATES; EUROPE, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; 
HITLER ADOLF; MUSSOLINI, BENITO; STALIN, 
JOSEF. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bosworth, Richard. Mussolini. 2002. 

Brooker, Paul. Twentieth-Century Dictatorships: The Ideo- 
logical One-Party States. 1995. 

Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, 2nd edition. 
1998. 

Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspec- 
tives of Interpretation, 4th edition. 2000. 

Noakes, Jeremy, and Geoffrey Pridham, eds. Nazism 
1919-1945, 2nd edition. Vol. 1: The Rise to Power, 
1919-1934; Vol. 2: State, Economy, and Society, 
1933-1939. 1998. 

Pauley, Bruce F. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini: Totalitarian- 
ism in the Twentieth Century. 1997. 

Siegelbaum, Lewis H., and Andrei Sokolov. Stalinism as 
a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents, translated by 
Thomas Hoisington and Steven Shabad. 2000. 

J. Simon Rofe 



DICTATORSHIP, FEAR OF IN THE 
UNITED STATES 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidential adminis- 
tration reinvented the federal government in the 
United States during the Great Depression and 
World War II. From being a minimal state with 
scant taxing power, which played little role in the 
economy and made no effort to guarantee material 



or social wellbeing, the New Deal created and de- 
fined public responsibility for ensuring a minimal 
level of economic well-being for the American peo- 
ple. 

The rise of the federal government was a great 
transformation in American life. It elicited a pro- 
longed reaction from conservatives and from busi- 
nessmen whose power it seemed to limit, while tra- 
ditional liberal intellectuals were alarmed by what 
they perceived as the rise of a newly powerful fed- 
eral government. During the New Deal years, the 
idea that the Roosevelt administration might be- 
come a dictatorship circulated throughout nervous 
conservative and liberal circles alike. The rise of fas- 
cism in Germany and Italy accentuated the fear that 
the National Recovery Administration and other 
early New Deal planning efforts might be harbin- 
gers of fascism in the United States. Especially after 
Roosevelt introduced his plan to expand the num- 
ber of judges on the Supreme Court in 1937, con- 
servatives sought to paint him as a politician who 
wished to eliminate the checks and balances pro- 
vided in the Constitution. In addition, the rise of 
populist leaders like Huey Long of Louisiana and 
Father Charles Coughlin of Detroit frightened liber- 
als and conservatives who thought that these fire- 
brands could be fascist dictators in the making. 

In reality, there was never any danger that the 
Roosevelt administration would become a dictator- 
ship, nor of it sliding into fascism. In fact, the cries 
of dictatorship accelerated later in the New Deal, 
when Roosevelt undertook the kind of controver- 
sial legislation permitting the self- organization of 
workers — such as the Wagner Act — that Europe's 
fascist governments had sought to destroy as soon 
as they came into power. Still, even during World 
War II, conservatives compared the New Deal to 
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. For example, David 
Sarnoff, the president of RCA, said in a 1943 speech 
criticizing wartime social legislation, "If we have 
learned anything from the history of the past ten 
years, we have learned how empty were the claims 
of those demagogues who wheedled away the free- 
doms of their people with the mirage of an all- 
powerful state that would provide security at the 
expense of liberty." 

In the early 1940s, fears about dictatorship and 
fascism changed into anxieties about Communism. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



237 



D I L L I N G E R 



JOHN 



Ex-Trotskyist James Burnham's The Managerial 
Revolution (1941) and Austrian exile Friedrich 
Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) both marked 
the rising level of anxiety about centralized govern- 
ment power. This intellectual shift transformed the 
anti-fascism of World War II, with its egalitarian di- 
mensions and support of social democracy, shifting 
it to a more conservative politics after the war was 
over. Often, the measures denounced as evidence 
of totalitarianism were simply those that sought 
greater welfare state protections or an expansion of 
social democracy. By targeting these as dictatorial 
or totalitarian politics, conservatives were able to 
use the language of World War II to support their 
own aim of rolling back social democracy in the 
postwar period. 

The new paranoia about totalitarianism afflict- 
ed liberals as well. Anxious and frustrated by the 
limitations and failures of the New Deal and horri- 
fied by Stalinist Russia, some liberal intellectuals in 
the United States began during the late Depression 
days to fear the rise of a brutal central state as much 
as the power of corporations or the plight of the 
poor. They became afraid that their efforts to create 
a welfare state would have the unintentional effect 
of moving the country towards dictatorship. This 
fear prompted many to draw back from the radical 
politics they had espoused in an earlier era, and to 
seek ways to regulate capitalism without excessive- 
ly strengthening the state. This new liberal timidity 
and radical self-doubt was the real victory of the ris- 
ing conservative reaction at the end of the New 
Deal. Unfounded fears of totalitarianism — which 
never threatened the United States — would con- 
strain postwar liberalism, especially when it came 
to domestic social and economic policy. 

See Also: AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE; 

CONSERVATIVE COALITION; DICTATORSHIP. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father 
Coughlin, and the Great Depression. 1982. 

Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in 
Recession and War. 1995. 

Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution. 1941. 

Ekirch, Arthur, E., Jr. Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of 
the New Deal on American Thought. 1969. 



Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom. 1944. 

Kim Phillips -Fein 



DILLINGER, JOHN. See CRIME. 



DISNEY, WALT 



Walter Elias Disney (December 5, 1901-December 
15, 1966) was a motion picture and television pro- 
ducer and entrepreneur. After a childhood and 
youth in the Midwest, Walt Disney entered the field 
of animated cartoon films in the 1920s and ulti- 
mately achieved world fame with the creation of 
Mickey Mouse. He went on to a long and successful 
career producing cartoons, feature-length films, 
and wildlife documentaries, then branched out into 
television during the 1950s and broke new ground 
in that medium as well. He also pioneered the con- 
cept of theme parks with Disneyland in Anaheim, 
California, and Walt Disney World in Orlando, 
Florida, the latter in progress at the time of his 
death. 

Although Disney achieved recognition in a va- 
riety of fields during his life, his lasting reputation 
as an artist rests on his work in animated cartoons. 
The Disney studio introduced technological inno- 
vations and a new level of artistic brilliance into ani- 
mation, transforming a relatively crude medium 
into a dazzling and sophisticated form. The years of 
this transformation, and Walt Disney's peak years 
as an artist, were the 1930s and early 1940s — a peri- 
od corresponding almost exactly to the Great De- 
pression — during which Disney produced a series 
of one-reel Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony car- 
toons, then ambitiously tackled the making of fea- 
ture-length animated films. Snow White and the 
Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney's first full-length ani- 
mated film, was a commercial success that captivat- 
ed audiences and demonstrated the viability of the 
genre. By the early 1940s, in films like The Old Mill 
(1937), Snow White, and Fantasia (1940), the studio 
had established a standard of artistic excellence in 
animation that has never since been equaled. 

The Depression years lent more than a back- 
drop to this creative phenomenon; they had a direct 



Z38 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DISNEY 



WALT 



bearing on the process. In the early 1930s, when 
Disney's explosive growth was beginning, numer- 
ous artists were drawn to his studio out of simple 
necessity. Veterans of the period have testified that, 
in those bleak economic times, jobs for artists were 
exceedingly scarce. Cartoonists, fine draftsmen, 
skilled painters, and other artists flocked to the Dis- 
ney studio, grateful for a chance at steady employ- 
ment. Disney, in turn, displayed an uncanny knack 
for assessing the varied gifts of these artists, and en- 
couraged them to use their distinctive abilities to el- 
evate the quality of the films. 

In addition, the films themselves reflected the 
spirit of their time. Mickey Mouse, created in 1928, 
gradually achieved nationwide recognition during 
1929, and thus the rise of his popularity coincided 
with the onset of the Depression. Mickey, with his 
humble barnyard origins, made an ideal mascot for 
an America faced with hard times; his unflagging 
good cheer and plucky resourcefulness seemed to 
symbolize the indomitable spirit of the country. In 
his very first film, Plane Crazy, he improvises an air- 
plane out of an old jalopy and other found objects, 
and in many succeeding films he similarly makes do 
with whatever unlikely items may be at hand. 

An even more striking morale builder was the 
1933 Silly Symphony Three Little Pigs. In this im- 
mensely popular cartoon, a nation facing a figura- 
tive "wolf at the door" saw the title characters de- 
feat their Big Bad Wolf through a combination of 
optimism and hard work. The Pigs and their taunt- 
ing theme song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad 
Wolf?" sparked a nationwide craze in 1933, and ob- 
servers have often seen the film as an antidote to 
the Depression. Other Silly Symphonies like Grass- 
hopper and the Ants and The Wise Little Hen (both 
1934) entertainingly stressed the benefits of dili- 
gence and industry. 

The happy antics of Mickey, the Pigs, and other 
Disney creations made life a little more bearable for 
millions of Americans during the 1930s. Small 
wonder that those same Americans continued to 
reward Disney with their loyal support in succeed- 
ing decades. 

See Also: HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY; 
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARTS. 




Walt Disney, 1935. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs 
Division, New York World -Telegram and the Sun Newspaper 
Photograph Collection 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Barrier, Michael. Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation 
in Its Golden Age. 1999. 

Greene, Katherine, and Richard Greene. The Man behind 
the Magic: The Story of Walt Disney. 1991. 

Isbouts, Jean-Pierre, director. Walt: The Man behind the 
Myth. 2001. 

Kaufman, J. B. "Three Little Pigs: Big Little Picture." 
American Cinematographer 69, no. 11 (November 
1988): 38-44. 

Merritt, Russell, and J. B. Kaufman. A Companion to Walt 
Disney's Silly Symphonies. 2004. 

Watts, Steven. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the 
American Way of Life. 1997. 

J. B. Kaufman 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



239 



DOCUMENTARY 



FILM 



DOCUMENTARY FILM 



The American people spent more time at the mov- 
ies during the Depression years than in any other 
decade, and they wanted their money's worth. Be- 
fore each feature they expected to see a cartoon, a 
short comedy, and a newsreel. 

Newsreels were the documentaries of the 
1930s, and the newsreel archives are an important 
source of visual evidence of the period. All five 
major studios produced their own twice-weekly 
editions. Five items were generally packaged to- 
gether, and few items ran for more than two min- 
utes. The studios, ever conscious of their vulnera- 
bility to government censorship and the 
disapproval of powerful religious and special inter- 
est groups, favored lighthearted fare. Beauty pag- 
eants, animal acts, and novelties were staples. 
Many items were faked by stringers, the freelance 
cameramen who got paid only when their coverage 
appeared on the screen. So it is astounding to see 
the degree to which the true life of the times actual- 
ly got recorded, in spite of all the obstacles. 

In many newsreels, it was the voiceover narra- 
tion that provided both the comedy and the politi- 
cal bias. Stripped of this sound, as most footage is 
in today's archives, modern filmmakers use this 
haphazard documentation to say something more 
than the original filmmakers intended. It is impor- 
tant to keep in mind that a great deal of the most 
revealing material recorded at the time was never 
projected in theaters. Considered too gloomy and 
depressing to please audiences who had come to 
escape their own dark times, the unused footage 
went directly into the vaults, considered hardly 
worth the storage costs involved. 

By 1967, when the last of the newsreel makers 
went out of business, the owners of these archives 
gave them to universities and the U.S. government 
in exchange for generous tax write-offs. Given the 
highly biased origins of the newsreels, today's film- 
makers and their audiences need to view their lega- 
cy with caution, if not outright skepticism. Yet 
when guided by historians and witnesses with 
hindsight, the material the 1930s cameramen left us 
can help bring the period to life in a way that print- 
ed evidence alone seldom can. This is best seen, 



perhaps, in the seven-part series The Great Depres- 
sion, made for the Public Broadcasting Service by 
Blackside in 1993. 

The March of Time, a newsreel-like affiliate of 
Time magazine that appeared in 1935, was pro- 
duced by filmmakers with more serious intent. 
Chapters were issued monthly, ran as long as twen- 
ty minutes, and were devoted to a single topic. In 
1937 the series showed the bombing of Manchuria 
by the Japanese. The next year a chapter called "In- 
side Nazi Germany" showed American audiences 
vivid pictures of the racial policies of a rapidly re- 
arming future enemy. In 1939, The March of Time 
included film of sharecroppers in Mississippi in a 
pathetically unequal struggle with plantation own- 
ers. The series often resorted to dramatized recre- 
ations when reality footage could not be obtained, 
a practice much criticized at the time by profession- 
al observers and now considered unethical. Though 
the series received an Academy Award in 1937, its 
producers lacked the bargaining power of the stu- 
dio-sponsored newsreels, and many theater man- 
agers found their audiences did not clamor for The 
March of Time's tendency to present unpleasant 
news. The series ceased production in 1951, a de- 
cade and a half before television brought all news- 
reels to an end. 

The early days of the Depression were also re- 
corded by a small group of politically radical mem- 
bers of the New York Film and Photo League, an 
organization that for a short time had correspond- 
ing chapters in half a dozen other cities. Thanks to 
the Film and Photo League, the major protest 
movements of the 1930 to 1934 period can still be 
brought to life, though the bulk of their footage was 
not saved. The Museum of Modern Art in New 
York circulates brief compilations, silent with titles 
(as they were originally shown), that are powerful 
reminders of the days when tens of thousands of 
people were thronging the streets carrying banners 
for such "socialist" programs as unemployment in- 
surance and subsidized public housing. 

The most notable documentary filmmaker of 
the period was Pare Lorentz, a film critic turned 
producer, who persuaded the Roosevelt adminis- 
tration to present the need for its reform programs 
in films of such power and quality that they could, 



ZtO 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



DOMESTIC SERVICE 



and did, win widespread theatrical distribution in 
spite of strong film industry opposition. Lorentz's 
first film, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), 
dramatized the disasters caused by unwise land 
use, a condition made all too evident by massive 
dust storms that swept across middle America that 
spring. His next film, The River (1937), was an 
equally powerful lesson about flood control, again 
made vividly current by news of recurring disas- 
trous floods along the Mississippi. Building on his 
critical success, Lorentz and his New Deal support- 
ers established the U.S. Film Service, which they 
hoped would nurture the production of still more 
"films of merit." However, both of Lorentz's films, 
although popular with critics and the public, were 
greeted by howls of protest from local and state 
government officials, who resented their cities and 
states being depicted as problem areas. Only three 
other films were finished and released by the U.S. 
Film Service, with increasingly less success. 

Many contemporary viewers find both The Plow 
and The River flawed by the features that won them 
widespread critical and public acceptance at the 
time of their release: namely, narrations composed 
in Whitmanesque poetics and delivered with over- 
whelming stridency. But it would be a mistake to 
ignore the message underlying the persuasive visu- 
als; Lorentz, in these two films of less than one half 
hour each, managed to state the essential philoso- 
phy of the New Deal, both its willingness to accept 
responsibility for correcting the sins of the past and 
its certainty that its methods of alleviation, its "so- 
cial engineering," would triumph over all adversity. 
Many contemporary environmentalists and social 
scientists, however, question the "solutions" pres- 
ented in Lorentz's films. 

Toward the end of the 1930s, a small but grow- 
ing group of filmmakers was beginning to produce 
documentaries that were more in line with contem- 
porary documentary film. Film was an expensive 
medium, so the filmmakers were dependent on 
foundations or corporations for sponsorship, with 
the inevitable artistic and political compromises this 
type of partnership implies. Yet some veterans of 
the Film and Photo League and some who had 
gained experience under Lorentz managed to make 
a few films that are clear-eyed about the hard truths 
the nation faced as it reluctantly prepared for war. 



Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke's The City 
(1939) remains a sharp, poignant, and even witty 
comment on urban society and its discontents, 
though its Utopian solutions now seem unconvinc- 
ing. Van Dyke's Valley Town (1940) probes the di- 
lemmas of automation, unemployment resulting 
from new technology, and social upheavals that are 
as baffling now as then. These films put us inside 
the heads and hearts of those who lived in the 
1930s in a way rarely achieved in any other medi- 
um. 

See Also: COMMUNICATIONS AND THE PRESS; 
HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documen- 
tary Film from 1931 to 1942. 1981. 

Barnouw, Erik. The Documentary: A History of the Non- 
Fiction Film, 2nd rev. edition. 1993. 

Blackside, Inc.; WGBH Boston; and BBC, producers. The 
Great Depression (a seven-part television series). 
1993. 

Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel: 1911-1967. 
1972. 

Lorentz, Pare, director. The Plow that Broke the Plains. 
1936. 

Lorentz, Pare, director. The River. 1937. 

MacCann, Richard Dyer. The People's Films: A Political 
History of XI. S. Government Motion Pictures. 1973. 

Seltzer, Leo, ed. Film and Photo League: Compilations 
1930-34. 1982. 

Snyder, Robert L. Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film. 
1968. 

Steiner, Ralph, and Willard Van Dyke, directors. The 
City. 1939. 

Stoney, George C, and Robert Wagner, directors. Images 
of the Great Depression: A Two Hour Compilation. 
1988. 

Van Dyke, Willard, director. Valley Town. 1940. 

George C. Stoney 



DOMESTIC SERVICE 



Although the Great Depression adversely affected 
a broad spectrum of Americans between 1929 and 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



I 41 



DOMESTIC SERVICE 




Young men practice serving a meal at the WPA household workers training center in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1936. Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt Library 



1941, the economic calamity was particularly dev- 
astating for the millions of workers employed in the 
domestic and personal service labor force. New 
Deal programs did little to remedy the financial dif- 
ficulties of this group. Before the 1929 stock market 
crash, domestic and personal service employees, 
such as maids, cooks, washerwomen, and laun- 
dresses, comprised 8 percent of the American 
workforce. The crash, along with falling manufac- 
turing sales, increased debt, the shrinking money 
supply, bank failures, small business closings, tariff 
policies, the boll weevil epidemic, and the overpro- 
duction of agricultural goods, increased the size of 
the domestic and personal service sector slightly to 
10 percent of the labor force by 1930. 



The domestic labor force in the early twentieth 
century was comprised mostly of immigrants from 
Ireland, Eastern Europe, Mexico, Japan, and China, 
as well as many native-born, single white females 
and married and single African-American women, 
whose fathers, husbands, and sons faced routine 
periods of underemployment and unemployment. 
Between 1900 and 1920, native whites and immi- 
grants from northern and western Europe made up 
the majority of domestics. However, a gradual racial 
and ethnic shift occurred during and after World 
War I. In the northern United States, Eastern Euro- 
pean immigrants and African Americans began to 
replace German, Scandinavian, Irish, and native- 
born single white women as household help. As 



2W 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DOMESTIC SERVICE 



native-born and foreign-born white females found 
better-paying jobs outside the domestic labor sec- 
tor, the numbers of black servants increased sub- 
stantially. African-American females comprised 40 
percent of all female household workers in 1920, 36 
percent in 1930, and 47 percent the following de- 
cade. Not surprisingly, they led in the numbers of 
domestics in the Jim Crow South. In the southwest- 
ern United States, Mexican and Mexican-American 
women comprised a large percentage of household 
workers. Like African-American women, they in- 
creasingly dominated the domestic and personal 
service sector after their white counterparts found 
employment opportunities elsewhere. In 1930, La- 
tina household workers comprised 45 percent of all 
Mexican females employed outside the home. In 
major southwestern cities such as El Paso, Denver, 
and Albuquerque, young unmarried female domes- 
tics constituted two-thirds of all Mexican women 
employed outside the home. 

Although women overwhelmingly dominated 
the domestic service sector, men also worked as 
household help, mainly as butlers, chauffeurs, gar- 
deners, and cooks. Only in California and Wash- 
ington state, where high numbers of Chinese male 
immigrants lived, did men lead in the domestic ser- 
vice area. For the duration of the Depression, men 
made up 10 percent of all household servants in the 
nation. 

White women remained the largest segment of 
the female domestic service category — 54 percent 
in 1930 and 53 percent in 1940. Still, some of them 
had other options. Those with skills increasingly 
found work in the growing female-oriented service 
sector economy, where they worked in nursing, ed- 
ucation, newly created government agencies, social 
services, and sales, as well as in business as clerical 
staff. Although they dominated the domestic sec- 
tor, those working as servants made up only 10 per- 
cent of the overall white female labor force. 

Black women, of whom 60 percent labored as 
domestics, had a different experience, and found 
themselves at the bottom rung of the labor sector. 
Like their white counterparts, black wives, mothers, 
and sisters, attempted to supplement the meager 
earnings of their husbands, fathers, or brothers. 
During the Depression, however, they faced com- 



petition from both whites and other black women 
for their domestic jobs. Although the white female 
labor force increased by 17 percent, the black fe- 
male labor force declined by 5 percent during the 
Depression. Given a choice, many employers pre- 
ferred white domestics over black domestics. Fur- 
thermore, unemployed African-American high 
school and college graduates — displaced teachers, 
secretaries, sales consultants, and social workers — 
sought domestic work in growing numbers after 
losing their jobs. Faced with this uncertainty, Afri- 
can-American domestics sought alternatives. 

A newly elected President Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt, with the help of advisers, unleashed a 
number of programs that attempted to increase in- 
dustrial profits, improve consumer spending, allevi- 
ate unemployment, and relieve destitution: These 
programs included the Federal Emergency Relief 
Administration (FERA) and the Works Progress 
Administration (WPA). Legislation with similar 
aims included the National Industrial Recovery Act, 
which improved working conditions and wages and 
guaranteed employees the right to unionize; the 
Fair Labor Standards Act, which created maximum 
working hours and minimum wages; and the Social 
Security Act, which established unemployment 
compensation and retirement pensions for the un- 
employed. Unfortunately, this legislation excluded 
domestics and farm laborers because many New 
Dealers, especially southerners, argued that the 
provisions would have put undue financial strain 
on the employers of household help and agricultur- 
al workers. Domestics, thus, continued to experi- 
ence economic contraction and widespread dis- 
crimination. Many household workers went on 
temporary relief, provided by such agencies as 
FERA and the WPA. Other disillusioned household 
workers abandoned domestic work altogether. 
Only with the entry of the United States into World 
War II in December 1941 did the Depression end 
for domestic workers. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; FAMILY AND HOME, 
IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; 
UNEMPLOYMENT, LEVELS OF. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



2U 



N ' T 



U Y WHERE 



Y U 



CAN'T 



WORK 



MOVEMENT 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Blackwelder, Julia Kirk. Now Hiring: The Feminization of 
Work in the United States, 1900-1995. 1997. 

Bureau of Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 
1930, Population: Occupations. 1932. 

Bureau of Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 
1940, Population: The Labor Force, Part 1. 1943. 

Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black 
Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Pres- 
ent. 1985. 

Katzman, David M. Seven Days a Week: Women and Do- 
mestic Service in Industrializing America. 1978. 

Romero, Mary. Maid in the U.S.A. 1992. 

Bernadette Pruitt 



DON'T BUY WHERE YOU CAN'T 
WORK MOVEMENT 

The "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" move- 
ment, also known as the "Buy Where You Can 
Work" movement, emerged in major northern U.S. 
cities during the Great Depression to protest black 
unemployment rates that often were double or tri- 
ple the national average. In 1929 the Chicago news- 
paper the Whip, under editor Joseph Bibb, spon- 
sored a campaign to boycott Chicago stores that 
refused to hire blacks. Supported by the Reverend 
J. C. Austin of the Pilgrim Baptist Church, the pro- 
gram resulted in the hiring of more than two thou- 
sand blacks, mostly as clerks in Chicago depart- 
ment stores. 

The movement spread rapidly to other cities, 
drawing support from the major civil rights organi- 
zations. In 1931 black ministers, politicians, and 
businessmen published appeals in Harlem newspa- 
pers to follow Chicago's example. Calls for boycotts 
came from the Harlem Business Men's Club and 
from supporters of the black nationalist Marcus 
Garvey. Harlem Reverend John H. Johnson of Saint 
Martin's Protestant Episcopal Church formed the 
Citizens League for Fair Play and used Harlem 
newspapers to promote its picketing efforts. In 1933 
in Washington, D.C., the New Negro Alliance, Inc., 
created the motto "Buy Where You Work — Buy 
Where You Clerk." Responding to layoffs of black 
workers at a Washington hamburger grill, the alli- 



ance targeted such black district stores as Kaufman 
department stores, the A. & P., and the High Ice 
Cream Company stores. Overall, the alliance devel- 
oped a comprehensive agenda advocating in- 
creased black employment, opportunities for black 
advancement and promotion, combined African 
Americans' purchasing power, and the creation of 
larger black businesses. 

The "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" 
movement had several legacies. In some cities such 
as New York, it helped to create hiring programs 
that were among the first affirmative action pro- 
grams in U. S. history. The movement also provided 
a model for 1960s direct-action civil rights protests, 
such as lunch counter sit-ins, and led the way for 
later federal efforts to address structural unemploy- 
ment and equal purchasing and earning power in 
black communities. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; UNEMPLOYMENT, 
LEVELS OF. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bunche, Ralph J. "Negroes in the Depression: Ralph J. 
Bunche Describes a Direct-Action Approach to 
Jobs." In Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Centu- 
ry, edited by August Meier, Elliott Rudwick, and 
Francis L. Broderick. 1971. 

Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. Black Metropolis: 
A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. 1993. 

McKay, Claude. "Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 1940." In 
Negro Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, edited 
by Francis L. Broderick and August Meier. 1966. 

Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem during the Great De- 
pression. 1983. 

Trotter, Joe William, Jr. "From a Raw Deal to a New 
Deal? 1929-1945." In To Make Our World Anew: A 
History of African Americans, edited by Robin D. G. 
Kelley and Earl Lewis. 2000. 

Bill V. Mullen 



DOS PASSOS, JOHN 



John Roderigo Dos Passos (January 14, 1896-Sep- 
tember 28, 1970) was a prominent leftist and one of 



2U 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DOUGLAS 



WILLIAM 



the great writers of the Depression era. The illegiti- 
mate son of a Portuguese immigrant, Dos Passos 
graduated from Harvard University in 1916 and 
volunteered as an ambulance driver in France and 
Italy during World War I. In the 1920s, Dos Passos 
established himself as a writer of some talent with 
works such as Manhattan Transfer (1925). Yet he is 
best known for his epic 1930s trilogy, U.S.A., widely 
hailed by contemporaries as the great American 
novel. The trilogy consists of The 42nd Parallel 
(1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). An 
ambitious 1,200-page attempt to depict "the slice of 
a continent" and "the speech of the people," U.S.A. 
blends the experimental modernism of the 1920s 
with the social novel of the 1930s. The novel con- 
sists of four different types of writing: biographical 
portraits of important Americans, "newsreels" 
quoting the headlines and popular culture of the 
time, "camera eye" sections of free-form prose po- 
etry (often autobiographical in nature), and a series 
of interlocking narratives of a dozen fictional char- 
acters who appear rootless and directionless while 
trying to make their way through modern America. 
When combined, these sections form an elegy on 
the decline of American democracy in the first dec- 
ades of the twentieth century and offer a sharply 
critical view of the dominance of "big money" in 
the contemporary United States. 

U.S.A. won the respect of literary critics, and it 
also achieved political significance in the 1930s as 
the Popular Front coalition of Communists and lib- 
erals adopted it as essential reading. Dos Passos, 
however, had professed left-wing ideas prior to the 
Great Depression; in fact, it was the execution of 
Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo 
Vanzetti in 1927 that radicalized him. In the late 
1920s and early 1930s, Dos Passos was close to the 
Communist Party. He helped found the Commu- 
nist literary magazine New Masses, and he famously 
denounced the Socialist Party as "near beer." In 
1931, along with a number of other writers, Dos 
Passos traveled to Harlan County in Kentucky to 
publicize the unjust working conditions of striking 
miners. Dos Passos also helped organize American 
support for the antifascist side in the Spanish civil 
war. He traveled to Spain in 1937, where he learned 
of the brutality of Stalinist Communists who secret- 
ly used ruthless tactics against their antifascist al- 



lies. After hearing of the murder of a friend by 
Spanish Communists, Dos Passos drifted away 
from the left in the late 1930s. 

After Dos Passos publicly criticized the Com- 
munists, the New Masses suddenly declared Ernest 
Hemingway a better writer than Dos Passos. After 
the 1930s, Dos Passos turned toward conservative 
politics, associating himself with the National Re- 
view and writing a right-wing counter-trilogy to 
U.S.A. Dos Passos's literary reputation suffered as 
his right-wing turn discredited his work among lib- 
erals and his new conservative friends had little lik- 
ing for his earlier leftist work. Thus, after the 1930s, 
too many forgot that Dos Passos's U.S.A. is one of 
a select number of works worthy of the title "great 
American novel." 

See Also: LITERATURE; SPANISH CIVIL WAR. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of 
American Culture in the Twentieth Century. 1997. 

Ludington, Townsend. John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Cen- 
tury Odyssey. 1980. 

Rosen, Robert C. John Dos Passos: Politics and the Writer. 
1981. 

Daniel Geary 



DOUGLAS, WILLIAM O. 

William Orville Douglas (1898-1980), Supreme 
Court justice, was born in Maine, Minnesota, the 
second of the three children of Julia Fisk and Wil- 
liam Douglas, a Presbyterian minister. At age three, 
Douglas moved west with his parents, first to Es- 
trella, California, then to Cleveland, Washington. 
When his father died in 1904, his mother settled 
with her children near relatives in Yakima, Wash- 
ington. 

Douglas had been crippled with polio before 
his family moved west, and life in Yakima was hard 
for his practically penniless mother and her chil- 
dren. Eventually, however, Douglas not only re- 
gained the use of his legs but became an inveterate 
mountain hiker, developing the love of nature and 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



21.5 



DOUGLAS 



WILLIAM 



solitude that later characterized his lifestyle and 
personality. He, his sister, and his younger brother 
helped their mother financially with odd jobs and 
work in area orchards. He excelled academically, 
becoming valedictorian of his high school class in 
1916 and a 1920 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Whit- 
man College in Walla Walla. After teaching English 
and Latin for two years at Yakima's high school, 
and reportedly with only $75 in his pocket, Douglas 
took a train east, herding a carload of sheep to pay 
his fare, and enrolled at Columbia Law School. Al- 
though obliged to devote much of his time to tutor- 
ing and odd jobs, he graduated second in his class. 

Douglas had hoped to clerk for Supreme Court 
Justice Harlan Fiske Stone after law school. But 
when the clerkship went to another Columbia 
graduate, he reluctantly joined a prominent Wall 
Street firm. After two unsatisfying years there, he 
left private practice to teach law, first at Columbia, 
then at Yale, where he specialized in corporate law, 
became one of the school's youngest endowed 
chair professors, and enthusiastically embraced the 
legal realist movement then flourishing at Yale, in- 
cluding its conception of judges as social engineers. 

When the Depression returned the Democrats 
to power in Washington and gave birth to the New 
Deal, Douglas, like many other prominent scholars, 
went to work in the Roosevelt administration. In 

1936, he became a member of the Securities and 
Exchange Commission (SEC), and the next year its 
chair. He also developed close ties with members 
of the Roosevelt inner circle, often joining the 
weekly poker games at the White House. 

Ultimately, such connections paid off hand- 
somely. Roosevelt had no opportunities to fill Su- 
preme Court vacancies during his first term, but be- 
ginning with his appointment of Hugo Black in 

1937, the president eventually was able to com- 
pletely remake the Court. Black and Roosevelt's 
second appointee, Stanley Reed, were southerners, 
Felix Frankfurter, his third selection, was an east- 
erner; and Roosevelt promised to appoint a west- 
erner to the next vacancy on the Court. 

Justice Louis Brandeis's retirement in 1939 gave 
the president another appointment. Although 
Douglas had spent his youth on the west coast, 
Roosevelt considered the SEC chairman an east- 



erner from Yale. The depth of Douglas's commit- 
ment to the New Deal and rigorous regulation of 
the stock market was questionable as well. But a 
Douglas speech applauding New Deal programs 
and attacking financial interests helped to calm 
such concerns, and in late March, the president 
submitted Douglas's name to the Senate. In early 
April, the Senate confirmed the nomination 62-4; 
those voting no, all Republicans, complained, ironi- 
cally, that Douglas was a tool of Wall Street. 

As a member of the Court, Douglas enthusias- 
tically joined the justices in completing the disman- 
tling of the pre-1937 Court's laissez-faire economic 
precedents. Indeed, his opinion for the Court in 
Olsen v. Nebraska (1941) remains a classic Roosevelt 
Court repudiation of the Old Court's assumption of 
superlegislative powers in regulatory cases. Albeit 
with a number of lapses, most notably his stance in 
Korematsu v. United States (1944) and in other 
World War II cases involving sanctions against Jap- 
anese Americans, Douglas was also a leader in the 
modern Court's increasing scrutiny of laws restrict- 
ing First Amendment freedoms, the rights of sus- 
pects and defendants in criminal cases, and racial 
equality. 

Unlike his frequent ally Justice Black, however, 
Douglas did not rest his jurisprudence on a positiv- 
ist framework, championing only those individual 
liberties and other restrictions on governmental au- 
thority that are rooted in constitutional language or 
evidence of the framers' intent. Instead, he ulti- 
mately rejected the laissez-faire Court's decisions 
as simply inconsistent with society's needs, while 
readily embracing the modern Court's use of due 
process and equal protection in recognizing sexual 
privacy, abortion, and related rights that have no 
basis in the Constitution's text or records of histori- 
cal intent. 

Justice Douglas's expansive reading of civil lib- 
erties infuriated conservative politicians. His unor- 
thodox personal life attracted controversy as well. 
In the early 1950s, he divorced his wife of nearly 
thirty years. He later remarried three times, on the 
last occasion to a twenty-six-year-old when he was 
sixty-six. A 1970 impeachment effort — ostensibly 
directed at ethical improprieties but more likely at 
Douglas's judicial record — failed. A severe stroke in 



21,6 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



D U B I N S K Y 



DAVID 



1975 forced his retirement, but not before he had 
served thirty-six and a half years on the high bench, 
the record to date for Supreme Court service. Before 
his death in 1980, Congress recognized the veteran 
justice's love of hiking and nature by designating 
parkland along a favorite Washington walking trail 
as the William O. Douglas National Park. 

See Also: BLACK, HUGO; FRANKFURTER, FELIX; 
HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, JR.; HUGHES, 
CHARLES EVANS; SECURITIES REGULATION; 
SUPREME COURT. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ball, Howard, and Phillip J. Cooper. Of Power and Right: 
Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and America's Con- 
stitutional Revolution. 1992. 

Countryman, Vern. The Judicial Record of Justice William 
O. Douglas. 1974. 

Douglas, William O. The Court Years, 1939-75: The Auto- 
biography of William O. Douglas. 1980. 

Douglas, William O. Go East, Young Man, The Early Years: 
The Autobiography of William O. Douglas. 1974. 

Simon, James F. Independent Journey: The Life of William 
O. Douglas. 1980. 

Urofsky, Melvin, and P. E. Urofsky, eds. The Douglas Let- 
ters: Selections from the Private Papers of Justice Wil- 
liam O. Douglas. 1987. 

Wasby, Stephen L., ed. He Shall Not Pass This Way Again: 
The Legacy of Justice William O. Douglas. 1990. 

TlNSLEY E. YARBROUGH 



DUBINSKY, DAVID 



The life of the labor leader and political activist 
David Dubinsky (February 22, 1892-September 17, 
1982) was governed by three great passions: trade 
unionism, social reform, and anticommunism. 
Raised as the youngest son of a Jewish baker in 
Lodz in Russian Poland, Dubinsky started his labor 
activism early. After a rudimentary secular Zionist 
education, he went to work for his father at the age 
of eleven and led his first strike at fifteen. Dubinsky 
also joined the Jewish Bund, a socialist organization 
banned by czarist authorities. Imprisoned and later 
exiled to Siberia at eighteen, he escaped. Recogniz- 



ing that he was a hunted man, Dubinsky left Po- 
land, arriving in New York on New Year's Day, 
1911. 

Dubinsky became a U.S. citizen and joined the 
Socialist Party and garment cutters' Local 10 of the 
International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union 
(ILGWU). He embraced the cutters' craft culture, 
moderate socialism, and practical trade unionism. 
Elected president of his local in 1921, he played a 
vital role in the bitter "civil war" between Commu- 
nists and Socialists that decimated New York's gar- 
ment unions during the 1920s. Several factors led 
to the ILGWU's demise, but Dubinsky blamed an 
ill-fated 1926 strike and supported the expulsion of 
the Communists. ILGWU membership fell from a 
high of 120,000 in the early 1920s to only 40,000 in 
early 1933 shortly after Dubinsky's ascent to the 
presidency. His tenure became closely entwined 
with Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Taking ad- 
vantage of the National Recovery Administration's 
nominal recognition of collective bargaining rights, 
Dubinsky launched organizing drives in sixty cities, 
as well as a series of successful strikes. By May 1934 
membership in the ILGWU had jumped to more 
than 400,000, and Dubinsky emerged as a major 
figure in New Deal labor circles. Placing its new 
strength behind the NRA code authority, the 
ILGWU established a thirty-five hour work week, 
substantially raised wages, and transformed condi- 
tions in its industry. In the process, it provided a 
model for the industrial union explosion of the late 
1930s. 

Convinced that the labor movement's future 
lay in the development of giant industrial unions, 
in late 1935 Dubinsky formed the Committee for 
Industrial Organization with Sidney Hillman, John 
L. Lewis, and other American Federation of Labor 
(AFL) leaders to push the AFL into organizing basic 
industry. Although he supported organizing drives 
throughout 1936 and 1937 and recognized the need 
to revitalize the labor movement, Dubinsky op- 
posed the formation of the CIO as a separate labor 
federation in November 1938, fearing dual union- 
ism and Communist Party influence in the new 
group. He led his union back into the AFL in 1940 
and rejoined the Federation's executive board in 
1945. Dubinsky retired from the ILGWU presiden- 
cy in 1966. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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I S 



Dubinsky's political life was shaped both by his 
strong commitment to social justice and his staunch 
anti-Communism. He helped to form the American 
Labor Party in 1936 but eventually renounced it, al- 
leging Communist influence. He cofounded the 
New York Liberal Party, Americans for Democratic 
Action, and the International Confederation of 
Trade Unions, all bastions of Cold War liberal anti- 
Communism. Throughout, he remained an avid 
supporter of Roosevelt and later Democratic presi- 
dents. 

See Also: AMALGAMATED CLOTHING WORKERS 
(ACW); AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR 
(AFL); ANTICOMMUNISM; CONGRESS OF 
INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (CIO); 
ORGANIZED LABOR. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bernstein, Irving. The Turbulent Years: A History of the 
American Worker, 1933-1941. 1969. 

Danish, Max. The World of David Dubinsky. 1957. 

"David Dubinsky, the I.L.G.W.U., and the American 
Labor Movement: Essays in Honor of David Dubin- 
sky." Labor History 9 (1968), special supplement. 

Dubinsky, David, and A. H. Raskin. David Dubinsky: A 
Life with Labor. 1977. 

James R. Barrett 



DUBOIS, W. E. B. 

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 
1868-August 27, 1963), who was born in Great Bar- 
rington, Massachusetts, in the year of Andrew 
Johnson's impeachment and died ninety-five years 
later in the year of Lyndon Johnson's installation, 
cut an amazing swath through four continents. He 
was a Lenin Peace Prize laureate and his birthday 
was officially celebrated in China. He wrote four- 
teen pioneering books of sociology, history, and 
politics, and in his eighties a second autobiography 
and three historical novels, complementing the two 
large works of fiction he wrote in the first two dec- 
ades of the twentieth century. The premier architect 
of the civil rights movement in the United States, 
Du Bois was among the first American intellectuals 



to grasp the international implications of the strug- 
gle for racial justice, memorably proclaiming at the 
dawn of the century that the problem of the twenti- 
eth century would be the problem of the color line. 
The Souls of Black Folk, his 1903 collection of four- 
teen essays, transformed race relations in the Unit- 
ed States and, by redefining the terms of the three- 
hundred-year-old interaction between blacks and 
whites, reshaped the cultural and political psychol- 
ogy of peoples of African descent not only through- 
out the western hemisphere but on the African 
continent as well. 

By 1910, the problem of the color line in Ameri- 
ca had become so acute that Du Bois gave up his 
Atlanta University professorship for the editor's 
desk at the National Association for the Advance- 
ment of Colored People (NAACP) in New York. Du 
Bois's magazine, The Crisis, was entirely the editor's 
creature, its policies virtually independent of the 
NAACP's board of directors, and its extraordinary 
monthly circulation of more than 100,000 by 1920 
due almost entirely to Du Bois's pen. For fourteen 
years, Du Bois spoke through The Crisis to demand 
full civil rights and complete racial integration as 
the NAACP grew from a small operation into a cor- 
porate body increasingly staffed by lawyers, lobby- 
ists, and accountants. Du Bois grew increasingly 
impatient with the legalistic tack of the NAACP 
after the onset of the Great Depression. 

Having failed to reform the NAACP, Du Bois 
devoted the years after 1934 to reading Karl Marx 
and supervising graduate students. Du Bois's peri- 
od of Talented Tenth Marxism (1935 to 1948) was 
distinguished by a deepening economic radicalism, 
but also by a renewal of his social science melio- 
rism. He wrote with increasing enthusiasm for 
communism in Russia and with mounting condem- 
nation for European imperialism in Africa and Asia. 
His 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, was 
ultimately to transform the historiography of a peri- 
od, although initially it appalled most professional 
historians by positing a general strike by the slaves 
during the Civil War and a proletarian bid for power 
in the South after the war. Flaws it certainly had, 
but Du Bois's sprawling monograph would return 
the African American to the Reconstruction drama 
as a significant agent. Historians Howard K. Beale 



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BOWL 



and C. Vann Woodward wrote the author of their 
admiration for the work and of its influence upon 
them. 

Pressured by several members of the NAACP 
board, secretary Walter White invited the septuage- 
narian back. As consulting delegate with White and 
Mary McLeod Bethune to the founding of the Unit- 
ed Nations in May 1945, Du Bois began what would 
become ever sharper public attacks upon the poli- 
cies of an international body whose charter was 
ambiguous about the rights of colonial peoples. His 
1947 United Nations petition, "An Appeal to the 
World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights 
to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro De- 
scent in the United States of America," was a bold 
initiative for the NAACP. Although the NAACP 
board had unanimously endorsed the document 
the previous August, by June 1948 new board 
member and UN delegate Eleanor Roosevelt made 
it plain that international circulation of the petition 
and repeated attempts at General Assembly pre- 
sentation "embarrassed" her and the nation. By 
then, Du Bois had virtually endorsed Henry Wal- 
lace's Progressive Party candidacy, denounced the 
Marshall Plan and NATO as building blocks in the 
aggressive American containment of the Soviet 
Union, and roiled the NAACP directorate by dis- 
tributing a detailed memorandum for restructuring 
the national headquarters. Already shaken in 1947 
by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s charges in Life 
magazine of Communist infiltration, the NAACP 
chose Mrs. Roosevelt and fired Du Bois in Septem- 
ber 1948. 

During the 1950s Du Bois aligned himself in- 
creasingly with the communist-dominated peace 
movement. Tried and acquitted in 1951 as an agent 
of a foreign power, he was barred from travel 
abroad until the return of his passport in 1958. After 
several years of extensive travel in the Soviet Union, 
China, and Eastern Europe, Du Bois joined the 
American Communist Party in 1961 and departed 
for Accra, Ghana. He died there in 1963 on the eve 
of the March on Washington. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 

GREAT DEPRESSION ON; RANDOLPH, A. PHILIP; 
ROBESON, PAUL. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Du Bois, W.E.B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Auto- 
biography of a Race Concept. 1940. 

Home, Gerald. Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the 
Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963. 
1968. 

Lewis, David Levering, ed. W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader. 
1995. 

Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for 
Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. 2000. 

Marable, Manning. W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Demo- 
crat. 1986. 

David Levering Lewis 



DUST BOWL 

The Dust Bowl refers to a ninety-seven-million- 
acre area in the southern Great Plains where 
drought and wind erosion were the most severe 
during the 1930s. Extending approximately four 
hundred miles from north to south and three hun- 
dred miles from east to west, the Dust Bowl encom- 
passed southeastern Colorado, northeastern New 
Mexico, western Kansas, and the panhandles of 
Texas and Oklahoma. The region of the southern 
Great Plains that became known as the Dust Bowl 
received its name after a gigantic dust storm, 
known as a black blizzard, struck the area on April 
14, 1935. Robert E. Geiger, a reporter for the Asso- 
ciated Press who was traveling in the area, sent a 
series of articles from the region to the Washington, 
D.C. Evening Star. Geiger referred to the southern 
Great Plains as a "dust bowl." The public and the 
Soil Conservation Service quickly adopted the term, 
and it became the sobriquet for this windblown, 
drought-stricken area. 

CAUSES 

Sandy loess soil, drought, lack of soil-holding 
vegetation, and wind have caused the dust to blow 
on the southern Great Plains since the prehistoric 
period. During the nineteenth century, drought and 
prairie fires sometimes destroyed the grass and ex- 
posed the soil to wind erosion. During the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the settle- 
ment of the region and drought contributed to dust 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



249 



DUST 



W L 




This farmer in Cimarron Country, Oklahoma, put up fencing in 1936 to protect his farm from drifting sand. Library of Congress, 
Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



storms as farmers plowed the grassland for crops. 
Similarly, between 1900 and 1930, farmers on the 
southern plains broke even more native sod for 
wheat. Steam traction engines, gasoline-powered 
tractors, and one-way disc plows helped farmers 
plow the sod and expose the soil to the nearly cons- 
tant wind. High agricultural prices stimulated by 
World War I and adequate precipitation encour- 



aged agricultural expansion on the southern plains, 
and few farmers gave much thought to soil conser- 
vation. Many factors, then, contributed to the cre- 
ation of the Dust Bowl — soils subject to wind ero- 
sion, drought that killed the soil-holding vegetation 
(including wheat), the incessant wind, and techno- 
logical improvements that facilitated the rapid 
breaking of the native sod. 



Z50 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DUST 



BOWL 




This massive cloud of dust hit Rolla, Kansas, in April 1935. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



THE STORMS 

In 1931, drought struck the southern Great 
Plains. By late January 1932, dust storms began to 
sweep across the Texas Panhandle, and wind ero- 
sion became a common problem for the region dur- 
ing the spring. During the worst storms of the de- 
cade, the dust drifted like snow, halted road and 
railway travel, and made breathing difficult. Work 
crews shoveled the railway tracks clear of drifted 
dust so the trains could pass. Railroad engineers 
sometimes missed their stations. During the worst 
dust storms, residents sealed windows with tape or 
putty and hung wet sheets in front of windows to 
filter the air. Others spread sheets over their uphol- 
stered furniture, wedged rags under doors, and 
covered keyholes to keep the dirt out of their 
homes. Mealtime during a storm meant that plates, 
cups, and glasses were often covered with a thin 
coat of dust, and the dust made the food and one's 
teeth gritty. Electric lights dimmed to a faint glow 
along streets during the middle of the day. Travel 
on highways was hazardous during a dust storm 
because of poor visibility and dust drifts across 



highways. Static electricity accompanied the storms 
and caused automobile ignition systems to fail and 
cars to stall during the storms. Motorists attached 
drag wires and chains to their automobiles and 
trucks to ground this static electricity and prevent 
their vehicles from stalling. Even windmills, pump 
handles, and cooking pans became so highly 
charged that a mere touch caused a good shock. 
Residents often wore masks when they went out- 
side during a storm, because the dust contained sil- 
ica that irritated the mucus membranes of the respi- 
ratory system and made people feel ill. Many 
residents died from "dust pneumonia." Surgeons 
and dentists confronted the problems of steriliza- 
tion. Between 1932 and 1939, dust storms made life 
miserable and sometimes dangerous for residents 
of the Dust Bowl. 

Throughout the 1930s, continued drought and 
crop failure caused the soil to blow. The number of 
dust storms increased across the region from 1934 
to 1938. The acreage subject to wind erosion also 
expanded during the period, despite the increased 
efforts of farmers and government officials to bring 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



231 



DUST 



W L 





Many families abandoned their farms during the Dust Bowl and traveled west in search of work. Dorothea Lange photographed 
this family group from Texas at an overnight roadside camp near Calipatria, California, in 1937. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division. FSA/OWI Collection 



fields under control by various soil and water con- 
servation methods. The dust storms that began in 
1932 and peaked in 1935 continued intermittently, 
primarily during the spring "blow months" of Feb- 
ruary, March, and April, when the wind velocity is 
the highest in the region. By spring 1936, the 
coarse, granular structure of the soil particles had 
broken down due to drought and the constant 
blowing and shifting of the soil. Much of the topsoil 
had become a fine powder that even low-velocity 



winds could easily lift into the air and carry for hun- 
dreds of miles. During the winter the alternate 
freezing and thawing of the ground pulverized the 
soil still further, making it even more susceptible to 
wind erosion. The dust storms remained severe into 
1937, and the prevailing winds carried the soil to 
the Middle Atlantic and Gulf Coast states. During 
the worst storms, sand and soil lacerated the wheat 
and cotton crops, and covered pastures and killed 
the grass used for grazing and hay. 



252 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DUST 



BOWL 




This dust-covered farm, photographed in 1938 near Dalhart, Texas, remained occupied, but many in the area were abandoned 
during the Dust Bowl years. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



SOIL CONSERVATION 

By 1933 the wind erosion conditions in the 
southern Great Plains became so serious that farm- 
ers looked to the federal government for technical 
and financial support to help them bring the blow- 
ing lands under control. In March the Forest Service 
became the first federal agency to try to stop the 
dust storms in the region after President Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt asked the agency to investigate 
whether a major tree-planting program could sub- 
stantially reduce wind erosion on the Great Plains. 
Working with nearly record speed, in August the 
Forest Service reported that it could. This plan, 
known as the Shelterbelt Project, advocated the 
creation of a zone a hundred miles wide that would 



stretch from Canada to northern Texas, with the 
western edge running along a line from Bismarck 
North Dakota, to Amarillo, Texas. Within that area, 
shelterbelts, that is, rows of trees, would be planted 
across the entire zone to slow the prevailing winds. 
With the wind controlled, the dust storms would 
end or become less severe, and the land could be 
restored to normal agricultural productivity when 
the drought ended. 

In 1935, after nearly two years of studying the 
climate, soils, native vegetation, and earlier tree 
plantings on the Great Plains, the Forest Service re- 
affirmed the practicality of the project but recom- 
mended that the western edge of the zone be 
moved eastward to follow a line from Devil's Lake, 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



Z53 



DUST 



W L 



North Dakota, to Mangum, Oklahoma; this new 
border area received twenty-two inches of precipi- 
tation annually, compared to sixteen inches in the 
border area originally proposed. The Forest Service 
then began the Prairie States Forestry Project, as it 
became known in 1937, planting shelterbelts on se- 
lected lands leased from farmers. As the trees grew, 
the shelterbelts shielded wheat fields from the wind 
and slowed the blowing soil. By the time the project 
terminated in 1942, the Forest Service had planted 
nearly 18,600 miles of shelterbelts that had nearly 
a 60 percent survival rate. Although the return of 
normal precipitation enabled nature to heal the 
wounds to the soil from drought and wind, the 
shelterbelts helped check soil erosion and protected 
farmsteads, livestock, and fields. 

The Soil Erosion Service (SES) in the Depart- 
ment of the Interior and the Department Agricul- 
ture also developed plans to end wind erosion in 
the Dust Bowl. On August 25, 1933, the Public 
Works Administration provided $5 million to the 
Soil Erosion Service to support a conservation pro- 
gram. The SES used these funds to establish dem- 
onstration projects on private lands where nearby 
farmers could observe the best soil conservation 
practices. The work of the SES, however, duplicated 
many projects of the Department of Agriculture 
and, in 1935, the agency was renamed the Soil 
Conservation Service and moved under the juris- 
diction of the United States Department of Agricul- 
ture. 

The Soil Conservation Service also established 
demonstration projects to persuade farmers to 
adopt proper conservation techniques. By the late 
1930s, the work of the Soil Conservation Service 
(along with federal dollars and the return of near 
normal precipitation) helped farmers bring their 
blowing lands under control. Most farmers who fol- 
lowed the technical advice and procedures of the 
SCS adopted proper tillage and cropping practices, 
such as contour plowing, terracing, strip cropping, 
and planting drought-resistant crops such as grain 
sorghum. In order to halt dust storms completely, 
though, the grazing lands had to be restored. Ac- 
cordingly, the SCS advised farmers to rotate, rest, 
and reseed pastures and to use contour furrowing 
and ridging techniques on their grasslands to derive 



the maximum benefit from precipitation and pre- 
vent runoff. The soil conservation practices promot- 
ed by the SCS were designed to restore the land to 
predrought, pre-Dust Bowl conditions. 

The soil conservation projects depended on 
persuasion and voluntary agreements between the 
farmers and the agency. Officials in the SCS did not 
believe the agency had the constitutional authority 
to impose mandatory land-use regulations. Conse- 
quently, the SCS encouraged the state govern- 
ments to require farmers to practice the best soil 
conservation techniques. On May 13, 1936, the SCS 
drafted a model state law, titled A Standard Soil 
Conservation District Law, which provided for the 
creation of state conservation districts by local peti- 
tion and referendum. After a district organized 
under the direction of the state soil conservation 
authority, committee, or agency, the farmers in the 
district worked in a common effort to halt soil ero- 
sion, particularly from the wind, and to follow the 
best soil conservation practices. District supervisors 
provided technical information and financial aid to 
help farmers conduct various conservation practices 
and purchase gasoline, oil, and horse feed to meet 
basic soil conservation expenses. Dust Bowl farmers 
adopted SCS programs because they were geared 
to practicality and low cost, and the SCS and other 
agencies provided funds to help them initiate the 
recommended soil conservation practices. By 1940, 
most farmers who participated in SCS conservation 
programs credited the agency with improving their 
farm practices, increasing their land values, and 
boosting their incomes. Most Dust Bowl farmers 
planned to continue their newly learned soil con- 
servation practices. 

The most optimistic attempt to help farmers in 
the Dust Bowl end the wind erosion menace in- 
volved the land-use program of the Resettlement 
Administration (RA) and Farm Security Adminis- 
tration (FSA). The Resettlement and Farm Security 
administrations, like the SCS, contended that if se- 
verely eroded lands could be removed from cultiva- 
tion and restored to grass, and the blowing range 
lands reseeded, then the soil could be stabilized, the 
dust storms ended, and the land returned to a graz- 
ing economy similar to that of the Great Plains be- 
fore the sod was broken for crops. Accordingly, in 



254 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DUST 



BOWL 



1935 the Resettlement Administration, and later 
the Farm Security Administration (which assumed 
this responsibility in 1937), began a land-purchase 
program to acquire the most severely wind-eroded 
lands on the Great Plains in order to restore them 
with grass and the best soil conservation tech- 
niques, and to move the farmers from the lands that 
it acquired to better federally owned lands. By the 
time the SCS assumed responsibility for this work 
in 1938, the land-purchase program had become an 
unprecedented experiment in environmental and 
social planning. The SCS continued to restore the 
wind-eroded lands in the purchase areas after nor- 
mal precipitation returned. Since 1960, many of 
these land-utilization projects have been known as 
national grasslands, such as the Cimarron National 
Grassland in Kansas, the Comanche National 
Grassland in Colorado, the Rita Blanca National 
Grassland in Oklahoma, and the Kiowa National 
Grassland in New Mexico. 



FEDERAL RELIEF 

As the wheat and cotton crops withered under 
the sun on the southern Great Plains, farmers 
looked to the federal government for aid beyond 
soil conservation. Although the federal government 
provided many programs for economic relief from 
drought and depression, the aid from the Agricul- 
tural Adjustment Administration (AAA) became 
the most significant. Without the financial aid of 
the AAA, many farmers in the Dust Bowl would 
have suffered bankruptcy and lost their lands. The 
AAA paid farmers nationwide to reduce production 
by withdrawing a specific acreage from production. 
In the Dust Bowl, the AAA paid them to reduce 
production of wheat and cotton, mostly. With fewer 
acres planted in these crops, agency officials be- 
lieved that the surplus of these commodities na- 
tionwide would disappear and agricultural prices 
would rise, thereby increasing farm income. Eco- 
nomic necessity compelled nearly all Dust Bowl 
farmers to participate in the AAA program, but the 
drought, not the AAA, played a greater role in re- 
ducing production than did the allotment or acre- 
age reduction program. Until World War II rapidly 
increased agricultural prices, AAA checks provided 
the most important income for many of them. 



Dust Bowl farmers also received financial aid 
from the Resettlement Administration. Only those 
farmers who could not qualify for loans at banks or 
other lending institutions could apply for RA reha- 
bilitative loans. These loans allowed farmers to pur- 
chase necessities such as food, clothing, feed, seed, 
and fertilizer in order to remain on their land and 
ultimately return to self-sufficiency when the 
drought ended. Before making a loan, the RA pre- 
pared a farm management plan that budgeted the 
farmer's income for daily home and operating 
needs as well as loan and mortgage obligations. Re- 
settlement Administration loans in the Dust Bowl 
averaged about $700 per family. In 1937, the Farm 
Security Administration continued this loan pro- 
gram for the most destitute farmers, on the condi- 
tions that the farmers' operations could become 
profitable and they had adequate credit to obtain 
equipment, seed, and livestock. The FSA also en- 
couraged Dust Bowl farmers to diversify by raising 
more cattle and less wheat. 

Despite aid from the AAA, RA, FSA, and other 
federal agencies and programs, Dust Bowl residents 
often did not have enough income to meet their fi- 
nancial obligations. In some areas drought, dust, 
and economic depression caused property values to 
decline as much as 90 percent. As farm valuations 
shrank, tax revenues decreased and some local gov- 
ernments responded by imposing higher property 
taxes. As income from wheat and cotton fell and as 
property tax rates rose, tenancy and nonresident 
ownership increased more than 40 percent in some 
areas, and tax delinquencies and bankruptcies in- 
creased. 



MIGRATION 

Although wheat and cotton prices fell because 
of overproduction and although drought and dust 
storms ruined crops and caused additional eco- 
nomic hardship, farmers did not emigrate in great 
numbers from the Dust Bowl. The migrant charac- 
ters in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath were 
not from the Dust Bowl, but from the cotton region 
east of the most drought-stricken areas. Migrants 
from this area had been tenant farmers or share- 
croppers whom landowners evicted in order to 
keep the total amount of the AAA allotment checks 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



255 



DUST 



W L 



for reducing cotton production (farmers were re- 
quired to share the aid with any tenants, but they 
ignored this provision of its AAA program). These 
thousands of displaced cotton farmers and field 
workers were the Okies who headed west to Cali- 
fornia. Still, between 1930 and 1940, the counties in 
the Oklahoma Panhandle lost 8,762 people, but 
they did not create a great Dust Bowl migration. 
Many Dust Bowl farmers moved to the nearest 
town, where they sought employment or relief from 
government agencies such as the Civil Works Ad- 
ministration or Works Progress Administration. 
Some areas rich in natural gas and oil gained popu- 
lation as the petroleum industry expanded and cre- 
ated job opportunities. Similarly, in the Texas Pan- 
handle twenty-three counties lost fewer than 
fifteen thousand inhabitants between 1930 and 
1940. 

In southwestern Kansas, the number of farmers 
actually increased in a twenty-seven county area 
between 1930 and 1935 as the children of resident 
farmers and townspeople returned home from cit- 
ies, often in other states, seeking refuge from the 
economic hard times of the Great Depression. Be- 
tween 1935 and 1940, however, the population of 
southwestern Kansas dropped dramatically, with 
losses ranging from 18 percent to 53 percent in 
many Dust Bowl counties. As the farm population 
decreased, the number of farms declined and farm 
sizes increased by 24 percent due to the consolida- 
tion of farms. Most residents who left the Kansas 
portion of the Dust Bowl were single men and 
women or young married couples who perceived 
better opportunities elsewhere in the region or be- 
yond. Tenant farmers often left the Dust Bowl but 
landowners usually stayed because they were un- 
willing to lose their investments in the land, and the 
agricultural and work-relief programs of the federal 
government kept most farmers on the land and the 
majority of the nonfarm population in the towns. 
Certainly, a large number of people moved within 
the Dust Bowl area and from the Great Plains states 
during the 1930s, but most were not people dis- 
placed by drought and wind erosion. 

NORMALCY 

During the spring of 1938 precipitation in- 
creased and the wheat, grass, and cotton grew and 



helped hold the soil against the wind. As a result, 
the black blizzards ended and even the lesser dust 
storms diminished in number and intensity. By the 
spring of 1939 only 9.5 million acres were still sub- 
ject to severe wind erosion, compared to fifty mil- 
lion acres in 1935. Only a few dust storms occurred 
throughout the year. By December 1939, the Dust 
Bowl encompassed only southwestern Kansas and 
southeastern Colorado. During the early 1940s, the 
return of near-normal amounts of precipitation 
ended the drought, and weeds, grass, and crops 
covered much of the land, preventing the wind 
from lifting and blowing the soil. 

A combination of factors, then, created the 
Dust Bowl in the southern Great Plains — the plow- 
ing of too much marginal land for wheat and cot- 
ton, the failure to practice soil conservation, the 
drought, and the relentless wind. The dust storms 
of the 1930s forced farmers and the federal govern- 
ment to utilize all of the technical expertise and fi- 
nancial resources they could command to bring the 
wind erosion problem under control. When 
drought and dust storms returned to the region 
during the 1950s, the technology and conservation 
practices that Dust Bowl farmers had been using for 
twenty years prevented the region from reverting to 
the severe conditions of the 1930s. 

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT (AAA); 
GRAPES OF WRATH, THE; LAND USE PLANNING; 
MIGRATION; WEST, GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE 
AMERICAN. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bonnifield, Paul. The Dust Bowl: Men, Dirt, and Depres- 
sion. 1979. 

Cunfer, Geoffrey Alan. "Common Ground: The Ameri- 
can Grassland, 1870-1970." Ph.D. diss., University 
of Texas at Austin, 1999. 

Droze, Wilmon H. Trees, Prairies, and People: A History of 
Tree Planting in the Plains States. 1977. 

Floyd, Fred. "A History of the Dust Bowl." Ph.D. diss., 
University of Oklahoma, 1950. 

Gregory, James N. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Mi- 
gration and Okie Culture in California. 1989. 

Henderson, Caroline. "Letters from the Dust Bowl." At- 
lantic Monthly 157 (May 1936): 540-551. 

Hewes, Leslie. The Suitcase Farming Frontier: A Study of 
the Historical Geography of the Central Great Plains. 
1973. 



Z56 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DUST 



BOWL 



Hurt, R. Douglas. "Federal Land Reclamation in the Dust 
Bowl." Great Plains Quarterly 6 (1986): 94-106. 

Hurt, R. Douglas. The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and So- 
cial History. 1981. 

Hurt, R. Douglas. "Gaining Control of the Environment: 
The Morton County Land-Utilization Project in the 
Kansas Dust Bowl." Kansas History 19 (1996): 
140-153. 

Hurt, R. Douglas. "The National Grasslands: Origin and 
Development in the Dust Bowl." Agricultural History 
59 (1985): 246-259. 

Johnson, Vance. Heaven's Tableland: The Dust Bowl Story. 
1947. 

Lockingbill, Brad. Dust Bowl, USA: Depression America 
and the Ecological Imagination, 1929-194. 2001. 

Lowitt, Richard. The New Deal in the West. 1984. 

McDean, Harry. "Dust Bowl Historiography." Great 
Plains Quarterly 6 (1986): 117-126. 

McDean, Harry. "Federal Farm Policy and the Dust 
Bowl: The Half-Right Solution." North Dakota Histo- 
ry 47 (1980): 21-31. 

Riney-Kenrberg, Pamela. Rooted in Dust: Surviving the 
Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas. 1994. 



Rutland, Robert Allen. A Boyhood in the Dust Bowl, 
1926-1934. 1995. 

Saloutos, Theodore. The American Farmer and the New 
Deal. 1982. 

Schuyler, Michael W. The Dread of Plenty: Agricultural Re- 
lief Activities of the Federal Government in the Middle 
West, 1933-1939. 1989. 

Sears, Paul B. Deserts on the March. 1980. 

Shindo, Charles J. Dust Bowl Migrants and the American 
Imagination. 1997. 

Stein, Walter J. California and the Dust Bowl Migration. 
1973. 

Svobida, Lawrence. Farming in the Dust Bowl: A First- 
Hand Account From Kansas. 1986. 

Ware, James Wesley. "Black Blizzard: The Dust Bowl of 
the 1930s." Ph.D. diss., Oklahoma State University, 
1977. 

Worster, Donald. The Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in 
the 1930s. 1979. 

R. Douglas Hurt 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



257 




EARHART, AMELIA 



Amelia Earhart (July 24, 1897-July 1937) was an 
aviator and feminist who symbolized the excite- 
ment of early aviation and new roles for women to 
Depression-era Americans. Always a restless and 
independent spirit, Earhart (photograph overleap) 
took her first plane ride in 1921 and earned her li- 
cense soon after. While working at a Boston settle- 
ment house in 1928, she jumped at the chance to 
be a passenger on a flight from Newfoundland to 
Wales, thus earning the distinction of being the first 
woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean by plane. In- 
stantly compared to Charles Lindbergh (to whom 
she bore an uncanny resemblance), Earhart found 
herself lionized as a popular heroine even though 
she had done none of the actual flying. 

On May 20, 1932, Earhart claimed her place in 
aviation history by soloing the Atlantic in her bright 
red single-engine Lockheed Vega. She was the first 
woman and only the second person to do so since 
Lindbergh's 1927 flight. Once again she was front- 
page news nationwide, enabling her to promote her 
belief in the viability of commercial aviation and her 
equally fervid conviction that women could do any- 
thing they set their minds to. In 1937 she an- 
nounced plans for a round-the-world flight in her 
new Lockheed Electra, accompanied only by navi- 
gator Fred Noonan. The first east-to-west attempt 



ended prematurely when she damaged her plane in 
Hawaii. On June 1 she set off in a west-to-east di- 
rection. On the hardest leg of the flight, from New 
Guinea to tiny Howland Island in the mid-Pacific, 
the plane disappeared. For weeks the country fol- 
lowed the story, but an extensive search turned up 
no evidence of the aviators' fate and they were pre- 
sumed lost at sea. Amelia Earhart's last flight re- 
mains one of the twentieth century's greatest un- 
solved mysteries, but it should not deflect attention 
from her significance as a record-breaking aviator 
and a compelling symbol of women's emancipa- 
tion. 

See Also: GENDER ROLES AND SEXUAL RELATIONS, 
IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; 
LINDBERGH, CHARLES. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Butler, Susan. East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart. 
1997. 

Earhart, Amelia. The Fun of It: Random Records of My Own 
Flying and of Women in Aviation. 1932. 

Earhart, Amelia. Papers. Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesin- 
ger Library on the History of Women in America. 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, 
Mass. 

Ware, Susan. Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search 
for Modern Feminism. 1993. 

Susan Ware 



Z59 



E C C L E S 



R R I N E R 




Amelia Earhart, 1930s. Archive Photos 



ECCLES, MARRINER 



Marriner Eccles (September 9, 1890-December 18, 
1977) was born in Logan Utah. He was a high 
school graduate of Brigham Young College in 1909 



and shortly afterwards left for Scotland, where he 
worked for just over two years as a Mormon mis- 
sionary. The Eccles family had extensive business 
interests and Eccles became fully engaged in them 
on his return from Scotland. His family responsibil- 
ities increased after the death of his father in 1912, 
but he thrived on challenges and effectively man- 
aged the family enterprises through the Eccles In- 
vestment Company. In 1913 he married Mary 
Campbell Young, whom he had met while in Scot- 
land. 

During the 1920s Eccles built up a formidable 
reputation as a banker and achieved considerable 
personal wealth. During the period from 1930 to 
1933 U.S. banks in general, and Utah banks in par- 
ticular, exhibited high failure rates. During this 
time, Eccles presided over a number of banks which 
demonstrated such resilience in the face of adversi- 
ty that he was invited to testify before the Senate 
Finance Committee in February 1933. 

The shock of the Depression had a profound 
influence upon Eccles's political philosophy. He be- 
lieved that the economic crisis had been caused by 
underconsumption and that this trend should be 
corrected by a variety of government funded initia- 
tives. Because Eccles's views were unorthodox by 
bankers' standards, and because he was willing, es- 
pecially after the recession of 1937 and 1938, to 
contemplate budget deficits, he has been described 
as a Keynesian. In fact Eccles developed his views 
independently and they were the product of com- 
monsense observation not high-level economic 
theory. Perhaps his lack of formal education en- 
abled Eccles to free himself from old ideas when it 
was clear that they were not working. 

Eccles chose to work in Washington, initially as 
special assistant on monetary and credit issues to 
Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who recommended him to 
Roosevelt as someone who would make a very ef- 
fective head of the Federal Reserve Board. Eccles 
agreed to accept this post on condition that legisla- 
tive changes would move power over money and 
credit matters away from the Federal Reserve Banks 
towards a newly constituted Board. Eccles was to 
the fore in drafting and lobbying for the Banking 
Act of 1935, which centralized monetary policy and 
gave formidable powers to the Board. The fact that 



Z60 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ECONOMISTS 



he was not a Wall Street banker endeared him to 
many New Dealers. Although Eccles was a strong 
supporter of government intervention to ameliorate 
the effects of depression, the restrictive monetary 
policies pursued by the Fed played a significant role 
in causing the serious economic contraction of 
1937-1938. 

Eccles served as chairman of the Board of Gov- 
ernors of the Federal Reserve System until 1948 and 
remained a board member until 1951. He died on 
December 18, 1977. 

See Also: FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM; MONETARY 
POLICY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burns, Helen, M. The American Banking Community and 
New Deal Banking Reforms 1933-1935. 1974. 

Eccles, Marriner, S. Beckoning Frontiers. Public and Person- 
al Recollections. 1951. 

Peter Fearon 



ECONOMISTS 



The Great Depression presented formidable chal- 
lenges to mainstream economists of the day. The 
slump following the stock market crash in the au- 
tumn of 1929 was not itself that perplexing. Ortho- 
dox doctrine then held that downturns in economic 
activity were part of the business cycle's natural 
rhythm. The real problem was to account for the 
economy's failure to right itself. In a well- 
functioning market system, it was expected that 
downward adjustments in wages and prices would 
generate the correctives needed to restore condi- 
tions of high production and employment. By late 
1931, it was clear that the expectations of the ortho- 
dox did not mesh with the observable reality. This 
observation did not mean that mainstream econo- 
mists were ready to reject their original "model." 
For most of them, confidence in its Tightness could 
still be salvaged with the argument that the state of 
the economy — not the state of economic theory — 
was out of joint. It could thus be argued that the 
many impediments to wage-price flexibility — some 



generated by the market power of businesses and 
trade unions, some generated by governments — 
had kept the normal adjustment mechanisms from 
functioning properly. This intellectual maneuver 
may have stiffened the morale of economists in the 
mainstream, but it did nothing to improve their 
public image. 

In the popular estimation, some critics of main- 
stream economics were also discredited by the flow 
of events. In the 1920s, two strands of argument 
were developed that purported to demonstrate that 
there was nothing inevitable about "so-called" 
business cycles and that appropriate policy inter- 
ventions could effectively stabilize aggregate eco- 
nomic activity at a high level. One variant of this 
approach maintained that expenditures on public 
works should be timed to compensate for fluctua- 
tions in private spending. This strategy formed an 
important part of the "new era" economics associ- 
ated with studies inspired by Herbert C. Hoover as 
Secretary of Commerce. It is important to note that 
Hoover expected that the overwhelming bulk of ex- 
penditures on public works would be undertaken 
by state and local governments and that the Federal 
government's primary role was to signal when to 
open or close the spending tap. (This strategy was 
indeed deployed in 1930 — but without the antici- 
pated results — when Hoover was in the White 
House.) A second variant insisted that the alleged 
"laws" of the business cycle could be repealed 
through the appropriate conduct of monetary poli- 
cy. The leading spokesman for this position — Irving 
Fisher of Yale — maintained that variations in the 
general price level were at the root of fluctuations 
in production and employment. Hence, it seemed 
to follow that stabilizing the general price level — a 
task that could be performed by the Federal Re- 
serve — would stabilize the economy. These vestiges 
of "new era" thinking did not fare well in face of the 
events of 1929 through 1931. 

Events did, however, enhance the credibility of 
economists associated with the heterodox school of 
institutional economics. Those of this persuasion 
had long been skeptical of the claims of the main- 
stream regarding the beneficent properties of un- 
regulated markets. In their view, economists sym- 
pathizing with a regime of laissez-faire were 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



Z61 



ECONOMISTS 



hopelessly out of touch with the modern economy. 
The notion that markets were effectively competi- 
tive might have had some validity in an earlier, sim- 
pler, and less concentrated economic order. The 
central truth about the current economy was totally 
otherwise: It was characterized by a fundamental 
asymmetry inherent in the economy's structure. In 
one sector — in which large manufacturing firms 
were predominant — producers had the capacity to 
administer prices. It was often in their interest as 
profit-maximizers to raise prices by restricting out- 
puts, which meant that production and employ- 
ment were inevitably held below their potential. By 
contrast, the myriad producers in the agricultural 
sector were inevitably price-takers, not price- 
makers, and the prices they faced tended to be no- 
toriously unstable. Depression conditions lent 
some plausibility to the institutionalist position. 
(These conditions might also have been read as 
compatible with a Marxist claim that the Depres- 
sion foreshadowed the imminent collapse of the 
capitalist system. This interpretation was indeed ar- 
ticulated, but its impact was never more than mar- 
ginal in the United States.) 

Advocates of the institutionalist heterodoxy got 
a public hearing in the early 1930s, but they also got 
more. A number of their most prominent 
spokespersons were invited to walk in the corridors 
of power in the early days of the Roosevelt adminis- 
tration. Rexford Guy Tugwell, for example, was a 
member of Roosevelt's "Brains Trust" during the 
presidential campaign of 1932 and remained a key 
adviser in the shaping of policy in the First New 
Deal. Tugwell was amply on record in holding that 
laissez-faire amounted to "competition and con- 
flict" and that it should be displaced by a regime of 
"coordination and control" — that is, central plan- 
ning. This intellectual posture underpinned the 
supply-restriction programs administered by the 
newly formed Agricultural Adjustment Administra- 
tion as well as the "codes of fair competition" that 
industrial trade associations were expected to pre- 
pare (and to submit for governmental approval) in 
the National Recovery Administration. Tugwell's 
influence was also noteworthy in the recruitment of 
economists to staff these emergency agencies, 
which in turn gave economists a greater presence 



in the Washington bureaucracy than they had ever 
before enjoyed. 

While most American economists tended to 
view the world through familiar analytic lenses, 
there were some notable instances in which econo- 
mists fundamentally rethought their original posi- 
tions. Irving Fisher is a case in point. In the 1920s, 
he had pronounced that the United States was ap- 
proaching an era of permanent prosperity — a fore- 
cast that was to be disastrous, both professionally 
and personally. By 1932, he had produced an inno- 
vative reformulation to explain what had gone 
wrong. The root of the difficulties, as he then saw 
matters, could be traced to two diseases: the "debt 
disease" and the "dollar disease." The American 
economy of 1929 was fragile because of overindeb- 
tedness (a vulnerability that had gone largely unno- 
ticed at the time). But once the dimensions of this 
problem had been recognized, alarm spread among 
some creditors and debtors, sparking an initial 
round of liquidations. A chain reaction followed, in- 
volving distress selling, the contraction of bank de- 
posits as loans were paid off or called in, and a con- 
sequent collapse in the general price level. The 
"dollar disease" had exacerbated this situation: 
That is to say, as prices fell, the real burden of debts 
increased. Deflation thus became cumulative. Price 
reductions in response to shrinking demand should 
thus no longer be seen as part of a normal readjust- 
ment leading to recovery. Instead deflation simply 
generated more deflation, with no end in sight 
short of universal bankruptcy. The remedy was im- 
plicit in the diagnosis: reflating the price level back 
to its pre-Depression norm and then stabilizing it 
at that level. Debt burdens would thereby be re- 
lieved and liquidations halted. Debtors, with more 
discretionary income available for spending on 
goods and services, would spur resurgence in pur- 
chasing power that would reinvigorate production 
and employment. 

Economists in the Washington bureaucracy 
also displayed some analytic originality, particularly 
in evidence as they groped to understand a sharp 
downturn in economic activity in the late summer 
of 1937 which was, in fact, more precipitous than 
the drop in production in the months immediately 
following the crash of 1929. The recession of 1937 



Z6Z 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ECONOMISTS 



and 1938 was especially puzzling because it oc- 
curred when the economy was still experiencing ex- 
cess productive capacity and high levels of unem- 
ployment. In the post-mortem on this epi- 
sode, governmental insiders — most importantly, 
Lauchlin Currie (then on the staff of the Federal Re- 
serve Board) — detected a significant turnaround in 
"government contribution to spending" between 
1936 and 1937. In 1936, the fiscal impact of govern- 
ment had been decidedly stimulative owing to the 
payout of a bonus to veterans of World War I, a 
once-and-for-all transaction for which there would 
be no counterpart in 1937. Governmental fiscal op- 
erations in 1937 turned contractionary when payroll 
taxes to finance the newly created Social Security 
system were introduced. It had long been under- 
stood that governmental budgetary outcomes were 
influenced by the state of economy, with revenues 
rising or falling in response to fluctuations in eco- 
nomic activity. It now appeared that changes in tax- 
ing and spending by government could influence 
the level of economic activity. This basic insight is 
explored in John Maynard Keynes's General Theory 
of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 

1936. American experience in the recession of 1937 
and 1938 appeared to provide empirical validation 
of that finding. 

Analysis of this episode was also a watershed 
in the thinking of the economist who was to be- 
come the leading interpreter of the Keynesian mes- 
sage in the United States. Harvard's Alvin H. Han- 
sen had reviewed Keynes's General Theory 
unsympathetically when it first appeared. By late 

1937, however, Hansen had undergone a conver- 
sion experience. His reading of the course of eco- 
nomic events then meshed with Currie's: He was 
convinced by the Keynesian argument that identi- 
fied deficiency in aggregate demand as the cause of 
excess capacity and underemployment. He was fur- 
ther persuaded that — in American conditions — full 
recovery could not be achieved unless the govern- 
ment mounted an aggressive deficit spending pro- 
gram to compensate for inadequacies in private de- 
mand. 

Hansen and Currie became the point men in 
delivering the Keynesian message, and they used 
the platform provided by hearings before the Tem- 



porary National Economic Committee in 1939 to 
present it at some length. In mid-1939, Currie was 
elevated to the White House staff as the "economic 
adviser to the president," a title he was the first to 
hold. By that time, his commitment to the Keynes- 
ian conceptual system was complete. He drew the 
argumentative threads together in a lengthy mem- 
orandum on full employment, which he placed be- 
fore Roosevelt in March 1940. Though its structure 
was inspired by the Keynesian framework, the pri- 
mary remedy he then offered for a deficiency in ag- 
gregate demand was not the one that Keynes had 
emphasized. Unlike Keynes, Currie downplayed 
deficit spending on public works: Further increases 
in the national debt were politically sensitive in the 
American context and should be constrained. The 
main weight of policy should instead be assigned to 
government programs in order to shift consump- 
tion upward. This objective could be reached, he 
maintained, by combining a "truly progressive" tax 
system with redistributive transfer payments and 
enlarged public outlays for health, education, and 
welfare. Thus, the "humanitarian and social aims of 
the New Deal" could be reconciled with "sound 
economics." 

Pearl Harbor precluded the implementation of 
this policy strategy, but it did not slow the spread 
of an Americanized version of a Keynesian-style of 
thinking in the highest echelons in official Wash- 
ington. Indeed, within the bureaucracy, it ap- 
proached the status of an orthodoxy. But this think- 
ing was a long distance removed both from the 
mainstream orthodoxies of the 1920s and from the 
heterodoxies that had guided the Roosevelt admin- 
istration's initial approaches to Depression- 
fighting. 

See Also: CURRIE, LAUCHLIN; ECONOMY, 

AMERICAN; HANSEN, ALVIN; KEYNES, JOHN 
MAYNARD; KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS; 
TUGWELL, REXFORD G. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Barber, William J. From New Era to New Deal: Herbert 
Hoover, the Economists, and American Economic Policy, 
1921-1933. 1985. 

Barber, William J. Designs within Disorder: Franklin D. 
Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American 
Economic Policy, 1933-1945. 1996. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



263 



ECONOMY 



M E R I C A N 



Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in 
Recession and War. 1995. 

Hawley, Ellis W. The New Deal and the Problem of Monop- 
oly. 1966. 

Lash, Joseph P. Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the 
New Deal. 1988. 

Stein, Herbert. The Fiscal Revolution in America. 1969. 

Tugwell, Rexford Guy. The Brains Trust. 1968. 

Tugwell, Rexford Guy. Roosevelt's Revolution: the First 
Year — a Personal Perspective. 1977. 

William J. Barber 



ECONOMY, AMERICAN 

The popular description of the U.S. economy dur- 
ing the 1920s, "Prosperity Decade," was no mere 
slogan; it was reality. From the depths of the very 
severe post-war Depression of 1920 and 1921, the 
economy embarked upon a rapid and sustained re- 
covery. Between 1922 and 1929, real gross national 
product (GNP) grew by 22 percent, with the most 
rapid rate of expansion evident during the opening 
and closing years of the decade. This economic 
growth was not exceptional by the standards that 
had been set before 1914, but it was at the least 
highly satisfactory. 

THE PROSPEROUS TWENTIES 

During the twenties, high levels of investment 
and productivity growth, which delivered stable 
prices and full employment, characterized the 
economy. The output of durable consumer goods, 
which include automobiles, radios, electric cookers, 
and refrigerators, grew at about 6 percent per year. 
Non-durables, examples of which include clothing, 
shoes, and foodstuffs, expanded at a more modest 
3 percent annually. In fact 80 percent of the growth 
in GNP was in the flow of consumer goods of 
which the most important was the automobile. 

Factory sales of all autos rose from 1.9 million 
in 1919 to 4.4 million in 1929, during which period 
U.S. manufacturers built approximately 85 percent 
of the world's passenger vehicles. Even more re- 
markable is the fact that just two companies, Ford 
and General Motors, accounted for 65 percent of all 



U.S. sales. An insignificant industry before 1914, 
motor vehicle production, together with the manu- 
facture of bodies and parts, employed some 447,000 
wage earners in 1929. The nation's largest manu- 
facturing grouping, foundry and machine shop 
products, had 454,000 wage earners. 

Although domestic sales were impressive, the 
instability that is the hallmark of the durable goods 
sector was evident. In 1921, in 1924, and in 1927 
automobile output actually declined. However, 
1928 and the first half of 1929 saw a boom of such 
magnitude that automotive products accounted for 
nearly 17 percent of the total value of fully and 
semi-manufactured goods. This growth was so vig- 
orous that it is difficult to see how it could have 
been sustained. Although the auto producers were 
confident, the sector was highly vulnerable to ad- 
verse changes in demand at home and abroad. 

The contribution of different parts of the econ- 
omy to National Income is revealing. In 1929 the 
largest was manufacturing (25.2%), followed by 
trade (15.5%), finance (14.7%), services (10.1%), 
and agriculture (9.7%). Although manufacturing 
represented the largest part, it is clear that other 
areas of the economy made a great contribution to 
national wealth. This distribution was also reflected 
in employment patterns. In 1929 the nation's facto- 
ries employed 10.7 million workers but large num- 
bers found work outside manufacturing. The 
wholesale and retail trade employed 6.1 million, 
transport and public utilities 3.9 million, services 3.4 
million, finance 1.5 million, and construction 1.5 
million. 

In 1929 manufacturing reached a new peak, 
producing a 38 percent larger physical output than 
in 1919 even though in 1929 factory employment 
was 1.8 percent less. The increase in output was the 
result of a large rise in productivity, which had been 
achieved by judicious investment in, especially, 
electric power and specialised machinery funded 
mainly by high company profits. Within manufac- 
turing some businesses shed labor while others re- 
cruited. Employment expanded in the production 
of electrical machinery (including radios), bakery 
products, furniture, petroleum refining, and motor 
vehicle parts. Contraction occurred in railroad re- 
pair shops, in leather goods, in chemicals, and in 



264 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



ECONOMY 



A M E R I C 



cotton textile factories located in the northeast re- 
gion. During the pre-Depression decade, twenty- 
two states experienced growth in their factory pop- 
ulations. The most vigorous expansion took place 
in South Carolina followed by Tennessee, North 
Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona. A variety of 
industries were responsible for the industrial suc- 
cess of these states and among them were cotton 
goods, knitwear including rayon, lumber, furniture, 
and cigarette manufacture. In contrast, manufac- 
turing employment declined in the Mid-Atlantic, 
New England and West North Central regions. For 
example, traditional manufacturing states, such as 
Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Jer- 
sey, and Pennsylvania, lost jobs. However, growth 
was not entirely confined to the less industrialized 
states; Indiana and Michigan also experienced 
gains. Nor had the absolute dominance of the tradi- 
tional states been broken. In 1929 there were more 
manufacturing wage earners in either New York or 
Pennsylvania than in the entire South Atlantic re- 
gion, though the fastest rates of factory job creation 
were evident in states where the industrial base was 
relatively undeveloped 

Between 1920 and 1929 an additional four mil- 
lion jobs were created outside agriculture. Since 
manufacturing as a whole did not generate any ad- 
ditional positions, where did the expanding labor 
force find work? The biggest increase in employ- 
ment was in the wholesale and retail trade (2.1 mil- 
lion additional jobs) followed by finance, insurance, 
and real estate (0.6 million additional jobs). Vigor- 
ous construction activity also created many new 
employment opportunities. From a low point of 
0.85 million in 1920, the construction industry ex- 
panded to an employment peak of 1.7 million dur- 
ing 1927 and 1928 before declining to 1.5 million in 
the following year. 

The construction industry played a significant 
role in the twenties expansion. A residential build- 
ing boom reached its peak in 1926 but was already 
in decline by 1929. However, aggregate construc- 
tion activity was still buoyant in 1929 as public con- 
struction and non-residential building expanded to 
fill the slack created by the reduction in home 
building. Residential building was strongly influ- 
enced by national prosperity and by the demands 



of a highly mobile population. Migration from rural 
to urban areas, especially to the major metropolises, 
combined with the flexibility of location made pos- 
sible by the automobile helped create a vigorous 
housing market. Auto owners' demands for new or 
improved roads encouraged higher levels of public 
construction. As has been noted, the construction 
industry was a major employer; it was also notori- 
ously prone to booms and slumps. A sharp fall in 
general economic activity would inevitably dent 
private and corporate confidence with serious con- 
sequences for the industry. 

Major changes had been taking place in the 
socio-economic composition of the labor force 
since the beginning of the twentieth century. One 
of the most significant was an increase in both male 
and, especially, female clerical workers, a trend that 
continued into the twenties. This trend reflects a 
general movement of the native born white work- 
force away from heavy, unpleasant, and unskilled 
tasks towards the more professionally rewarding 
and secure white-collar work. 

In 1929, 25.2 percent of the U.S. population 
lived on 6.5 million farms. The farm sector was the 
source of 40 percent of U.S. exports, measured by 
value, and also responsible for the provision of a 
vast range of foodstuffs, feedstuffs, and raw materi- 
als for the domestic market. However, over 2.4 mil- 
lion farms were less than 50 acres, over 700,000 
farmers worked for more than one hundred days 
away from farms that could not support their fami- 
lies, and about half the nation's farms produced no 
appreciable surplus for market. Over 2.6 million 
tenants farmed only rented land and tenancy was 
on the increase. Although some small enterprises 
were profitable, the vast majority were hopelessly 
uneconomic, and the families living on them were 
mired in debt, poverty, poor health, and low levels 
of education. There was a marked difference be- 
tween the major commercial operators, who invest- 
ed in the most up-to-date farm machinery and who 
belonged to effective farm pressure groups and in- 
efficient operators trying to eke out a miserable ex- 
istence on infertile soil. Indeed, in 1929 about one 
million farm families had a net annual income of 
between $100 and $300, far below the sum required 
to avoid poverty. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



265 



ECONOMY 



M E R I C A N 



Given the sharp disparity that existed between 
rural and urban incomes it is not surprising that so 
many Americans migrated to cities. During the 
twenties there was a net movement of approxi- 
mately six million people from the countryside to 
urban centers, in particular to New York, Los Ange- 
les, Chicago, and Detroit where building activity 
was stimulated. The states that lost most residents 
were Georgia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and 
Kentucky. Many African Americans left the racially 
oppressive, low-income South and headed for Chi- 
cago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, 
Washington D.C., and Baltimore. The migration of 
so many Americans during the twenties was bene- 
ficial to the economy, which could no longer de- 
pend on a substantial flow of European immigrants 
as permanent controls on entry were introduced in 
1924. 



1929-1933: THE GREAT SLUMP 

The Depression, which began in the middle of 
1929, hit a booming economy with savage intensity. 
By the time a trough was reached in March 1933, 
manufacturing output had fallen by almost half, 
unemployment, estimated at just over 3 percent in 
1929, had risen to over 25 percent, business profits 
were negative, and investment had fallen to a his- 
toric low. At the same time wholesale prices fell by 
38 percent, bank crises paralysed the financial sys- 
tem and farm income plummeted. This Depression 
embraced industrial and rural America. 

By 1933, some 3.4 million manufacturing jobs 
disappeared, as had 1.4 million in the wholesale 
and retail trades, 688,000 in construction, 567,000 
in services, and 214,000 in finance insurance and 
real estate. Within manufacturing, the durable 
goods sector was most seriously affected and out- 
put declined by 70 to 80 percent and employment 
by 55 percent. Among the industries most seriously 
hit were machinery manufacture, cement, automo- 
biles, bricks, and locomotives. On the other hand, 
the manufacture of shoes, tobacco, foodstuffs, tex- 
tiles, and other non-durables fell by a more modest 
10 to 20 percent and employment by 30 percent. In- 
dustrial structure accounts for the significant re- 
gional variations in unemployment. Factory em- 
ployment was most Depression resistant in the 



South Atlantic states where, unfortunately, there 
were few wage earners. However, the East North 
Central region, which includes the highly industri- 
alized states of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, was very 
badly affected. 

The problems facing the consumer durable sec- 
tor can be illustrated by an examination of automo- 
bile manufacture, which had produced a record 
output of 4.5 million passenger vehicles in 1929. In 
1932, production had collapsed to a mere 1.1 mil- 
lion. Employment had fallen by approximately 45 
percent, but pay cuts and short time working had 
decreased the sector's wage bill by 75 percent. With 
consumer confidence low and the stock of vehicles 
both high and relatively new, further consolidation 
took place in the industry. General Motors, Ford, 
and Chrysler were better able to produce cheap cars 
than small independent producers, many of which 
failed. Of the big three, General Motors was by far 
the most successful, controlling 41 percent of the 
market by 1933 compared to Chrysler's 25 percent 
and the ailing Ford Motor Company, 21 percent. 
Even General Motors suffered a loss in 1932; Ford 
losses were substantial. The decline in auto produc- 
tion had adverse repercussions on a range of indus- 
tries including steel, safety glass, nickel, tin, uphol- 
stery, and wrought iron. However, the manufacture 
and sale of petroleum products held up well; Amer- 
icans bought few new autos, but they continued to 
drive. 

Together with automobile production, con- 
struction had been a mainstay of the twenties econ- 
omy, but the industry now experienced a staggering 
decline. In 1929 there were 509,000 housing starts; 
in 1933 there were 93,000. Low company profits 
and surplus office accommodation led to a contrac- 
tion in commercial construction. Cutbacks in state 
and local spending reduced the road building and 
maintenance program. The collapse in the con- 
struction industry had dire consequences for struc- 
tural steel, plate glass, brick making, and the furni- 
ture industry. Railroads responded to the lack of 
freight business by cutting orders for locomotives 
and cars and, of course, by firing employees. 

When farm prices fell even more steeply than 
those in manufacturing, farm income collapsed. 
The average net farm income fell from $945 in 1929 



Z66 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



ECONOMY 



A M E R I C 



to a mere $304 in 1932. In spite of growing farm 
misery, however, the migratory flow from the coun- 
tryside to the town was reversed. With jobs scarce, 
fewer rural people left for the city and at the same 
time many urban unemployed took part in a "back 
to the land" movement. Returning to family farms, 
or even occupying abandoned farms in order to 
practice subsistence agriculture, was a preferable 
option for many. Some politicians mistakenly saw 
the farm as a sensible solution to mounting unem- 
ployment. However, the lack of urban job opportu- 
nities and a growing rural population ensured that 
underemployment was a persistent feature of life in 
the countryside throughout the thirties. 

When Franklin Roosevelt delivered his inaugu- 
ral address in March 1933 the American economy 
was in deep crisis. Unemployment and farm misery 
were widespread, the financial system was in a state 
of paralysis, and business confidence was at an all 
time low. 

1933-1937: THE RECOVERY 

From March 1933 to July 1937 real GNP grew 
at an impressive 8 percent per annum. At the peak 
of recovery the economy had struggled back to le- 
vels of output and employment that had prevailed 
in 1929. However, this expansion was halted and 
put into reverse temporarily by a sharp recession in 
1937 and 1938, after which GNP resumed its up- 
ward trajectory. 

During the recovery phase the expansion of 
non-durable goods was much greater than that of 
durables. Indeed, by 1937 textiles and cigarettes, 
the latter an exceptionally Depression-proof indus- 
try, had improved upon their pre-Depression out- 
put figures. However, the durable sector lagged, 
sometimes very badly. The output of machinery 
and of iron and steel had only just failed to reach 
1929 levels when the recession struck. The automo- 
bile sector had just exceeded its pre-Depression 
peak in 1937 only to fall spectacularly from it over 
the next year. Meanwhile, construction and related 
industries such as lumber, bricks and furniture con- 
tinued to languish, with late 1920s levels of output 
a distant dream. 

Even by 1937 the manufacturing labor force 
had not recovered to its pre-Depression position in 



New England and in the Mid-Atlantic states. Out- 
side these regions, Illinois and Indiana registered 
modest gains while Michigan recorded a massive 
rise of 27 percent, which the recession of 1937 and 
1938 totally erased. Indeed, the recession had an 
adverse effect on employment everywhere, except 
in the South Atlantic and East South Central re- 
gions, which remained surprisingly buoyant. 

Between 1929 and 1937 the number of manu- 
facturing wage earners expanded by 17.9 percent in 
the South Atlantic region; the figure for the East 
South Central region was 8.4 percent. On average, 
in Virginia and the Carolinas manufacturing wage 
earners grew more numerous by just less than 25 
percent. North Carolina, with cigarette manufac- 
ture and low cost textiles, was the most Depression 
proof state in the nation. Unfortunately the indus- 
tries that displayed the fastest rate of output growth 
during the recovery, that is, after 1933, were not 
major employers. New jobs were created producing 
refrigerators, rayon, glass bottles and jars, tin cans, 
canned fruit, washing machines, and radios, but 
these were industries in which technical progress 
often acted as a barrier to maximizing employment. 
They could not fully compensate for jobs lost since 
1929 in transport and public utilities (550,000), con- 
struction (385,000), and finance real estate and in- 
surance (100,000). The industries most seriously af- 
fected by the economic collapse were among the 
nation's most dominant employers. By contrast, in 
1937 there were 470,000 more jobs in the retail and 
wholesale trade than in 1929, and an additional 
300,000 people worked for the federal government. 

Agricultural income revived from its desperate- 
ly low position during the worst years of the De- 
pression but not to the levels that had prevailed 
during the late twenties. The problem of small inef- 
ficient farms, rural poverty, and a surplus popula- 
tion remained. Migration to urban centers resumed 
as the "back to the land" movement petered out, 
but only on a relatively small scale as the job oppor- 
tunities in cities were so limited. In 1940 virtually 
the same number of people (30.2 million) lived on 
farms as in 1929. Agriculture remained a troubled 
sector. 

It is important to remember that many of the 
structural changes that have been identified as part 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



267 



ECONOMY ACT 



F 



19 3 3 



of the Depression were evident before 1929. Manu- 
facturing employment as a proportion of national 
employment had been declining since 1920. The 
same can be said for mining and agriculture. More 
people took jobs outside the factory and the farm. 
Clerical work and employment in the retail and 
wholesale trades became increasingly attractive. 
Note too the rise of manufacturing in the South. 
We can detect in the 1920s the roots of the structur- 
al revolution, which led, after 1945, to the rise of the 
Sun Belt. 

However, unemployment remained a persis- 
tent problem. Even in 1937 unemployment stood at 
14.3 percent of the labor force, significantly above 
the 1929 level of 3.2 percent. The plight of the job- 
less was made more acute by a change in the age 
structure of the population, which in turn led to a 
substantial increase in the numbers available for 
work. There was also a rise in the numbers of fe- 
males who wanted to work. In 1937 there were as 
many people employed as there had been in 1929, 
but in the meantime an additional six million 
Americans had been added to the labor force. The 
recovery had not created sufficient additional jobs 
to employ all those who wanted to work. It was not 
until 1942 that full employment returned. 

See Also: AGRICULTURE; CAUSES OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION; STOCK MARKET CRASH (1929); 
UNEMPLOYMENT, LEVELS OF. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bernstein, Michael A. The Great Depression: Delayed Re- 
covery and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939. 
1987. 

Bordo, Michael D.; Goldin, Claudia; and White, Eugene 
N., eds. The Defining Moment: The Great Depression 
and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century. 
1998. 

Chandler, Lester V. America's Greatest Depression: 
1929-1941. 1970. 

Engerman, Stanley L., and Gallman, Robert E., eds. The 
Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 
Ill: The Twentieth Century. 2000. 

Fabricant, Solomon. The Output of Manufacturing Indus- 
tries. 1940. 

Fearon, Peter. War, Prosperity, and Depression: The U.S. 
Economy 1917-1945. 1987. 



Smiley, G. The American Economy in the Twentieth Centu- 
ry. 1994. 

Peter Fearon 



ECONOMY ACT OF 1933 

The Economy Act was enacted on March 20, 1933, 
during the so-called First Hundred Days of anti- 
Depression activism by President Franklin D. Roo- 
sevelt's new Democratic administration. It cut $400 
million from federal payments to veterans and $100 
million from the payroll of federal employees. The 
measure reflected the fiscal conservatism of the 
early New Deal and Roosevelt's antipathy to deficit 
spending. 

The legislation was drafted by budget director 
Lewis Douglas, who shared Roosevelt's determina- 
tion to deliver on his 1932 campaign pledge that a 
Democratic administration would balance the bud- 
get. The president was much impressed by Doug- 
las, whom he described as "the real head of the 
Roosevelt cabinet." Both found themselves at odds 
with those Democratic congressmen who worried 
that the bill would alienate the veterans' lobby and 
that federal retrenchment would worsen the De- 
pression. To overcome their opposition, Roosevelt 
delivered a special message to Congress on March 
10 that blamed the Hoover administration's deficit 
budgets for continued economic stagnation and for 
the banking collapse of early 1933. "For three long 
years," he warned, "the federal government has 
been on the road toward bankruptcy." 

Although ninety Democrats broke ranks, the 
measure gained speedy approval in the House on 
March 11 under the skilled parliamentary leader- 
ship of John McDuffie of Alabama. The power of 
the president during this time of unprecedented 
economic crisis was convincingly demonstrated. As 
Representative John Young Brown, a Kentucky 
Democrat, avowed, "I had as soon start a mutiny in 
the face of a foreign foe as start a mutiny today 
against the program of the President of the United 
States." Routine approval later followed in the 
upper house. Nevertheless, the measure was in- 
strumental in prompting the share -the -wealth 



Z68 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



EDUCATION 



campaign launched in 1934 by Senator Huey P. 
Long of Louisiana, who saw the Economy Act as 
evidence of Roosevelt's capture by big business and 
banking interests. 

The Economy Act did not prevent the growth 
of the budget deficit during the early New Deal, but 
it diminished the expansionary effects of new 
spending programs. The $500 million in savings 
that it yielded was precisely the sum that was ap- 
propriated for federal unemployment relief in May 
1933. The legislation was signal proof of the ab- 
sence of influence of the new economics soon to be 
known as Keynesianism on the early New Deal and 
it reflected Roosevelt's initial belief that deficit 
spending was harmful to economic recovery be- 
cause it impaired the restoration of business confi- 
dence. 

See Also: DEFICIT SPENDING; HUNDRED DAYS. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Freidel, Frank. Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New 
Deal. 1973. 

Sargent, James E. "FDR and Lewis Douglas: Budget Bal- 
ancing and the Early New Deal." Prologue 6 (1974): 
33-43. 

Iwan Morgan 



EDUCATION 



In the first years of the 1930s, educators failed to 
recognize the severity of the Great Depression. By 
1932, however, it had become apparent to them 
that the Great Depression was a crisis that would 
have a dramatic impact on the nation's educational 
system. 

One of the most striking ways the Depression 
affected schools was by altering enrollment pat- 
terns. Elementary school enrollment declined as fi- 
nancial necessity forced people to postpone mar- 
riage and children, causing the birth rate to decline. 
By 1940 there were 2.3 million fewer children in the 
nation's primary schools than in 1930. Conversely, 
high school enrollment skyrocketed, jumping from 
4.8 million students in 1930 to 7.1 million by the 



end of the decade. Many young people extended 
their school careers because they could not find 
jobs. Additionally, more stringent child labor and 
mandatory school attendance laws were enacted, 
keeping youths off the job market and inside the 
classroom. 

Although the Great Depression brought chil- 
dren to school, there was less money spent on edu- 
cation. As tax revenues declined, government and 
business leaders argued that schools were too ex- 
travagant and deep cuts were made in education. 
By 1934 the nation's school spending had declined 
by 34 percent from pre-Depression levels. Admin- 
istrators stopped school construction, discontinued 
classes, eliminated teaching positions, and reduced 
salaries. Some of the worst cuts took place in rural 
districts, particularly in the South, which spent the 
least money on education. Arkansas, for example, 
spent only $33.56 per student annually, while New 
York invested $137.55 on each of its pupils. In many 
rural districts the shortage of money led to school 
closures. By 1934 an estimated twenty thousand 
rural schools were forced to close. Other districts 
had to shorten the school year. In the 1933 to 1934 
period, ten rural states reported school years of less 
than three months. 

These cuts hit African -American students par- 
ticularly hard. During the 1930s in the South and in 
most of the rest of the nation, schools were segre- 
gated by race. Schools for black children received 
less money and resources than those attended by 
white children. A survey of educational conditions 
in the South, where most black children lived, 
showed per capita spending on African-American 
students was only $12 per child annually. This was 
a full $32 less than was spent on southern white 
children and $75 less than the national average. 
Many schools for black children were merely run- 
down shacks that did not even have desks. The 
Urban League reported that 230 counties in fifteen 
states had no high school for black students to at- 
tend. 

As school budgets shrank, educators fought 
back. Teachers worked to preserve both their jobs 
and the quality of education. The National Educa- 
tion Association created the Joint Committee on 
the Emergency in Education to raise public aware- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



269 



EDUCATION 




A 7:30 a.m. bus carries the children of migratory cotton pickers from a Farm Services Administration camp to the Eloy district 
school in 1940 in Pinal county, Arizona. National Archives and Records Administration 



ness of the problem and to lobby public officials for 
solutions. Other state and local organizations fol- 
lowed, and by the mid-1930s, thirty-two states had 
increased aid to education. New cost-saving re- 
forms were also enacted. Schools emphasized guid- 
ance programs and grouped students with similar 
abilities so they could be taught more efficiently. 
Additionally, pupils were automatically promoted 
to the next grade level to prevent the added cost of 
having them repeat courses or entire grades. 



Although school leaders remained committed 
to complete local control of schools, they called on 
the federal government to provide aid. They want- 
ed federal dollars, but not federal intervention. 
President Franklin Roosevelt obliged them. His 
New Deal programs provided aid without taking 
control by granting assistance directly to students 
and providing money for capital improvements. 
The National Youth Administration provided poor 
high school and college students with part-time 



270 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



EDUCATION 




The young children of unemployed miners attend a Works Progress Administration nursery school near Scott's Run, West 
Virginia, in 1937. National Archives and Records Administration 



jobs to help them stay in school. Students did cleri- 
cal work, served as teacher and library assistants, 
and worked in school cafeterias. New Deal pro- 
grams also provided free hot lunches to poor chil- 
dren, funded 70 percent of all new school construc- 
tion, and helped build playgrounds and athletic 
fields. 

In addition, Roosevelt created federal programs 
that provided alternatives to schools. These pro- 
grams were primarily designed to provide work for 
the unemployed, but also had educational compo- 
nents. The Civilian Conservation Corps, for exam- 
ple, provided unemployed youths with conserva- 
tion jobs. Participants lived in military style camps, 
where education programs occupied their free time 
and helped them develop work skills. The New 



Deal, moreover, provided education to people that 
schools ignored. Over forty thousand preschool 
children were educated in 1,500 federally operated 
nursery schools. Adult education courses in every- 
thing from vocational training to parenting skills 
were also available through New Deal programs. 

While the New Deal aided schools, it did not 
offset the dramatic impact the Great Depression 
had on student life. Pupils had to adjust to packed 
classrooms, less attention from instructors, crowd- 
ed extracurricular activities, and reduced course of- 
ferings. In some places pupils became so discour- 
aged with the situation that they took action. In 
Chicago and New York students joined their par- 
ents in marches to protest cuts in education. Stu- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



271 



ELDERLY 



IMPACT 



F 



THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



N 



&■ 



V 



,tf 



FOR ADULTS 



AT 



NO CHARGE 




HDULT EDUCHTIDH 

CLASSES 

MANY COURSES -MANY PLACES 

INQUIRE : 1900 ST. CLAIR AVE. 
TEL. CHerry 6566 

WORK PROJECTS RD m I II 1 5TRHT 1 R 



Posters like this one publicized the WPA adult education 
program, which encouraged adults to return to school by 
offering free classes in many subjects. Library of Congress, 
Prints & Photographs Division, WPA Poster Collection 



dents also went on strike when popular teachers or 
administrators were laid off. 

For poor students the school experience created 
anxiety. They felt left out by the materialism of 
school culture. High school students, in particular, 
felt the need to dress in stylish clothes, buy the 
school newspaper, and attend dances, proms, and 
graduations. Poor students felt ashamed when they 
could not afford these things and sometimes re- 
sponded by becoming critical of the elitism and 
snobbery of their classmates. 

School, however, also served as a refuge for 
poor children. They attended classes to get a show- 



er and a hot meal and to warm up in the cold winter 
months. Teachers donated money to provide 
clothes, meals, and glasses to their needy pupils. 
Poor students were also aided by their classmates. 
In Milwaukee, for example, textbook drives were 
held to provide books to students who could not af- 
ford them, and the Washington High School Girls 
club provided no-interest loans to needy members 
so they could buy school supplies. These efforts, 
along with the New Deal programs, helped schools 
and their students endure one of the most difficult 
periods of the twentieth century. 

See Also: CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS, IMPACT 
OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; FAMILY AND 
HOME, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 
ON. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ashby, LeRoy. "Partial Promises and Semi-visible Youth: 
The Depression and World War II." In American 
Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, 
edited by loseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner. 1985. 

Cohen, Robert, ed. Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Chil- 
dren of the Great Depression. 2002. 

Elder, Glen H., Ir. Children of the Great Depression: A So- 
cial Change in Life Experience. 1974. 

Fass, Paula S. "Without Design: Education Policy in the 
New Deal." American Journal of Education 9 (1982): 
36-64. 

Fass, Paula S. Outside Ln: Minorities and the Transforma- 
tion of American Education. 1989. 

Hawes, loseph M. Children between the Wars: American 
Childhood, 1920-1940. 1997. 

Krug, Edward A. The Shaping of the American High School, 
Vol. 2: 1920-1941. 1972. 

Moreo, Dominic W. Schools in the Great Depression. 1996. 

Tyacke, David; Robert Lowe; and Elisabeth Hansot. Pub- 
lic Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and 
Recent Years. 1984. 

Daryl Webb 



ELDERLY, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON THE 

The perception that the elderly constitute a unique 
group with special needs is a relatively recent his- 



in 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ELDERLY 



I M P A C E E E 



G R E A E 



DEPRESSION 



N 



torical phenomenon. Widespread concern for the 
well-being of the elderly became prevalent by the 
late nineteenth century, as social reformers began 
to warn that industrialization and urbanization had 
negatively affected the status and welfare of many 
older Americans. Although the elderly were, in fact, 
overrepresented among the population of the era's 
almshouses and poorhouses, these fears were gen- 
erally exaggerated. Rather, most older Americans at 
this time managed to accumulate sufficient re- 
sources, often supplemented by the assistance of 
supportive kin networks, to live their final years rel- 
atively comfortably. This was, however, far more 
the case for white, higher income people than for 
minorities and the poor. Nor is this to suggest that 
the elderly as a group were affluent, but that there 
is little evidence to suggest that their standard of 
living was deteriorating. The historical record also 
discloses that despite continued lobbying efforts by 
reformers and social workers, few programs de- 
signed to help the elderly poor were enacted during 
the early decades of the twentieth century. 

This situation changed dramatically during the 
1930s. Although the Great Depression had a pro- 
found impact on all segments of society, the eco- 
nomic downturn and subsequent social upheaval 
presented unique problems for elderly Americans. 
As the economic crisis worsened, many employers 
were reluctant to rehire or keep on older workers. 
Widespread bank failures often wiped out savings 
accumulated over a lifetime of labor. At a time 
when home ownership was a long and arduous 
process for working-class families, poor employ- 
ment prospects and the loss of savings brought the 
threat of foreclosure. Given the inability of private 
and public aid organizations to provide adequate 
relief, those in need were forced to rely on the assis- 
tance of friends and relatives. Even those older 
Americans who managed to avoid the immediate 
impact of the Depression often had less fortunate 
kin, resulting in the day-to-day stress of providing 
economic assistance or sharing living space. 

The magnitude of the crisis eventually induced 
a governmental response. In addition, a huge 
movement calling for generous old-age pensions 
arose around an idea put forth by Dr. Francis 
Townsend. By 1934 a majority of state governments 



MORE SECURITY FOR 
THE AMERICAN FAMILY 




FOR INFORMATION WRITE OH CALL AT THE NEAREST FIELD OFFfCE OF THE 

SOCIAL SECURITY BOARD 



As this Depression-era poster testified, the Social Security 
Board promised to help elderly Americans by providing 
insurance to those reaching retirement age. Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt Library 



had enacted old-age assistance programs based on 
economic need. Eventually all states provided for 
elderly relief, which was subsidized by the federal 
government under the Social Security Act of 1935. 
This groundbreaking legislation also established 
Social Security Old Age Insurance, which provided 
retirement benefits (based on employee and em- 
ployer contributions) to eligible workers when they 
reached the age of sixty-five. Unfortunately, there 
were no provisions for workers retiring before 1935, 
and the original program covered less than half of 
the American labor force, such predominantly mi- 
nority occupations as farm and domestic work hav- 
ing been excluded in order to secure the backing of 
southern Democrats. In addition, significant bene- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



273 



ELDERLY 



IMPACT 



F 



THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



N 




Many elderly Americans traveled with their families in search 
of work during the Bust Bowl years. This grandmother was 
living in California's Kerns County migrant camp in 1936. 
She cared for her two grandsons while their parents worked in 
the fields. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, 
FSA/OWI Collection 



fits would only accrue over a lifetime of work; thus 
older workers still in the labor force during the 
1930s would ultimately receive reduced benefits. 
Despite these limitations, the Social Security Act of 
1935 would have important consequences for sub- 
sequent generations of America's elderly. 

Retirement was not uncommon prior to Social 
Security, but it was most prevalent among white- 
collar workers covered by private pension plans. 
For the American working class, industrialization 
generally brought higher standards of living, but re- 
tirement funds were largely dependent on personal 
savings (a significant exception would be Union 
Army veterans covered by Civil War pensions). Be- 
cause of concerns about the stability of private sav- 
ings institutions, many older workers attempted to 
supplement these funds with income derived from 
part-time work as they passed what would today be 
considered retirement age. This practice became 
less common after World War II, and retirement 



became a well-defined life stage characterized by 
leisure activities. Some researchers argue that the 
impact of Social Security has been relatively minor, 
since employee contributions that finance Old Age 
Insurance would have had a comparable effect if in- 
vested in personal savings or private pension plans. 
Nonetheless, the mandatory aspects of Social Se- 
curity — compulsory participation with induce- 
ments to retire at a specified age — have contributed 
to the normalization of retirement. 

Old Age Insurance benefits also helped bring 
about significant changes in the living arrange- 
ments of older Americans. Prior to the twentieth 
century, relatively few formerly married elderly 
maintained independent households — the more 
common pattern was to live with adult children. Al- 
though the trend away from co-residency with 
adult children was underway before the Great De- 
pression, it was most common among middle- and 
upper-class elderly, since establishing and main- 
taining a separate residence is typically more ex- 
pensive than sharing living space with kin. The es- 
tablishment in 1939 of survivor's benefits under 
Social Security had a significant effect on the ability 
of widows to maintain independent households 
after the death of their spouses. A luxury at the be- 
ginning of the twentieth century, residential auton- 
omy increasingly became the cultural norm in the 
decades following World War II. 

Although the Social Security Act of 1935 did 
not provide health care insurance for the elderly, it 
did set a precedent for the establishment of services 
designed to care for the elderly, which was consis- 
tent with the eventual establishment of Medicare in 
1965. Universal health insurance for the elderly, in 
combination with Old Age Insurance and the ex- 
tension of survivor's benefits, reinforced the long- 
term trends in retirement and residential autono- 
my. These social programs also had the secondary 
effect of fostering an increased political awareness 
and influence among older Americans. This is par- 
tially the result of growing numbers — 
approximately 13 percent of the American popula- 
tion was over the age of sixty-five in 1990, com- 
pared to 4 percent a century earlier — resulting from 
increased longevity and the post-baby boom fertili- 
ty decline. But as the magnitude of society's finan- 



m 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ELDERLY, I M P A C E OF THE G R E A E DEPRESSION ON E H E 







Thousands of elderly Americans, like this man photographed by Dorothea Lange near Washington, Pennsylvania, in 1935, lived, 
in extreme poverty during the Depression. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



cial commitment to the elderly has grown, older 
Americans have come to understand that maintain- 
ing these benefits requires an active participation in 
the political process. 

The federal government's commitment to pro- 
vide significant social services represents an impor- 
tant transformation. During the latter half of the 
twentieth century, issues related to the elderly have 
moved from the private to the public sphere as gov- 
ernment has replaced the family as the institution 
most responsible for the well-being of older Ameri- 
cans. Today, most of the elderly maintain emotional 
intimacy with their kin, but these relationships gen- 
erally lack a significant financial or day-to-day care 



component. Although some commentators feel 
that this has contributed to an increasingly seg- 
mented society based on age, the attempt to pro- 
vide for the welfare of the elderly has been success- 
ful as old age in the United States has become 
characterized by residential autonomy and financial 
independence. 

See Also: FAMILY AND HOME, IMPACT OF THE 

GREAT DEPRESSION ON; OLD-AGE INSURANCE; 
SOCIAL SECURITY ACT; TOWNSEND PLAN. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bordo, Michael D.; Claudia Goldin; and Eugene N. 
White; eds. The Defining Moment: The Great Depres- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



275 



[LECTION 



f 



I 9 Z 



sion and the American Economy in the Twentieth Cen- 
tury. 1998. 

Chudacoff, Howard P. How Old Are You?: Age Conscious- 
ness in American Culture. 1989. 

Costa, Dora L. The Evolution of Retirement: An American 
Economic History, 1880-1990. 1998. 

Graebner, William. A History of Retirement: The Meaning 
and Function of an American Institution, 1885-1978. 
1980. 

Haber, Carole, and Brian Gratton. Old Age and the Search 
for Security: An American Social History. 1994. 

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American Peo- 
ple in Depression and War, 1929-1945. 1999. 

Quadagno, Jill S. The Transformation of Old Age Security: 
Class and Politics in the American Welfare State. 1988. 

Van Tassel, David, and Peter N. Stearns, eds. Old Age in 
a Bureaucratic Society: The Elderly, the Experts, and the 
State in American History. 1986. 

Ron Goeken 



ELECTION OF 1928 



The election of 1928 was the last of a Republican era 
extending back to the 1860s. The realignment that 
broke the Republican Party's hold on the electorate 
began only after the advent of the Great Depression 
and was not rooted in the old politics of the 1920s. 
America's Depression thus established the most 
significant discontinuity in American political his- 
tory since the Civil War. 

America's two major parties nominated their 
leading public officials in 1928. President Calvin 
Coolidge's withdrawal from the presidential con- 
test led to the nomination of Herbert Hoover, who, 
as secretary of commerce, had become the driving 
force of domestic policy in the 1920s. The Demo- 
crats nominated Al Smith, the four-term governor 
of New York, who had earned a national reputation 
as a progressive devoted to social welfare and effi- 
ciency in government. 

Al Smith's Catholicism and other social issues 
overshadowed the record and policies of the presi- 
dential candidates. Anti- Catholics launched a cam- 
paign against Smith's candidacy that ranged from 
fulminations against papal control of the country to 



scholarly debates on the relationship between 
church and state in Catholic theology. Protestant 
and Catholic voters split decisively in 1928 as Smith 
benefited from a pro-Catholic and Hoover from an 
anti-Catholic vote. Al Smith's opposition to prohi- 
bition won him support from "wet" voters, while 
"dry" voters united behind Hoover. Religion also 
became tied to race in 1928 as the Republicans 
cracked the solidly Democratic south by exploiting 
Smith's Catholicism, his stand on prohibition, and 
his alleged sympathy for racial equality. 

The combination of economic prosperity, tran- 
quility at home, and stability abroad guaranteed 
Republican success in 1928. Hoover garnered 58 
percent of the popular vote, and his party, with vic- 
tories in both houses of Congress, controlled the 
national government for a third consecutive term. 
The bright spot for Democrats was the election of 
Franklin D. Roosevelt as governor of New York. 
Roosevelt had tried to avoid running in what 
looked to be a bleak year for Democrats, insisting 
on more time for rehabilitation from polio. He suc- 
cumbed, however, to a personal plea from Al 
Smith, who thought Roosevelt would help him win 
votes in upstate New York. 

In the aftermath of the Republican landslide, 
one of Roosevelt's correspondents wrote that no 
Democrat could again be elected president without 
a protracted campaign to educate the public in favor 
of progressive reform. Beginning in 1929, however, 
the Great Depression reeducated the public far 
more quickly than Roosevelt would have dreamed 
possible from the perspective of 1928. Roosevelt, 
who reluctantly attempted a political comeback that 
he had thought was premature, ironically found 
himself ideally situated as governor of New York to 
exploit Hoover's failed response to the challenges 
of the Great Depression. 

See Also: HOOVER, HERBERT; REPUBLICAN PARTY; 
SMITH, ALFRED E. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burner, David. "The Brown Derby Campaign." New York 
History 46 (1965): 356-380. 

Craig, Douglas B. After Wilson: The Struggle for the Demo- 
cratic Party, 1920-1934. 1992. 



Z76 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ELECTION 



F 



I 9 I 




THE Republican Party isn't a "Poor Man's 
Party:* Republican prosperity lias erased thai 
degrading phrase from our political vocabulary. 
The Republican Party is equality's party — 
opportunity's party- — democracy's party* the 
party of national development, not sectional interests — the 
impartial servant of every State and condition in the Union, 
Under higher tariff and lower taxation, America has 
stabilized output, employment and dividend rates. 

Republican efficiency has filled the workingman's 
dinner pail — and his gasoline tank besides — made tele, 
phone, radio .and sanitary plumbing standard household 
equipment. And placed the whole nation in the silk 
stocking class. 

During eight years of Republican management, we 
have built more and better homes, erected more sky- 
scrapers, passed more benefactory laws, and more laws to 
regulate and purify immigration, inaugurated more con- 
servation measures, more measures to standardize and 
increase production, expand export markets, and reduce 
industrial and human junk piles, than in any previous 
quarter century. 

Republican prosperity is^wrTtten on Juliet wage efti» 
velops, written in factory chimney smoke, written on the 
walls of new construction, written in savings bank books, 
written in mercantile balances, and written in the peat 
value of stocks and bonds. 

Republican prosperity has reduced hours and 
increased earning capacity, silenced discontent, put the 
proverbial "chicken in every pot." And a car in every 
backyard, to boot. 

It has raised living standards and lowered living costs. 

It has restored financial" confidence and enthusiasm, 

changed credit from a rich man's privilege to a common 



utility, generalised the use of time-saving devices and re- 
leased women from the thrall of domestic drudgery. 

It has provided every county in the country with its 
concrete road and knitted (he highways of the nation into 
a unified traffic system. 

Thanks to Republican administration, farrner, dairy- 
mati and merchant can make deliveries in less lime and at 
less expense, can borrow cheap money to refund exorbitant 
mortgages, *fx) stock their pastures, ranges and shelves. 

Democratic management impoverished arid demora- 
lized the railroads, led packing plants and tire factories into 
receivership, squandered billions on impractical programs, 

Democratic maladministration issued further billions 
on mere "scraps of paper," then encouraged foreign 
debtors to believe that their loans would never be called, 
and bequeathed to the Republican Party the job of mopping 
up the: mess. 

Republican administration has restored to the railroads 
Solvency, efficiency and par securities* 

It has brought rubber trades through panic and chaca. 
fesmfa 'rlnwa the prices of crude rubber by smaifuaj? 
monopolistic rings, put the tanner's books in the bUck tat 
secured from the European powers formal acknowledg- 
ment of their obligations. 

The Republican Party rests its case on a record of 

stewardship and performance. 

Its Presidential and Congressional candidates stand 
for election on a platform of sound practice. Federal vigi- 
lance, high tariff. Constitutional integrity, the conservation 
of natural resources, honest and constructive measures for 
agricultural relief, sincere enforcement of the laws, and the 
right of all citizens, regardless of faith or origin, to share 
the benefits of opportunity and justice. 



Wages, dividends, progress and prosperity say, 

"Vote for Hoover" 



-n. -- ■ , P'lCMrb^MBifc.riif tMB—Mt— _ Bmtot— Mm. Ib- 



L F. L«tv, . hi id. VpkTsji 



Vu. a. iui.iiil.1 



■jENERAL COMMITTEE 
Bemgt HtntTP.me, Chsiivii_ 



Inc. 4 West Mitt Street 






WkiJ Lett r, SL x<K,ii,hc w™, Cccmt j-witr R, B. ! 

Eflrncnd F- Wis* Altwrt IthKfa 



This advertisement ran in newspapers in October 1928 during Hoover's campaign for president. Four years later, during his 1932 
campaign for reelection, Hoover's opponents tried to discredit him by recalling his alleged promise of "a chicken for every pot." 
Herbert Hoover Library 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



277 



{LECTION 



f 



19 3 



Lichtman, Allan. Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presi- 
dential Election of 1928, rev. edition. 2000. 

Allan J. Lichtman 



ELECTION OF 1930 

The midterm election of 1930 was the first in a four- 
election cycle (1930, 1932, 1934, and 1936) follow- 
ing the 1929 stock market crash that ended an era 
of Republican Party domination, forged the New 
Deal coalition, and established the Democrats as 
the dominant party in the United States. The elec- 
tion was also pivotal to the careers of such impor- 
tant Depression-era politicians as Floyd B. Olson, 
elected Farmer-Labor governor of Minnesota; 
Huey Long, elected democratic Senator from Loui- 
siana while still serving as governor; and Franklin 
D. Roosevelt, whose election to a second term as 
governor of New York made him the front-runner 
for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1932. 

On the eve of the elections of 1930, the editors 
of Business Week warned that the economy was 
"sliding further into the final stages of depression, 
under the weight of still unbroken financial fatal- 
ism, business inertia, and popular fear." Predict- 
ably, voters punished the party in power. Republi- 
cans lost a net of more than fifty House seats, eight 
Senate seats, six governor's mansions, and at least 
one chamber of the legislatures in five states. With 
stunning ideological precision, voters rebuked the 
conservative economic consensus of the 1920s by 
dismissing dozens of conservatives, but not a single 
progressive Republican from Senate and House 
seats. Although it appeared after the election that 
Republicans would narrowly hold both chambers of 
Congress, special elections gave Democrats a nar- 
row majority in the new House, while Republicans 
clung to a single vote margin in the Senate. 

The 1930 elections marked a new era in Ameri- 
can politics as a revived Democratic Party launched 
the permanent campaign that continued for the 
four years between presidential elections, with no 
deference paid to the incumbent president. The 
Democratic National Committee set up the first en- 
during national party publicity bureau. Under the 



direction of journalist Charles Michelson, it laid 
down a barrage of anti-Hoover propaganda that 
staggered an administration unprepared for inces- 
sant political war. Still, the Republican Party suf- 
fered relatively modest losses for the party holding 
the White House in a slumping economy. And Re- 
publicans still led Democrats by large margins in 
the party affiliations of registered voters. The most 
optimistic of Republicans believed that both the 
Depression and their political fortunes had reached 
rock bottom and would turn upwards during the 
next two years. But history was not to vindicate 
their belief that by 1932 a revived economy would 
return Americans to their senses and restore the 
nation's normal Republican majority. 

See Also: DEMOCRATIC PARTY; HOOVER, HERBERT; 
LONG, HUEY P.; OLSON, FLOYD B.; REPUB- 
LICAN PARTY; ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Lichtman, Allan J. "Critical Election Theory and the Re- 
ality of American Politics, 1916-1940." American 
Historical Review 81 (1976): 317-351. 

Mayer, George H. The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson. 
1951. 

Williams, T. Harry. Huey Long. 1970. 

Allan J. Lichtman 



ELECTION OF 1932 



The presidential election of 1932 marked a turning 
point in United States political and economic histo- 
ry. The Democratic Party, reduced to minority sta- 
tus following the Civil War and particularly after the 
financial panic of 1893, emerged as the nation's 
majority party with the ushering in of the New 
Deal. The transition from the Herbert Hoover ad- 
ministration to the Franklin D. Roosevelt adminis- 
tration also witnessed the appearance of a peace- 
time activist central government in response to the 
crisis brought on by the Great Depression. 

HOOVER'S VULNERABILITIES 

A successful mining engineer, Herbert Hoover 
had made his reputation as a humanitarian when 



Z78 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ELECTION OF I 9 3 I 




franklin D. Roosevelt (in car, left) and his running mate, John Nance Garner, campaign in Peekskill, New York, in August 1932. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



he served as head of Belgian relief during World 
War I, and later as food administrator for President 
Woodrow Wilson after the United States entered 
the war. At war's end, both major parties consid- 
ered him a presidential prospect. Hoover identified 
himself as a Republican and served as secretary of 
commerce from 1921 to 1929 during the Warren 
Harding and Calvin Coolidge administrations. 
Hoover turned the Department of Commerce into 
a force for rationalizing the nation's economy 
through standardization and the elimination of 
waste, as well as by the promotion of cooperative 
activity among corporations, farmers, and trade as- 
sociations. 



Hoover's success as an administrator won him 
the Republican presidential nomination and victory 
over Alfred E. Smith in 1928 in a decade that valued 
business acumen; yet, Hoover's earlier accomplish- 
ments condemned him to criticism as president in 
light of his inability to counter the economic col- 
lapse. By the winter of 1932 to 1933, at least 25 per- 
cent of the nation's workforce was unemployed. 
The causes of the Depression were complex. Trade 
was stifled by a high tariff system and other protec- 
tionist mechanisms designed by European powers 
in order to hoard gold and hard currencies and to 
foster domestic employment. The Hawley-Smoot 
tariff, signed by Hoover in 1930, further curbed in- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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ELECTION 



F 



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ternational trade. On the domestic front, expressed 
in later (Keynesian) terms, the economy was crip- 
pled by demand deficiency, indicating the inability 
of consumers' income to absorb the output of in- 
dustry. Once the Depression struck, a misguided 
effort by the Hoover administration and the Federal 
Reserve System to maintain the dollar based on its 
gold value led to the final and most devastating 
stage of the economic collapse — a massive defla- 
tion that weakened a fragile banking system. 

Revisionist historians and economists since the 
1960s have attempted to credit Hoover with paving 
the way for the interventionist state, but such a 
view is debatable. Hoover's response to the domes- 
tic Depression was circumscribed by his limited 
view of the presidency, his opposition to intrusion 
by the federal government in the economy, and his 
insistence on community responsibility for the re- 
lief of distress. As an example, the Reconstruction 
Finance Corporation (RFC), legislated early in 1932, 
limited its activities to loans made for self- 
liquidating public works; designed to pump liquidi- 
ty into the banking system, RFC lending absorbed 
the soundest assets of banks, weakening their capi- 
tal structures. When public revenues fell and defi- 
cits grew during the 1931 to 1932 period, Hoover 
and his treasury secretary, Ogden L. Mills, sought 
cuts in expenditures and secured passage of the 
1932 Revenue Act, which increased tax levels virtu- 
ally to wartime rates, a move that had a negative 
impact on both consumption and investment. 



THE NOMINATION OF ROOSEVELT 

Reelection to a second term as governor of New 
York in 1930 put Franklin D. Roosevelt in the posi- 
tion of front-runner for the Democratic Party nomi- 
nation. He had established himself as a progressive, 
and there was "magic" in the Roosevelt name. In 
his quest for the nomination, Roosevelt put togeth- 
er a political team made up of Louis M. Howe, a 
one-time journalist who devoted much of his life to 
securing the White House for Roosevelt, and James 
A. Farley, an affable Catholic who could appeal to 
the party's Smith faction. Farley's principal task was 
recruiting delegates for the nomination, especially 
in the western states, and managing the Roosevelt 
fortunes at the Chicago nominating convention. 



But there were obstacles en route to the nomi- 
nation. Roosevelt had been crippled by polio, and 
rumors circulated regarding his physical and men- 
tal capacities. Party conservatives, led by the finan- 
cier Bernard Baruch, viewed Roosevelt as a light- 
weight, susceptible to control by radicals, a view 
widely circulated by the newspaper columnist Wal- 
ter Lippmann. A Roosevelt nomination was op- 
posed as well by the Du Pont family of Delaware, 
anti-statists who funded and controlled the party 
machinery through the national chairman, John J. 
Raskob, and its executive director, Jouett Shouse, 
and feared federal intrusion into their business em- 
pire. 

In the early stages of the Chicago convention, 
dark-horse hopefuls banded together in a stop- 
Roosevelt coalition managed by Baruch. The Du 
Pont group looked to Al Smith, who believed he 
was entitled to a second chance at the White 
House, and to Newton D. Baker, Woodrow Wil- 
son's secretary of war. In addition, William Gibbs 
McAdoo, Wilson's son-in-law and wartime admin- 
istrator of the railroads, enjoyed considerable sup- 
port in the Bible belt. The coalition's hopes depend- 
ed on the two-thirds rule, which required that a 
candidate receive a two-thirds proportion of dele- 
gates to secure the nomination; the anti-Roosevelt 
coalition believed that a stalemate would produce 
a compromise (conservative) candidate, likely 
Baker. These aspirations were dashed when McA- 
doo abandoned the coalition, and John Nance Gar- 
ner of Texas, speaker of the House of Representa- 
tives, relinquished his favorite son status and 
shifted that state's delegation to Roosevelt. Garner 
was determined to avoid repetition of the 1924 con- 
vention deadlock that nearly destroyed the party. 
Roosevelt was nominated on the fourth ballot and 
chose Garner as his running mate. 

In his acceptance speech, Roosevelt pledged "a 
new deal for the American people." The term ini- 
tially signified a shift away from the party's domi- 
nation by big businessmen in the 1920s and to- 
wards farmers, labor, and small entrepreneurs. The 
expression, popularized in the press, came to en- 
compass Roosevelt's domestic program. 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ELECTION 



E 



I 9 3 I 



THE CAMPAIGN 

In the spring of 1932, Roosevelt had been per- 
suaded by a long-time political adviser, Judge Sam- 
uel I. Rosenman, that his experience as governor 
had not prepared him or the Albany team for meet- 
ing the Depression crisis. The result was recruit- 
ment of the Brains Trust, headed by Raymond 
Moley, a Columbia University political scientist. 
Gifted at speech drafting, Moley proved capable as 
well of assimilating memoranda on economic and 
social issues. During the primary campaign, Roose- 
velt and Moley collaborated in key addresses begin- 
ning with the "forgotten man" speech, in which 
they pointed to massive urban unemployment and 
the impoverishment of rural Americans and 
claimed that no nation could endure half boom, 
half broke. In Saint Paul, Minnesota, they chal- 
lenged party conservatives by affirming a "concert 
of interests," or the interdependence of society's 
components. 

Catch-phrases and generalizations, while polit- 
ically appealing, were no substitute for a substan- 
tive program designed to tackle the Depression's 
causes and consequences. Thus, the Moley memo- 
randum of May 15, 1932, delineated a program re- 
quiring expanded federal functions. Excess corpo- 
rate profits, a result of improved machinery, 
management, and labor productivity, needed to be 
taxed and diverted to labor. A proposed public- 
works relief package of $2.6 billion went well be- 
yond Hoover's estimate of some $1.1 billion. Public 
works would be funded in part by an emergency 
budget, which Roosevelt later used as a fig leaf to 
claim budget balance for ordinary expenditures. 
Provision of unemployment and old-age insurance 
would cushion the economy and individuals 
against future downturns. Furthermore, the col- 
lapse of security values, market manipulation by 
pools, and the issuance of worthless paper required 
the divorce of commercial banking from investment 
banking and the regulation of securities issues and 
exchanges. 

Given the range of expertise involved in these 
and other problems, Moley recruited two col- 
leagues, Rexford Guy Tugwell and Adolf A. Berle, 
Jr., to form the original Brains Trust. Tugwell, an ex- 
pert in agrarian issues, entered the picture on the 



basis of Roosevelt's conviction that the farm de- 
pression of the 1920s left farmers unable to meet 
their debts and thus unable to consume the output 
of industry. Roosevelt was also aware that a perma- 
nent Democratic Party majority required that the 
depressed Midwest be persuaded to detach itself 
from its traditional Republican Party moorings. 
Tugwell urged the candidate to consider acreage 
controls or the tailoring of farm output to meet 
market demand. Once farmers voted for acreage al- 
lotment, subvention would be provided by a tax 
levied on processors, superseded later by direct 
government payments. Berle, author of the classic 
Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), sug- 
gested use of the credit of the United States to sal- 
vage farm and urban mortgages, a principle soon 
applied to the banking system. His main thesis, that 
of business accountability, found expression in the 
Commonwealth Club Speech, delivered by Roose- 
velt in San Francisco during the campaign. 

On September 12, 1932, one of history's most 
formidable political campaigners boarded the Roo- 
sevelt Special for a rail tour of the Midwest and Pa- 
cific Coast states. Roosevelt's love of the hustings 
and approbation of the crowds aside, the Demo- 
cratic candidate wanted to demonstrate his physical 
capacity for the nation's highest office. In the pro- 
cess, he planned to enunciate a broad outline of his 
plans for meeting the Depression and to offer hope 
for the future. At a small Missouri town, a tiny el- 
derly woman wearing a faded black dress, a bou- 
quet of flowers in hand, pressed towards Roosevelt: 
"Pound Hoover," she shouted as she presented her 
gift, "Pound him hard!" 

At Topeka, Kansas, based on the input of Tug- 
well and Milburn L. Wilson, an agrarian economist, 
Roosevelt proclaimed the need for a better eco- 
nomic balance between rural and industrial in- 
comes, which would require federal planning for 
control of the farm surplus. At Portland, Oregon, 
Roosevelt expressed approval of the development 
of the public power potential of the nation's great 
river valleys, a program favored by Republican pro- 
gressives who had sought federal development of 
Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a scheme Hoover had re- 
jected because of his opposition to public owner- 
ship of generating facilities and the sale of electrici- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



Z81 



ELECTION 



F 



I 9 3 Z 



ty in competition with private utilities. Roosevelt 
also proposed the use of Muscle Shoals as a yard- 
stick for measuring rates levied by holding compa- 
nies, which he regarded as too high, and the regu- 
lation of capital issues and interstate rates by the 
Federal Power Commission. In time, he hoped, the 
Tennessee Valley model would be applied to the 
Columbia River Valley and other watershed areas. 

Roosevelt's Commonwealth Club Address in 
San Francisco constituted his most important state- 
ment on business-government relations. Just as the 
Declaration of Independence called for restraint on 
the excesses of government, Roosevelt argued that 
the time had arrived to impose similar restraints on 
business. Private economic power, he asserted, had 
become a public trust. This development necessi- 
tated a new constitutional order consisting of a bet- 
ter economic balance, better distribution of pur- 
chasing power, restored wages, and the end of 
unemployment. He hoped that business would put 
its house in order; otherwise government would in- 
tervene to attain these ends. 

On October 19th in Pittsburgh, Ohio, Roose- 
velt pledged, on the insistence of party conserva- 
tives led by Baruch, to restore a balanced federal 
budget. Fiscal prudence was widely regarded as 
necessary to sustain business confidence in the pre- 
Keynesian era. In reality, the Roosevelt peacetime 
budgets were never balanced as a result of declining 
revenues and the demands of relief and public 
works. 

The Hoover campaign proved ineffective; the 
incumbent was unpopular, overworked, and a poor 
public speaker. The president believed he was en- 
gaged in a nonpartisan effort to salvage the Ameri- 
can system, which, in his view, was embodied in 
limited government, voluntarism, and freedom 
from federal economic interference in the market- 
place. In his August 11 speech accepting the nomi- 
nation in Washington, D.C., Hoover expressed his 
view that the Depression originated in Europe and 
was beyond his control. He did not gloss over his 
fundamental conviction that the powers of the fed- 
eral government should be limited even during 
times of Depression. He opposed "haphazard ex- 
perimentation" or reliance on a state -directed so- 
cial and economic system, which he equated with 
tyranny. 



At New York's Madison Square Garden on Oc- 
tober 31, with defeat at the polls imminent, Hoover 
claimed that his opponent's program would under- 
mine the nation's basic institutions because it pro- 
posed the enlargement of the federal bureaucracy, 
which would extend its reach into every corner of 
American society. Roosevelt, he believed, promised 
a radical departure from the nation's foundations, 
threatening suffocation of free speech and free en- 
terprise. Short-term, Hoover underestimated the 
depth and persistence of the Depression; long- 
term, he warned of the potential excesses of a bu- 
reaucratic welfare state. 



THE ELECTION 

Voters had a clear choice between two ap- 
proaches for resolving the economic crisis. Hoover 
preferred reliance on individual effort, buttressed 
by private charities and local and state government. 
Roosevelt pledged that the federal government 
would assume responsibility for recovery and social 
sustenance. On election day, November 8, 1932, 
voters chose the latter option, expressing their ac- 
ceptance of the interventionist state. Roosevelt won 
472 electoral votes (42 states); Hoover won 59 elec- 
toral votes (6 states). The popular vote for Roosevelt 
was 22,809,638 (57.4%), for Hoover 15,758,901 
(39.7%). 

Roosevelt's sizable victory represented a sea 
change in American politics, for Hoover had won 
60.4 percent of the popular vote only four years ear- 
lier. While Democratic candidates for the presiden- 
cy could usually rely on the South, Alfred E. Smith's 
unsuccessful effort in 1928 nevertheless brought 
first-time immigrant, Catholic, and urban workers 
into the fold. As a result, Roosevelt bested Hoover 
in all but one of the nation's major urban centers, 
establishing the basis for a long-term New Deal 
majority. The farm depression cut into traditional 
Republican majorities in the western states. Roose- 
velt's buoyant personality also determined the final 
outcome. Hoover's voting strength was concentrat- 
ed in the New England states, a Republican bastion, 
where he won 48.4 percent of the vote, and in the 
middle Atlantic region, where he won 45.4 percent 
of the vote. The Democratic Party won 310 seats in 
the House of Representatives, as opposed to 117 for 



Z8Z 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ELECTION 



F 



1 9 3 A 



the Republicans and 5 for minority parties. The 
Senate vote gave the Democrats a clear majority — 
sixty Democratic seats to thirty-five Republican and 
one Farmer-Laborite. 

Third party hopefuls offered no effective chal- 
lenge to the major party candidates, winning only 
1,163,181 votes, or 3 percent of the total cast. The 
largest proportion by far, 872,840 ballots, went to 
Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party candidate. 
Thomas was a minister and one-time settlement 
house worker who exemplified the party's depar- 
ture from its radical working-class origins. By 1932, 
the Socialists depended for their support on intel- 
lectuals, reform-minded ministers, well-educated 
middle -class liberals, the Jewish leadership of the 
major garment workers' unions, and a sprinkling of 
auto workers. While vague on the issue of public 
ownership of basic industries, Thomas ran on a 
platform of massive federal funding for relief and 
public works, old-age pensions and unemployment 
insurance, government aid to farmers and home- 
owners, and minimum wage legislation, a program 
that was soon subsumed by the New Deal. 

The Communist Party candidate, William Z. 
Foster, secured only 103,000 votes, hardly more 
than the Prohibition Party candidate. Riven by fac- 
tionalism, unwilling to compromise with "social 
fascists" (meaning democratic socialists and those 
who held that capitalism was susceptible of re- 
form), the Communist Party's chief support came 
from foreign-born workers in New York City and 
Chicago and exploited southern textile workers 
seeking unionization of the mills. Foster's cam- 
paign, based on the overthrow of capitalism as an 
exploitative system, pictured Hoover and Roosevelt 
as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. A centrist society 
opted for capitalism's reform. 

See Also: BRAIN(S) TRUST; GARNER, JOHN NANCE; 
HOOVER, HERBERT; NEW DEAL; ROOSEVELT, 
FRANKLIN D. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burner, David. Herbert Hoover: A Public Life. 1979. 

Farley, James A. Behind the Ballots: The Personal History 
of a Politician. 1938. 

Fausold, Martin L. The Presidency of Herbert C. Hoover. 
1985. 



Freidel, Frank B. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vol. 3: The Tri- 
umph. 1956. 

Meyers, William Starr, ed. The State Papers and Other 
Public Writings of Herbert Hoover, Vol. 2: October 1, 
1931, to March 4, 1933. 1934. 

Moley, Raymond. After Seven Years. 1939. 

Robinson, Edgar E. They Voted for Roosevelt: The Presiden- 
tial Vote, 1932-1944. 1947. 

Rollins, Alfred B., Jr. Roosevelt and Howe. 1962. 

Rosen, Elliot A. Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust: 
From Depression to New Deal. 1977. 

Rosenman, Samuel I, compiler. The Public Papers and Ad- 
dresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vol. 1: The Genesis of 
the New Deal, 1928-1932. 1932. 

Rosenman, Samuel I. Working with Roosevelt. 1952. 

Shannon, David. The Socialist Party of America: A History. 
1955. 

Sternsher, Bernard. "The Emergence of the New Deal 
Party System." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 
(summer 1975): 127-150. 

Tugwell, Rexford G. The Brains Trust. 1968. 

Elliot A. Rosen 



ELECTION OF 1934 



The election of 1934 took place during the early 
stages of the electoral realignment of the 1930s. 
This basic change in national voting behavior 
brought about the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt 
in 1932 for the first of four times, Democratic con- 
trol of the United States Congress, and the creation 
of a Democratic majority or plurality in the elector- 
ate. The "Roosevelt Revolution," to use Samuel Lu- 
bell's term, ended a Republican-dominated era that 
dated back to the 1890s. 

The realignment process probably began in the 
mid-term election of 1930, when the impact of the 
Great Depression first began to influence the politi- 
cal process. In that election Democrats gained con- 
trol of the House of Representatives for the first 
time since the election of 1916. In the Senate, where 
only one-third of the membership was up for elec- 
tion, Republicans maintained the thinnest of mar- 
gins for one more Congress despite the election of 
eight new Democrats. It was the first of a series of 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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[LECTION 



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19 3 4 



Democratic victories that established Democratic 
control of both houses of the United States Con- 
gress with only a few exceptions until the final dec- 
ades of the twentieth century. In his first election, 
in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated the incum- 
bent President Herbert Hoover with 57.4 percent of 
the popular vote, and the Democrats won substan- 
tial majorities in the House of Representatives and 
the Senate. Probably any one of the leading Demo- 
cratic candidates for the nomination in 1932 could 
have defeated Hoover, given the severity of the 
economic collapse, so it is not clear that a Demo- 
cratic realignment had in fact occurred at that point. 
As the authors of The American Voter have suggest- 
ed, if Roosevelt and the New Deal program had 
failed to win the support of a substantial portion of 
the electorate by the mid-1930s, voter behavior 
could have reverted to the voting patterns of the 
1920s (Campbell et al. 1960). In other words, a per- 
manent realignment of the electorate depended 
upon the success of Roosevelt's administration and 
a series of Democratic victories to persuade voters 
to repeatedly vote Democratic and begin to think of 
themselves as Democrats. 

Much depended, then, upon the success of 
Roosevelt's New Deal. Beginning immediately 
upon his inauguration, Roosevelt led the Congress 
in the enactment of an unprecedented flood of leg- 
islation to deal with the Depression. This list in- 
cluded the Emergency Banking Act, the Agricultur- 
al Adjustment Act, the Civilian Conservation Corps 
Reforestration Act, the act that created the Tennes- 
see Valley Authority, the National Industrial Recov- 
ery Act, and the Federal Emergency Relief Act. At 
its close, precisely one hundred days after it first 
met, the first Roosevelt Congress had enacted more 
important legislation in a shorter time period than 
any Congress in U. S. history. 

The election of 1934 was the first national elec- 
tion held after the passage of the legislation of the 
hundred days. It was and still is a rule of U. S. poli- 
tics that the party that won the previous presiden- 
tial election should expect to lose congressional 
seats in the following mid-term election, but in 
1934 the Democratic Party substantially increased 
its majority in both the House of Representatives 
and the Senate. In the Congress elected in 1934, 



Democrats added to their already overwhelming 
majority in the Senate with a net increase of nine 
seats. Republicans actually lost ten seats — nine to 
the Democrats and one to Wisconsin Senator Rob- 
ert M. LaFollette, Jr., who, along with his brother 
Philip LaFollette, broke with the Republican orga- 
nization to form the Progressive Party. Thus the 
party distribution in the Senate when the 75th Con- 
gress met in 1935 was sixty-nine Democrats, twen- 
ty-five Republicans and one Progressive. 

Democratic victories in the Senate were fo- 
cused in the Northeast (Connecticut, New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island), the Midwest (In- 
diana and Ohio) and the border states (Maryland, 
Missouri, and West Virginia). Many of the new 
Senate Democrats elected in 1934 were northern 
liberals eager to add their support to Roosevelt and 
the New Deal, including Joseph F. Guffey, the first 
Democrat from Pennsylvania to serve in the Senate 
since 1881. Guffey would become a loyal New 
Dealer and the cosponsor of the Guffey-Snyder Bi- 
tuminous Coal Conservation Act of 1935, one of 
several New Deal laws struck down by the Supreme 
Court in 1936. The group also included Missouri 
Senator Harry S. Truman, who would become vice 
president in 1944 and president upon the death of 
Roosevelt in 1945. 

Results of the election of 1934 in the House of 
Representatives were similar. In the 75th House, 
Democrats had a majority of 319 seats. The Repub- 
licans controlled 103 seats, and there were three 
members of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and 
seven Wisconsin Progressives. This total represent- 
ed a net Democratic increase of eight seats. The pri- 
mary source of new seats was Pennsylvania, where 
the number of Democratic seats increased by 
twelve. Excluding changes resulting from vacant 
seats, Democrats also gained two seats in Califor- 
nia, Connecticut, Illinois, and Massachusetts, and 
one in Wyoming. Again excluding vacancies, Re- 
publicans picked up five seats in Michigan and one 
seat in Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Ne- 
braska, and Oregon. The Republicans also won two 
seats in 1934 from the Farmer-Labor Party in Min- 
nesota, but in Wisconsin the Progressive Party cap- 
tured House seats from both major parties — five 
from the Republicans and two from the Democrats. 



ZU 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



[LECTION 



f 



19 3 6 



With a few exceptions, Democratic gains in 1934 
were concentrated in the states with large urban 
populations, and most losses (except those in Mich- 
igan) were in more rural, less populated states. 

In the gubernatorial elections Democratic can- 
didates won elections from Republicans in four 
states (Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, and Penn- 
sylvania), but lost three states to the Republicans 
(Maryland, Michigan and New Jersey). In Wiscon- 
sin the Democratic incumbent lost to Philip LaFol- 
lette, who, having lost a bid for re-election in the 
1932 Republican primary, won on the Progressive 
ticket. The only other successful third-party candi- 
date for governor in 1934 was incumbent governor 
Floyd B. Olson, the Farmer-Labor candidate, who 
was re-elected in Minnesota. In California, Upton 
Sinclair, the author of The Jungle and a lifelong so- 
cialist, also attracted much attention by winning the 
1934 Democratic gubernatorial primary on a pro- 
gram he called End Poverty in California. Sinclair's 
views were far to the left of those of both President 
Roosevelt and the California Democratic organiza- 
tion; failing to get their support, Sinclair lost deci- 
sively to a Republican. Even though the gubernato- 
rial election returns in 1934 could be described as 
a draw, after the election Democratic governors 
controlled the state houses of thirty-eight of the 
forty-eight states and the Republicans controlled 
only eight. 

Many New Deal Democrats concluded from 
the election results that the voting public had re- 
soundingly endorsed the leadership of President 
Roosevelt and the legislation of early New Deal. 
Harry Hopkins, one of the leading figures in the 
Roosevelt administration, summed up the reaction 
of many New Dealers with his often quoted obser- 
vation: "Boys — this is our hour. We've got to get 
everything we want — a works program, social se- 
curity, wages and hours, everything — now or 
never" (Leuchtenburg 1963, p. 117). Most of Hop- 
kins's expectations were realized as the 75th Con- 
gress in 1935 enacted some of the New Deal's most 
significant laws, including the Social Security Act, 
the National Labor Relations Act, and the Emer- 
gency Relief Appropriation Act. 

The election of 1934 was a milestone in the 
voter realignment of the 1930s. Those who voted 



Democratic in 1934 and in the other elections of the 
decade were predominantly new voters concentrat- 
ed in urban, industrial areas. These new Democrats 
were largely working-class, low-income voters — 
many of them first- or second-generation immi- 
grants, in many cases Catholics and Jews from 
southern and eastern Europe. They were among 
those who suffered most from the unemployment 
of the 1930s, and they constituted a major source of 
support that made the Roosevelt Revolution possi- 
ble. 

See Also: DEMOCRATIC PARTY; END POVERTY IN 
CALIFORNIA (EPIC); LA FOLLETTE, PHILIP; LA 
FOLLETTE, ROBERT M, JR.; MINNESOTA 
FARMER-LABOR PARTY; OLSON, FLOYD B.; 
REPUBLICAN PARTY; SINCLAIR, UPTON; 
WISCONSIN PROGRESSIVE PARTY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Andersen, Kristi. The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 
1928-1936. 1979. 

Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Tox. 
1956. 

Campbell, Angus; Philip E. Converse; Warren E. Miller; 
and Donald E. Stokes. The American Voter. 1960. 

Clubb, Jerome M.; William H. Flanigan; and Nancy H. 
Zingale. Partisan Realignment: Voters, Parties and 
Government in American History. 1980. 

Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections, 1975. 

Kennedy, David M. Preedom from Fear: The American Peo- 
ple in Depression and War, 1929-1945. 1999. 

Ladd, Everett C, Jr., and Charles D. Hadley. Transforma- 
tion of the American Party System: Political Coalitions 
from the New Deal to the 1970s. 1978. 

Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 
New Deal, 1932-1940. 1963. 

Lubell, Samuel. The Future of American Politics. 1951. 

Sundquist, James L. Dynamics of the Party System: Align- 
ment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United 
States. 1973. 

Howard W. Allen 



ELECTION OF 1936 



The crushing defeat by Democratic President 
Franklin D. Roosevelt of his Republican challenger 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



285 



ELECTION E 1936 




Banners flew in support of Roosevelt and Garner in Hardwick, Vermont, in September 1936. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



Alfred M. Landon in the presidential election of 
1936 was a watershed in American politics. In polit- 
ical terms, it brought together northern wagework- 
ers and southern racial conservatives in an uneasy 
coalition that was to provide a relatively stable elec- 
toral base for the Democratic Party until the 1960s, 
when disagreements over civil rights, social welfare, 
and the control of organized labor could no longer 
be kept off the national agenda. In ideological 
terms, the election amounted to a referendum on 
whether the new interventionist welfare state 
should replace the laissez-faire state that had domi- 
nated politics since the early twentieth century. In 
class terms, the Democratic and Republican parties 
were more sharply divided on economic and social 
issues than ever before (with the possible exception 
of 1896) and the struggle between the parties was 
often couched in the rhetoric of class conflict, a 
struggle between the wealthier classes and those 



seeking a more just and equitable share of Ameri- 
can economic wealth and power. 



ROOSEVELT AND THE NEW DEAL 
COALITION 

By November 1936, the New Deal had reached 
its high point. Important reform measures had been 
enacted into law, including such landmark legisla- 
tion as the Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933), the 
National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), the Securi- 
ties Exchange Act (1934), the Banking Act (1935), 
the Social Security Act (1935), and the National 
Labor Relations Act (1935). While economic recov- 
ery would prove elusive until the early 1940s, by the 
fall of 1936 Roosevelt could point to the fact that 
nearly six million jobs had been created, industrial 
output had doubled, corporate profitability had 
risen from a $2 billion deficit in 1933 to a $5 billion 
surplus in 1936, and New Deal agencies were well 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



[LECTION 



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19 3 6 



on the way to providing relief and assistance to the 
forty-five million people (35 percent of the popula- 
tion) they were to aid by the end of the decade. 

While scholarly debate has raged about the 
purposes and achievements of the New Deal, the 
American people perceived it as having alleviated 
the worst effects of the Depression. Roosevelt's 
popularity soared and people saw him as a strong 
and compassionate leader, one who genuinely 
cared about their welfare and one who had at- 
tempted to democratize government by employing 
racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in unprece- 
dented numbers. Most importantly, Roosevelt was 
seen as the defender of the common person against 
the selfish and atavistic business community that 
seemed intent on destroying the New Deal's at- 
tempts to help the poor and marginalized. 

Though Roosevelt had come to power in March 
1933 with broad popular support and had attempt- 
ed to forge an alliance that transcended class 
boundaries, by mid-1936 the administration had 
abandoned its conciliatory approach to business 
and adopted a more anti-business, pro-labor orien- 
tation intended to redistribute wealth and power to 
those outside the mainstream of the American 
power structure. The disaffection of business lead- 
ers with the president began with unease over their 
lack of power within the National Recovery Admin- 
istration (NRA) early in Roosevelt's first term, and 
it continued to escalate as Roosevelt rhetorically 
pushed "soak-the-rich" taxation, public utilities re- 
form, and social security legislation. The split be- 
tween Roosevelt and business became an un- 
bridgeable chasm after the labor unrest of 1935 and 
the passage of the National Labor Relations Act 
(also known as the Wagner Act). The Wagner Act 
was particularly odious to business because it pro- 
vided workers with the means of compelling em- 
ployers to recognize unions that had won represen- 
tative elections and it outlawed company unions 
and a number of other unfair labor practices. 

By the 1936 election, therefore, most business 
leaders were firmly committed to a Republican vic- 
tory and provided up to 80 percent of the $8.8 mil- 
lion that Republicans spent on the campaign. 
Prominent business people also supported a variety 
of anti-New Deal organizations, with the du Pont, 



Pitcairn, Morgan, Rockefeller, and Hutton groups 
providing 90 percent of their funding. The du Pont 
family alone provided 25 percent of the funding for 
the most prominent anti-Roosevelt organization, 
the American Liberty League. Business also funded 
the attempts of dissident conservative Democrats, 
who formed the National Jefferson Democrats in 
August 1936, to unseat Roosevelt. 

Roosevelt wished to take full electoral advan- 
tage of these class antagonisms, and his campaign 
staff was directed to focus attention on symbols of 
corporate wealth and privilege rather than the Re- 
publican Party itself. Roosevelt mentioned the 
Democratic Party by name no more than three 
times throughout the campaign, and he supported 
progressive candidates such as Senator George 
Norris of Nebraska even when it meant supporting 
Republicans over Democrats. In campaign speech- 
es across the nation, Roosevelt trumpeted the 
achievements of the New Deal and denounced the 
shortsighted and self-seeking "economic royalists" 
in big business, banking, and Republican-owned 
newspapers, who had changed the American econ- 
omy into "privileged enterprise not free enter- 
prise." Roosevelt's rhetoric indicated that he was 
willing to use the power of the federal government 
to protect ordinary Americans against the "eco- 
nomic tyranny" of wealthy business leaders. 

As part of his winning electoral strategy, Roo- 
sevelt institutionalized the "New Deal coalition" 
that had begun to emerge as early as 1928. By the 
presidential election of 1936, the Democratic 
Party's electoral base rested largely upon the sup- 
port of the "Solid" South, northern cities, immi- 
grants, African Americans, ethnic and non- 
Protestant religious groups, women, working peo- 
ple, and organized labor. The shift in African- 
American allegiance from the Republicans to the 
Democrats was particularly significant because 
their migration from the South had increased their 
political power in northern cities. The move of or- 
ganized labor into the Democratic camp was also 
momentous. Previously constrained by a hostile 
state and conservative craft leadership, the dynamic 
and militant leaders of the new industrial unions 
had presided over dramatic increases in union 
membership. They were eager to protect their hard 



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won gains (particularly the Wagner Act) and thus 
became a crucial source of votes, campaign work- 
ers, and finance. Given the hostility of business, 
union campaign contributions were decisive and it 
has been estimated that organized labor provided 
more than $800,000 to Roosevelt's reelection, near- 
ly 16 percent of total Democratic campaign expen- 
ditures. Indeed, in 1936 the Democrats received 
most of their campaign contributions from the 
same place as their votes, namely, the emerging 
New Deal coalition. 



ALF LANDON AND THE REPUBLICAN 
CHALLENGE 

The man given the unenviable task of trying to 
unseat President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 was 
Alfred Mossman Landon, the forty-eight year old 
Republican governor of Kansas. Having narrowly 
won the gubernatorial election in 1932, he was the 
only Republican governor in the nation to win re- 
election in 1934, a fact that immediately propelled 
him into the race for the Republican nomination for 
the presidency. With the newspapers of publisher 
William Randolph Hearst giving him national ex- 
posure, Landon had little difficulty in securing the 
nomination at the Republican National Convention 
in Cleveland, Ohio, in June 1936, and he immedi- 
ately named conservative Chicago publisher Frank 
Knox as his running mate. 

Landon's political and economic views were 
less conservative than the majority in his own party. 
As governor, he had attempted to maintain bal- 
anced budgets while also recognizing the impor- 
tance to his state of the federal money pouring in 
through various New Deal programs, and he had 
spoken in favorable terms about the general pur- 
poses of the New Deal. But Landon's strategic di- 
lemma was how to avoid alienating supporters of 
the New Deal while also projecting a sharply fo- 
cused identity that distinguished him from Roose- 
velt in the eyes of the electorate. Republicans 
thought he would win votes in the farm states of 
the Midwest and hoped that his unpretentious 
down-home style would appeal to voters disillu- 
sioned with the urbane sophistication of Roosevelt. 

At the outset of the campaign, Landon empha- 
sized his more liberal qualities despite the ferocious 



attack launched by the Republican right on the 
New Deal. But as the campaign progressed, Lan- 
don showed that there were limits to his liberalism. 
His campaign speeches raised the terrifying specter 
of government intrusion into private life and at- 
tacked the "communistic" drift of the Roosevelt ad- 
ministration. By October 1936, as opinion polls 
showed Roosevelt gaining a significant lead (with 
the exception of the infamous Literary Digest poll 
that predicted a Landon landslide), Landon's at- 
tacks on the New Deal became increasingly ex- 
treme. However, by then it had became clear that 
Landon's only hope of victory was if third parties 
could attract votes away from the president. 

POLITICAL ALTERNATIVES TO ROOSEVELT 
ON THE LEFT AND RIGHT 

The success of the New Deal in ameliorating 
the worst effects of the capitalist system without 
destroying it had undermined support for parties of 
the left and right who might have expected a politi- 
cal windfall given the economic and social crisis 
generated by the Depression. The Communist 
Party, whose membership grew from seven thou- 
sand in 1930 to nearly 100,000 in 1939, developed 
strong grassroots support during its principled 
struggles for southern textile workers, Appalachian 
mineworkers, and civil rights, as well as through 
the party's involvement in union organizing. But its 
electoral impact was minimal due to internal doctri- 
nal disputes, high membership turnover, and the 
Popular Front strategy adopted in 1936, which 
urged support for liberal and social democratic par- 
ties against the menace of fascism. The Socialist 
Party fared even worse, with membership collaps- 
ing to only 6,500 in 1937 from a high of around 
twenty thousand in 1931, and the party's appeal 
was muted by ideological disputes, lack of a work- 
ing-class base, and its electoral opposition to Roo- 
sevelt. Both parties found that leftist political con- 
victions merged easily with the policies and 
programs of the New Deal, and radicals discovered 
by 1936 that some of their ideological commitments 
could be represented in the new Democratic Party 
coalition. 

Opposition from new domestic demagogues 
was a far more potent electoral force than were the 
traditional parties of the left in 1936, and the Roose- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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velt campaign was deeply concerned about the 
populist appeal of demagogues, such as radio priest 
Father Charles Coughlin, pension movement lead- 
er Francis Townsend, and "Share the Wealth" lead- 
er Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, who had assumed 
leadership of the organization following the assas- 
sination of Senator Huey Long of Louisiana in Sep- 
tember 1935. In June 1936, these forces came to- 
gether to form the Union Party, which nominated 
Representative William E. Lemke of North Dakota 
for the presidency. Despite the Union Party's os- 
tensibly progressive and populist leanings, liberals 
sensed its conservative proclivities and many voters 
were repelled by the party's growing anti-Semitism 
and its vitriolic personal attacks on Roosevelt. Ulti- 
mately, the demagogues were unable to counteract 
the enormous loyalty Roosevelt engendered among 
ordinary voters who had benefited from the New 
Deal. 



ELECTION RESULTS 

Roosevelt's campaign manager Jim Farley had 
predicted that Roosevelt would win every state on 
November 3 except for Maine and Vermont. What 
initially appeared a wildly optimistic prediction 
turned out to be uncannily accurate. Turnout was 
high as 83 percent of eligible voters (around forty- 
six million Americans) cast a ballot, with Roosevelt 
receiving 27,751,841 votes compared to Landon's 
16,679,491. Roosevelt received 60.8 percent of the 
popular vote and the plurality (11,072,350) was the 
largest in presidential election history. This gave 
Roosevelt the largest victory in the electoral college 
(523 to 8) since James Monroe's unopposed reelec- 
tion in 1820. The results were equally convincing in 
the congressional elections, where Democrats won 
large majorities in the Senate (75-16) and the 
House of Representatives (331-88). The third-party 
threat failed to materialize as Union Party candi- 
date William Lemke received only 892,763 votes (2 
percent of the vote), Socialist candidate Norman 
Thomas won 187,342 votes (0.4 percent of the vote, 
down from the 2.2 percent he received in 1932), and 
Communist Party candidate Earl Browder won only 
80,000 votes. 

Furthermore, Roosevelt won 76 percent of 
lower income voters (but only 42 percent of upper 



income voters), 81 percent of unskilled laborers, 80 
percent of union members, 84 percent of relief re- 
cipients, 76 percent of northern African Americans, 
between 70 and 81 percent of Catholics, and 86 per- 
cent of the Jewish vote. Roosevelt ran well in the 
South and West, but for the first time the northern 
cities emerged as the real power brokers in the 
Democratic Party. Roosevelt won 104 of America's 
cities with populations of 100,000 or more; Landon 
won two. The results have been heralded as one of 
the most striking examples of critical realignment in 
the twentieth century, a seismic shift in voting pat- 
terns that redefined the basis of political loyalties 
for a generation. Debate has raged, however, about 
whether the results signify that the Democrats were 
able to convert large numbers of voters from the 
Republican Party or rather that the Democrats were 
able to mobilize many first-time voters, particularly 
in immigrant communities. Whatever the outcome 
of such debates, there can be little doubt that the 
1936 presidential election was a pivotal moment in 
American political history, marking one of the few 
occasions when a coalition of minorities normally 
outside the American power structure was able to 
exert a significant influence on the political process. 

See Also: COMMUNIST PARTY; GARNER, JOHN 
NANCE; LANDON, ALFRED M.; NEW DEAL; 
ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D.; SOCIALIST PARTY; 
UNION PARTY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 
1933-1940. 1989. 

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Tather 
Coughlin, and the Great Depression. 1982. 

Clubb, Jerome M.; William H. Flanigan; and Nancy H. 
Zingale. Partisan Realignment: Voters, Parties, and 
Government in American History. 1980. 

Domhoff, G. William. "The Wagner Act and Theories of 
the State: A New Analysis Based on Class-Segment 
Theory." Political Power and Social Theory 6 (1987): 
159-185. 

Ladd, Everett Carl, and Charles D. Hadley. Transforma- 
tions of the American Party System: Political Coalition 
from the New Deal to the 1970s, 2nd edition. 1978. 

Leuchtenburg, William E. The FDR Years: On Roosevelt 
and His Legacy. 1995. 

Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 
New Deal, 1932-1940. 1963. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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McCoy, Donald R. Landon of Kansas. 1966. 

Manza, Jeff. "Political Sociological Models in the U.S. 
New Deal." Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 
297-322. 

Nardulli, Peter F. "The Concept of a Critical Realign- 
ment, Electoral Behavior, and Political Change." 
American Political Science Review 89 (1995): 10-22. 

Nie, Norman; Sidney Verba; and John R. Petrocik. The 

Changing American Voter. 1979. 

Swenson, Peter. "Arranged Alliance: Business Interests 
in the New Deal." Politics and Society 25 (1997): 
66-116. 

Wald, Kenneth D. Religion and Politics in the United States, 
3rd edition. 1997. 

Webber, Michael J. New Deal Fats Cats: Business, Labor, 
and Campaign Finance in the 1936 Presidential Elec- 
tion. 2000. 

Wolfskill, George. The Revolt of the Conservatives: A Histo- 
ry of the American Liberty League, 1934-1940. 1962. 

Zieger, Robert H. American Workers, American Unions, 
2nd edition. 1994. 

Michael J. Webber 



ELECTION OF 1938 

In the 1938 congressional primaries, President 
Franklin D. Roosevelt sought party realignment 
along ideological lines by advocating the defeat of 
selected conservative Democratic senators and rep- 
resentatives. His efforts largely failed, as conserva- 
tives gained strength in Congress in the 1938 elec- 
tion. 

In 1936 President Roosevelt had won a second 
presidential term by a landslide and had helped the 
Democrats widen their overwhelming congressio- 
nal majorities. He interpreted the outcome as a 
mandate to complete his New Deal reform pack- 
age. In his January 1937 inaugural address, he had 
urged Congress to adopt more comprehensive New 
Deal programs for "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill- 
nourished" Americans. 

The Roosevelt administration entered the 1938 
election campaign on the defensive. During the 
75th Congress, conservative Democrats had 
aligned with Republicans to prevent Roosevelt from 
attaining his New Deal reform programs. The con- 



servative coalition, which protested the expansion 
of federal power and especially executive authority, 
had rejected Roosevelt's U. S. Supreme Court and 
executive reorganization plans and had stalled 
other New Deal reform measures. The economic 
recession of 1937 and 1938 had weakened Roose- 
velt's position further and made his New Deal pro- 
grams more vulnerable to attack. Democrats were 
expected to lose congressional seats as presidential 
parties had done in every off-year election since the 
Civil War except 1902 and 1934. 

ROOSEVELT ANNOUNCES PARTY 
REALIGNMENT PLANS 

President Roosevelt denounced the conserva- 
tive coalition tactics as undemocratic and intolera- 
ble. He considered the 1938 primaries an oppor- 
tune time to remove anti-New Deal Democrats 
from the party and bring conservatives in line with 
the party's national platform. In a June 1938 fireside 
chat, Roosevelt publicly announced his intentions 
to campaign for liberals in selected Democratic 
congressional primaries and inform Americans 
about which candidates supported his New Deal 
programs. He backed twenty-one of the thirty-one 
Democratic senators seeking reelection. The presi- 
dent, who complained that the 75th Congress had 
not fulfilled his party's "uncompromisingly liberal" 
1936 platform, pictured the primaries and elections 
as ideological contests between New Deal liberals 
and anti-New Deal conservatives. As Democratic 
party leader, he declared, "I feel that I have every 
right to speak in those few instances where there 
may be a clear issue between candidates for a Dem- 
ocratic nomination involving those principles, or 
involving a clear misuse of my name." Roosevelt's 
realignment strategy encountered several prob- 
lems. Besides belatedly launching his party realign- 
ment effort, Roosevelt did not define what he 
meant by a conservative or indicate what specific 
strategy he would utilize. White House assistants 
Tom Corcoran, Harold Ickes, and Harry Hopkins 
supported the president's tactics, but other advisors 
dissented. Newspapers accused Roosevelt of at- 
tempting to purge conservative Democrats. The 
president did not organize his strategy well, adopt- 
ing various tactics as he zigzagged across the nation 
by train. 



290 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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Roosevelt targeted for defeat ten conservative 
Democratic senators: Alva Adams of Colorado, 
George Berry of Tennessee, Bennett Champ Clark 
of Missouri, Walter George of Georgia, Guy Gillette 
of Iowa, Augustus Lonergan of Connecticut, Pat 
McCarran of Nevada, Ellison Smith of South Caro- 
lina, Millard Tydings of Maryland, and Frederick 
Van Nuys of Indiana. Political leaders quickly con- 
vinced Roosevelt that four of the targeted candi- 
dates could not be removed. The president did not, 
therefore, intervene in the primaries involving 
Adams, Clark, Lonergan, or McCarran, all of whom 
won party renomination. Several New Deal Demo- 
crats endorsed by President Roosevelt triumphed in 
primaries. Congressman Lister Hill defeated segre- 
gationist J. Thomas Heflin in Alabama, while Sena- 
tor Claude Pepper withstood conservative chal- 
lenger J. Mark Wilcox in Florida. Senate majority 
leader Alben Barkley outpolled conservative gover- 
nor Happy Chandler in Kentucky. Senators Hattie 
Caraway of Arkansas, Robert Bulkley of Ohio, and 
Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma and Representative 
Lyndon Johnson of Texas also won their primaries. 
The president campaigned against New York repre- 
sentative John O'Connor, helping James Fay oust 
the conservative House Rules Committee chair- 



THE 1938 PRIMARIES AND ELECTION 

Roosevelt's party realignment efforts, however, 
suffered setbacks in key midwestern and western 
Senate primaries. The Roosevelt administration 
campaigned in Iowa for liberal congressman Otha 
Wearin against incumbent Guy Gillette, who had 
opposed the president's court plan. Gillette, solidly 
backed by the state party organization, easily with- 
stood Wearin's challenge. The Indiana Democratic 
party organization could not find a New Dealer to 
unseat the moderate Van Nuys. Conservative con- 
gressman D. Worth Clark benefited from Republi- 
can crossover votes to upset Senator James Pope in 
the Idaho primary. 

The most critical setbacks for Roosevelt came in 
southern Senate primaries, where Roosevelt had 
intervened most directly, speaking on behalf of 
lesser known liberal Democrats against conserva- 
tive incumbents George of Georgia, Smith of South 



Carolina, and Tydings of Maryland. At a Democrat- 
ic meeting in Barnesville, Georgia, Roosevelt 
backed youthful attorney Lawrence Camp against 
George. George, however, nearly doubled Camp's 
vote total in a three-way primary. In Greenville, 
South Carolina, the president endorsed Governor 
Olin Johnston against agriculture committee chair- 
man Smith. Smith, a states' rights segregationist 
and senator since 1909, won his primary, in part be- 
cause of reaction against Roosevelt's intervention. 
Roosevelt stumped Maryland for two days in sup- 
port of Representative David Lewis, who was run- 
ning against Tydings. Tydings, nonetheless, easily 
prevailed in the primary. In the House, liberal 
Maury Maverick of Texas was unseated and House 
rules committee conservative Howard Smith of Vir- 
ginia handily won renomination. 

Roosevelt launched his party realignment strat- 
egy too late for it to be effective and he damaged 
his prestige with his impulsive effort. Ten of the 
twenty-five Democratic Senate candidates with 
prior voting records on national legislation were 
conservatives, showing Roosevelt's vulnerability. 
The president did not plan his strategy well, varied 
his tactics too much from state to state, and relied 
too heavily on often divided state party organiza- 
tions. The American electorate disapproved of in- 
terference by federal officials in state politics and 
prevented the personally popular Roosevelt from 
realigning the political parties ideologically. The 
primaries stiffened conservative resistance and in- 
tensified the liberal- conservative split within his 
party. Roosevelt did not attempt again to develop 
a strong liberal party. 

That November the Democrats retained sixty- 
nine seats and controlled over two-thirds of the 
Senate. Lonergan was the lone conservative Demo- 
crat to lose. The Republicans kept all their Senate 
incumbents and gained eight Senate seats, six of 
them replacing New Deal Democrats. Robert Taft 
unseated Bulkley in Ohio and quickly emerged as 
a Republican leader. The president thus faced a 
Senate that included twenty-three Republicans and 
twenty to thirty anti-New Deal Democrats. Al- 
though the Democrats maintained a comfortable 
majority in the House, holding 260 seats, the New 
Deal coalition was crippled, as public opinion shift - 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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ed in a more conservative direction. The seventy 
defeated House Democrats were mostly liberals 
from industrial northeastern and midwestern 
states. Most anti-New Deal Democrats won reelec- 
tion. Around eighty Democrats held at least strong 
reservations about New Deal reform programs. The 
Republicans gained eighty House seats, nearly dou- 
bling their strength from eighty-nine to 169, with 
thirteen governorships. Liberal governors Philip 
LaFollette of Wisconsin, Frank Murphy of Michi- 
gan, Elmer Benson of Minnesota, and George Earle 
of Pennsylvania lost reelection bids, while Republi- 
cans John Bricker of Ohio, Leverett Saltonstall of 
Massachusetts, and Harold Stassen of Minnesota 
won governorships. In Roosevelt's home state of 
New York, Thomas Dewey attracted national atten- 
tion by nearly defeating incumbent Governor Her- 
bert Lehman. 



THE DRIVE FOR POLITICAL REFORM 

Irregularities in three 1938 senatorial cam- 
paigns provoked the Hatch Act of 1939, regulating 
the political involvement of federal employees in 
primaries and elections. Several New Deal liberals 
who were either seeking renomination or attempt- 
ing to unseat conservative incumbents were ac- 
cused of manipulating the Works Progress Admin- 
istration (WPA) to enhance their electoral 
prospects. In the Kentucky primary, WPA authori- 
ties had solicited $24,000 in contributions from 
WPA employees to help Barkley defeat Chandler. 
Party officials had raised these funds directly, with 
WPA personnel being canvassed to ascertain their 
political affiliations. In neighboring Tennessee, 
WPA administrators had requested numerous do- 
nations from WPA workers to help insure the tri- 
umph of New Dealer Thomas Stewart over Berry in 
the primary. Democratic senatorial aspirants had 
benefited from political malpractices in the Novem- 
ber election against Republican candidates. The 
Pennsylvania WPA director had manipulated WPA 
finances in an unsuccessful attempt to help Gover- 
nor Earle unseat incumbent James Davis. Besides 
selling tickets to WPA workers at party gatherings, 
WPA administrators had ordered many Republican 
employees to change their registration to Demo- 
cratic. 



Disclosures from the Senate campaign expen- 
ditures committee in January 1939 intensified the 
drive for reform. The committee, led by Democrat 
Morris Sheppard of Texas, upheld accusations that 
WPA officials diverted relief funds for political pur- 
poses in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. 
They spiked similar allegations concerning con- 
gressional races in Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, 
New Jersey, New York, and Ohio. The Committee 
recommended legislation prohibiting government 
officials from either soliciting or receiving contribu- 
tions from WPA workers and other federal employ- 
ees. The Hatch Act of 1939 banned the assessment 
or solicitation of funds from WPA employees or re- 
moval of any personnel because of refusal to 
change political affiliation. Federal officials and 
workers were prevented from using their positions 
to interfere in presidential or congressional prima- 
ries or elections. 

Following the 1938 election, the conservative 
coalition controlled both the Senate and the House. 
Conservative Democrats aligned with Republicans 
to stymie any Roosevelt initiatives and to search for 
ways to reduce New Deal programs. In 1939, Con- 
gress slashed WPA appropriations, authorized an 
investigation of the National Labor Relations 
Board, and rejected self-liquidating projects and 
housing bills. The failure of party realignment di- 
minished Roosevelt's personal power because he 
was serving the final two years of what most Amer- 
icans expected to be his last presidential term. Roo- 
sevelt denied that the election was a rejection of his 
domestic reform program, but the New Deal re- 
mained on the defensive in Congress. 

See Also: CONSERVATIVE COALITION; FIRESIDE 
CHATS; PEPPER, CLAUDE; ROOSEVELT, 
FRANKLIN D. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Allswang, lohn M. The New Deal and American Politics: A 
Study in Political Change. 1978. 

Burns, lames MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. 
1956. 

Davis, Kenneth M. FDR, Into the Storm, 1937-1940: A 
History. 1993. 

Hopper, lohn E., "Lhe Purge: Franklin D. Roosevelt and 
the 1938 Democratic Nominations." Ph.D. diss., 
University of Chicago, 1966. 



29Z 



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Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American Peo- 
ple in Depression and War, 1929-1945. 1999. 

Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 
New Deal, 1932-1940. 1963. 

Mulder, Ronald A. The Insurgent Progressives in the United 
States Senate and the New Deal, 1933-1939. 1979. 

Patterson, James T. Congressional Conservatism and the 
New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in 
Congress, 1933-1939. 1967. 

Patterson, James T. "The Failure of Party Realignment in 
the South, 1937-1939." Journal of Politics 27 (August 
1965): 602-617. 

Plesur, Milton, "The Republican Comeback of 1938." Re- 
view of Politics 24 (1962): 525-562. 

Polenberg, Richard, "Franklin Roosevelt and the Purge 
of John O'Connor: The Impact of Urban Change on 
Political Parties." New York History 49 (1968): 
306-326. 

Porter, David L. Congress and the Waning of the New Deal. 
(1980). 

Price, Charles M., and Joseph Boskin. "The Roosevelt 
Purge: A Reappraisal." Journal of Politics 26 (1966): 
660-670. 

Savage, Sean J. Roosevelt: The Party Leader, 1932-1945. 
1991. 

Weed, Clyde P. The Nemesis of Reform: The Republican 
Party During the New Deal. 1994. 

Ziegler, Luther H., Jr. "Senator Walter George's 1938 
Campaign." Georgia Historical Quarterly 43 (1959): 
333-352. 

David L. Porter 



ELECTION OF 1940 

In the election of 1940, President Franklin D. Roo- 
sevelt defeated Republican nominee Wendell L. 
Willkie to win an unprecedented third term in the 
White House. Carrying 54.8 percent of the popular 
vote to Willkie's 44.8 percent (27.3 million votes to 
22.3 million), Roosevelt won thirty-eight of the 
forty-eight states and 449 of the 531 votes in the 
Electoral College. Democrats retained substantial 
majorities in both houses of Congress. 

The election of 1940 came at the juncture of the 
Great Depression and World War II. Unemploy- 
ment remained at 17 percent in the United States 
early in 1940, but after Europe went to war in Sep- 



tember 1939, and especially after the Nazi blitzkrieg 
overran Western Europe in the spring of 1940, the 
American defense program began to galvanize the 
economy. At the same time, national attention 
turned increasingly to defense and foreign policy. 
The election thus provided the first major test of the 
new Democratic majority, forged in the much dif- 
ferent context of the hard times and domestic con- 
cerns of the Depression decade. 

The war affected American politics throughout 
1940, perhaps most importantly in determining the 
presidential nominees. Early in the year, Roosevelt 
seemed uncertain about his intentions, but the in- 
ternational situation evidently convinced him to 
run again and made the public willing to support a 
third term. Among Republican candidates, the war 
in Europe made Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft seem 
too isolationist and New York district attorney 
Thomas E. Dewey too young; utilities magnate 
Willkie, a dynamic dark-horse candidate, won the 
nomination. Democrats nominated Secretary of 
Agriculture Henry A. Wallace for vice president, 
while Republicans chose Oregon Senator Charles 
McNary. 

Willkie and the Republicans tried without 
much success to capitalize on the third term issue, 
and they had little more success with charges that 
Roosevelt's anti-Axis policies were leading the 
United States to war. Responding to Republican ac- 
cusations that he intended to enter the war, Roose- 
velt memorably declared that "I have said this be- 
fore, but I shall say it again and again and again: 
Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign 
wars." For his part, Roosevelt stressed the improv- 
ing economic situation and the New Deal's empha- 
sis on employment, economic security, and rising 
living standards — issues that opinion surveys indi- 
cated remained central to public concerns and vot- 
ing decisions. 

The outcome of the election reflected not only 
the impact of the war but also powerful continuities 
from the politics of the Depression decade. Roose- 
velt's margin fell below that of 1936 when he had 
won 60.8 percent of the vote, partly because of di- 
minished support among isolationists, especially in 
the Midwest, and among Irish Americans, German 
Americans, and Italian Americans unhappy about 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



293 



ELLINGTON 



DUKE 



American foreign policy. The president also lost 
ground among wealthy voters opposed to the New 
Deal. Roosevelt gained some strength among sup- 
porters of his internationalist, anti-Axis policies, 
and his experience as president was reassuring 
given the global situation, but his victory came 
above all from the millions of working-class and 
lower-middle -class voters who continued to see 
him as the architect of the New Deal and the guar- 
antor of security. Voting patterns, like party images, 
thus remained substantially like those of the 1930s, 
and the New Deal coalition of urban, working- 
class, lower-middle-class, ethnic, black, and white 
southern voters remained mostly intact; indeed it 
was solidified by the politics of 1940. 

See Also: ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D.; WALLACE, 
HENRY A.; WILLKIE, WENDELL; WORLD WAR II 
AND THE ENDING OF THE DEPRESSION. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burke, Robert F. "The Election of 1940." In History of 
American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, Vol. 3, 
edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 1971. 

Jeffries, John W. Testing the Roosevelt Coalition: Connecti- 
cut Society and Politics in the Era of World War II 
1979. 

Lazarsfeld, Paul F.; Bernard Berelson; and Hazel Gaudet. 
The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes up his Mind 
in a Presidential Campaign, 3rd edition. 1968. 

Lubell, Samuel. "Post-Mortem: Who Elected Roose- 
velt?" Saturday Evening Post 25 (January 1941): 9ff. 

Parmet, Herbert S., and Marie B. Hecht. Never Again: A 
President Runs for a Third Term. 1968. 



John W. Jeffries 



ELLINGTON, DUKE 



Bandleader and composer Edward Kennedy Elling- 
ton (April 29, 1899-May 24, 1974) was born in 
Washington, D.C., of middle-class parents. Young 
Ellington's dignified bearing earned him the nick- 
name "Duke." Drawn in his teens to ragtime piano, 
he began to play for money and to compose. At 
nineteen, married with an infant son, Ellington or- 
ganized a band that included the drummer Sonny 



Greer, saxophonist Toby Hardwick, and trumpeter 
Arthur Whetsol. In 1923 they moved to New York 
City and worked in Harlem nightclubs. Assuming 
leadership, Ellington added the trumpeter Bubber 
Miley and studied with the veteran composers Will 
Vodery and Will Marion Cook. He also gained an 
able white manager, Irving Mills. The orchestra 
made its first recordings in 1926, and the following 
year began its residence at Harlem's exclusive Cot- 
ton Club. 

Ellington continued to build his band, hiring 
the clarinetist Barney Bigard, trombonist Sam Nan- 
ton, and saxophonist Johnny Hodges. Their work in 
the Cotton Club's famed "jungle revues" helped to 
publicize Ellington's increasingly innovative re- 
corded compositions. These numbers cannily ex- 
ploited his soloists' distinctive sounds and blended 
them in harmonically striking ensemble passages. 
Hodges, Greer, Nanton, and some later recruits re- 
mained with Ellington for decades, allowing him to 
mold his band into a unique "instrument." The or- 
chestra was a Harlem institution, performing at 
fundraisers for the National Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Colored People and at other commu- 
nity functions, and Ellington became Harlem's self- 
styled musical chronicler and spokesman. His band 
soon gained a national radio audience, and in 1931 
he joined an African-American delegation that met 
with President Herbert Hoover. 

Ellington left the Cotton Club that year. After 
classical musicians compared his compositions fa- 
vorably to those of the French Impressionists, he 
began to create extended concert works, including 
Creole Rhapsody and Reminiscing in Tempo. Wildly 
successful European tours also stimulated this 
work, but his success continued to lie with popular 
dance numbers and ballads. Some of them, such as 
"Concerto for Cootie" (written for the trumpeter 
Cootie Williams), showcased his soloists, while 
others (such as "Take the A Train") were written by 
Billy Strayhorn, a young arranger who quickly be- 
came indispensable to Ellington. Despite Elling- 
ton's popularity as a leader, composer, and pianist, 
he had to contend with society's racism and with 
discrimination in the music business. He valued 
Mills's assistance, but the latter also demanded a 
share of writing credit and royalties from Elling- 



zn 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



EMERGENCY RELIEF 



A N D 



CONSTRUCTION 



A C T 



F 



19 3 2 



ton's songs, and in 1939 the two parted ways. At 
great expense Ellington used a private railroad car 
for his constant touring (to avoid segregated ac- 
commodations) and established his own music 
publishing company. He was outspoken in inter- 
views and occasional written pieces about the bur- 
dens of prejudice, and he remained dedicated to 
celebrating the black experience in music. 

The saxophonist Ben Webster and the bassist 
Jimmy Blanton augmented the great band of the 
late 1930s, resulting in what are generally regarded 
as its finest recordings (1939-1941). Ellington's per- 
sonnel choices and extraordinary compositions of 
the 1930s were the foundation for the rest of his ca- 
reer, which, despite uneven commercial fortunes, 
produced an astonishing body of concert and popu- 
lar works and achieved worldwide fame and re- 
spect. 

See Also: ANDERSON, MARIAN; BIG BAND MUSIC; 
HOLIDAY, BILLIE; JAZZ; MUSIC. 




BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Collier, James Lincoln. Duke Ellington. 1987. 

Ellington, Edward Kennedy. Music Is My Mistress. 1973. 

Hasse, John Edward. Beyond Category: The Life and Genius 
of Duke Ellington. 1993. 

Peretti, Burton W. The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and 
Culture in Urban America. 1992. 

Tucker, Mark. Ellington: The Early Years. 1991. 

Burton W. Peretti 



EMERGENCY RELIEF AND 
CONSTRUCTION ACT OF 1932 

The Emergency Relief and Construction Act 
(ERCA) of 1932, signed by President Hoover on July 
27, 1932, appropriated funds for federal relief loans 
to the states and new public works construction. 
While the public works provisions of the law 
proved to be a disappointment, the $300 million re- 
lief appropriation financed the first large-scale fed- 
eral public welfare program in American history. 

Two forces combined to produce the congres- 
sional majorities that approved the law: mounting 



Duke Ellington, performing with his band in New York City 
in 1943. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, 
FSA/OWI Collection 



political pressure for new public works construction 
and the collapse of state and local relief programs 
then assisting the unemployed. Numerous con- 
gressional proposals for expanded public works 
spending had surfaced in 1930 and 1931. Even 
Hoover's own relief officials had initially supported 
a large public employment program. At the same 
time, supporters of direct federal relief to the unem- 
ployed through local welfare agencies garnered 
considerable support for a measure that would have 
provided $375 million in relief grants to the states 
(the so-called LaFollette-Costigan Bill introduced 
in Congress in December 1931). Hoover and mod- 
erates in Congress had opposed both these mea- 
sures, instead advocating voluntarist alternatives 
such as the private fund drive organized by the 
President's Organization for Unemployment Relief. 

By the spring of 1932, however, it was clear that 
the large emergency relief organizations in cities 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 6 R E A F DEPRESSION 



295 



EMERGENCY RELIEF APPROPRIATION 



A ( T 



f 



19 3 5 



such as Chicago and Philadelphia would collapse 
without federal aid. On May 12, Hoover announced 
that he would enlarge the coffers of the newly cre- 
ated Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to 
provide funds for public works and relief loans to 
the states. There followed a politically charged de- 
bate over the scope of the public works program 
and the policies of the RFC, but there now existed 
a consensus about the need for direct relief aid. In 
late July, with relief having been discontinued in 
Philadelphia and on the verge of collapse in Chica- 
go, Hoover signed the ERCA. 

The ERCA allocated $322 million for federal 
public works and authorized the RFC to provide 
funds for "self-liquidating" state, local, and private 
public works. The law also allocated $300 million in 
direct relief loans to local welfare agencies through 
states. These loans were to be repaid through de- 
ductions from future federal highway funds. The 
implementation of the public works provisions of 
the law proved to be a disappointment to the public 
works lobby. States and municipalities hesitated to 
apply for the funds, which would place them fur- 
ther in debt, and the administration was also slow 
to allocate the $322 million for federal public works. 

The impact of the provisions for direct relief, 
however, was significant. Federal aid financed the 
bulk of relief during the winter of 1932-1933. RFC 
aid not only bailed out large urban relief organiza- 
tions on the verge of collapse, it also financed a sig- 
nificant expansion of relief in smaller industrial 
communities and rural regions that had supplied 
relatively little relief prior to 1932. The RFC was 
forced to play a more active role in policymaking 
and administration than had been intended when 
the law was passed. Federal funds helped finance 
new state-level relief organizations and federal offi- 
cials played key roles in lobbying for new state wel- 
fare appropriations. 

By the time Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugu- 
rated, the federal government was financing over 
60 percent of all relief nationally. In the end, the 
$300 million in relief loans to the states was never 
repaid, and the federal government had perma- 
nently entered the field of public assistance. 

See Also: HOOVER, HERBERT; RECONSTRUCTION 
FINANCE CORPORATION (RFC). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brock, William R. Welfare, Democracy, and the New Deal. 
1988. 

Brown, losephine. Public Relief, 1929-1939. 1940. 

Huthmacher, J. loseph. Senator Robert F. Wagner and the 
Rise of Urban Liberalism. 1968. 

Sautter, Udo. Three Cheers for the Unemployed: Govern- 
ment & Unemployment before the New Deal. 1991. 

Schwarz, lordan. The Interregnum of Despair. 1970. 

Singleton, Jeff. The American Dole: Unemployment Relief 
and the Welfare State in the Great Depression. 2000. 

Williams, Edward A. Federal Aid for Relief. 1939. 

Ieff Singleton 



EMERGENCY RELIEF 
APPROPRIATION ACT OF 1935 

The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 
was the New Deal's effort to end the "dole" and re- 
place it with public employment. The act appropri- 
ated approximately $4.8 billion to finance the last 
months of the Federal Emergency Relief Adminis- 
tration (FERA) and initiate what became the Works 
Progress Administration (WPA). 

The administration's decision to replace relief 
with the WPA reflected the values of Franklin D. 
Roosevelt and his relief administrator, Harry Hop- 
kins. Both believed that relief demoralized the un- 
employed and produced a condition of dependen- 
cy. Furthermore, most unemployed workers 
preferred work relief to the direct "dole." The end 
of the Civil Works Administration (CWA) in the 
spring of 1934 had produced a mass protest move- 
ment that demanded work instead of a return to di- 
rect relief, and protest organizations proliferated 
under the "work program" of the FERA, which re- 
placed the CWA. But work relief was enormously 
expensive and was opposed by influential New 
Dealers who feared that it would unbalance the 
federal budget. Roosevelt, despite his clear prefer- 
ence for public employment, shared this concern 
and terminated the CWA. The end of civil works 
produced a debate within the administration be- 
tween "spenders," who favored public employ- 
ment, and fiscal conservatives who opposed it. 

In the end, Roosevelt came to support public 
employment because he feared that the high feder- 



296 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



E N D 



POVERTY 



N 



C A L I E R N I A (EPIC) 



al relief caseload, which by the end of 1934 ap- 
proached five million, would create a permanent 
federal "dole." In October he began meeting with 
key advisers to plan a new work program to replace 
relief. By the end of December the administration 
had determined to ask Congress for $4.8 billion, ap- 
proximately two-thirds of which to finance work 
relief and the rest to draw down the FERA. The pro- 
gram would not be administratively linked to the 
Social Security Act, the administration's proposed 
"permanent program" to deal with "economic in- 
security." Public employment would be a tempo- 
rary policy to deal with the Depression crisis, not a 
permanent public employment program. 

The administration's proposal to Congress at 
first appeared to be adequately funded and have 
broad-based political support. Eight hundred mil- 
lion dollars would be sufficient to phase out the re- 
lief program during the summer of 1935, leaving $4 
billion to employ approximately 3.5 million former 
relief recipients (70 percent of the FERA caseload). 
The remaining relief recipients, termed "unemploy- 
ables," would be returned to the states, which 
would receive some federal relief aid under the So- 
cial Security Act. 

But the transition from relief to public employ- 
ment in 1935 encountered political and administra- 
tive obstacles that seriously undermined the policy. 
First, the appropriation bill was delayed in Con- 
gress by demands from organized labor that the 
program pay prevailing wage rates. Then congres- 
sional leaders insisted on allocating the portions of 
the appropriation to specific employment catego- 
ries and federal agencies, making it much more dif- 
ficult to implement a smooth transition from the 
existing relief program. When the bill finally passed 
in the late spring, a battle erupted between the 
FERA's Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes, the interi- 
or secretary and director of the PWA, over control 
of the program. The conflict between Hopkins and 
Ickes was not only a power struggle; it was a debate 
over whether the new program should resemble 
public works, with capital intensive projects em- 
ploying relatively little relief labor, or work relief, 
which employed more recipients but often seemed 
to be "made work." 

By September 1935 the administration's new 
program appeared on the verge of collapse. Less 



than one-quarter of the projected 3.5 million work- 
ers had been employed and barely $1 billion of the 
original appropriation remained unallocated. To 
meet the crisis, Roosevelt handed the remaining 
funds to Harry Hopkins, who quickly began to 
transfer work relief projects to the program that 
came to be known as the WPA. By the end of De- 
cember, nearly three million workers were on the 
WPA payrolls and the administration declared its 
program "99 7/8% successful." But the smaller than 
expected WPA employment levels left a large relief 
burden for the states, generating an on-going crisis 
in the emerging state public welfare system of the 
late 1930s. The WPA, by contrast, proved enor- 
mously popular and contributed to Roosevelt's re- 
sounding victory in the 1936 election. 

See Also: FEDERAL EMERGENCY RELIEF 

ADMINISTRATION (FERA); HOPKINS, HARRY; 
WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Amenta, Edwin. Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the 
Origins of American Social Polio/. 1998. 

Charles, Searle. Minister of Relief: Harry Hopkins and the 
Depression. 1963. 

Howard, Donald S. The WPA and Federal Relief Policy. 
1943. 

Mclimsey, George. Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and 
Defender of Democracy . 1987. 

McMahon, Arthur W.; lohn D. Millett; and Gladys 
Ogden. The Administration of Federal Work Relief. 
1941. 

Singleton, Jeff. The American Dole: Unemployment Relief 
and the Welfare State in the Great Depression. 2000. 

Williams, Edward A. Federal Aid for Relief. 1939. 

Jeff Singleton 



END POVERTY IN CALIFORNIA 
(EPIC) 

End Poverty in California (EPIC) was a series of 
proposals defining the platform upon which Upton 
Sinclair hoped to win the governorship of Califor- 
nia in 1934. A prominent socialist and writer, Sin- 
clair won acclaim early in the century with The Jun- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



297 



E N D 



POVERTY 



I N 



C A L I E R N I 



EPIC 



gle (1906), an expose of the putrid conditions of 
meatpacking facilities and the exploitation of work- 
ers in American industry. In 1914 Sinclair left New 
Jersey and took up residence in California, where 
he threw his energies into politics, campaigning on 
the Socialist Party ticket. By 1933, however, with 
California mired in the throes of depression and 
possessed of an anemic Democratic Party, Sinclair 
realized the immediacy of the problem facing the 
unemployed as well as an opportunity to imple- 
ment his ideas. Switching to the Democratic Party, 
Sinclair announced his candidacy in a sixty-page 
book, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Pov- 
erty. Declaring that there was "no excuse for pover- 
ty in a state as rich as California," Sinclair proposed 
a program to end unemployment and poverty 
based upon the principle of production-for-use. 
Such a principle was believed conducive to a possi- 
bility of full employment, something that capitalism 
with its profit motive could not accomplish. The 
centerpieces of the EPIC plan were a full employ- 
ment program that would turn over idle land and 
factories to the unemployed and a pension plan 
that would provide those sixty years and older with 
fifty dollars a month, financed by higher income 
and inheritance taxes. Sinclair overwhelmed his ri- 
vals in the Democratic primary and, with support 
from hundreds of EPIC clubs — citizens groups that 
had sprung up to advocate the cooperative princi- 
ples of his program — appeared to be the favorite in 
the general election against Republican incumbent 
Frank Merriam. Alarmed that Sinclair would pre- 
vail, powerful economic interests in southern Cali- 
fornia organized the first modern electoral cam- 
paign in U. S. history. Financed and directed by the 
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio, the Southern 
California Citrus Growers (Sunkist), and the Los 
Angeles Times, the anti- Sinclair forces used mislead- 
ing cartoons and editorials to inflame voters with 
allegations that Sinclair was anti-marriage, anti- 
religion, pro-Soviet, and a free-love radical. The 
most controversial component of the attack on 
EPIC was a series of ostensibly factual newsreels 
screened to moviegoers that portrayed pro-Sinclair 
voters as poorly informed and lazy, while Merriam 
supporters appeared articulate and industrious. 
Particularly notorious were the newsreels that pres- 
ented as fact an incipient flood of hoboes and un- 



employed transients preparing to come to Califor- 
nia should Sinclair be elected. 

The outcome of the election hinged on the level 
of support provided by Democratic regulars, many 
of whom remained deeply suspicious of Sinclair's 
ideas, especially his call for the use of scrip as a me- 
dium of exchange among producers. Scrip was to 
be used as a token between producers and coopera- 
tives in addition to money. Hoping to palliate the 
regulars and lead a united party, Sinclair dropped 
the more controversial of his proposals while ap- 
pealing to Democratic leaders for full support. The 
linchpin of EPIC's fate would be an endorsement 
from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Early in 
the campaign, Sinclair traveled east and conversed 
at length with Roosevelt. In the end, however, Roo- 
sevelt refused his support, and the party leadership 
attempted to persuade Sinclair to step down in 
favor of a candidate deemed more favorable by the 
national leadership. When Sinclair refused, the 
Democratic leadership negotiated an agreement 
with the Merriam camp to support the Republican 
in exchange for a bipartisan administration that 
would support the middle road of New Deal re- 
form. Democratic support proved crucial to Repub- 
lican victory on election day. 

The legacy of the EPIC challenge was its role in 
pulling the New Deal leftward as Roosevelt, re- 
sponding to Sinclair (among others), embraced a 
broader series of social and economic reforms after 
1934. The response of the Democratic leadership, 
however, illuminated the ideological fissures within 
its brokerage politics, and firmly indicated that it 
would not support a social democratic insurgency 
at the grassroots level that managed to nominate 
candidates unsuitable to the party elite. 

See Also: ELECTION OF 1934; SINCLAIR, UPTON. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Harris, Leon A. Upton Sinclair, American Rebel. 1975. 

Mitchell, Greg. The Campaign of the Century. 1992. 

Sinclair, Upton. The Epic Plan for California. 1934. 

Sinclair, Upton. I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got 
Licked, rev. edition. 1994. 

Upton Sinclair Papers. Lilly Library, University of Indi- 
ana. 

William J. Billingsley 



Z98 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ETHIOPIAN 



W A R 



EPIC. See END POVERTY IN CALIFORNIA. 



ETHIOPIAN WAR 

The Italian government of Benito Mussolini in- 
vaded the African nation of Ethiopia on October 3, 
1935, in order to provide Italy with additional colo- 
nial territory, to stimulate Italy's economic growth 
and lower unemployment, and to create an outlet 
for Italy's excess population. Historians have specu- 
lated that with the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, 
Mussolini was also driven by a desire to maintain 
equal standing with Europe's other fascist dictator, 
and he saw the conquest as a means to do so. Ethi- 
opia, which had been one of the last independent 
African countries, was conquered by Mussolini's 
forces by May 1936. The Ethiopian monarch, Haile 
Selassie I, and his family were driven into exile in 
Great Britain. 

The brutality of the Italian military, particularly 
its use of low-flying bombing raids and poison gas 
against both civilians and soldiers, brought it con- 
demnation from the international community. The 
League of Nations issued economic sanctions 
against Italy, but the sanctions were applied hap- 
hazardly because France and Great Britain wanted 
to avoid harming their long-standing alliance with 
Italy. The sanctions also allowed the continued 
shipment of oil to Italy and did not restrict Italy's 
use of the Suez Canal. Once victory was assured, 
the League lifted the minor sanctions against Italy 
in July 1936, almost indicating that they endorsed 
the action. 

The general response of the United States gov- 
ernment to the war was disinterest. The United 
States maintained its isolationist stance and con- 
centrated its energies on the Great Depression. It 
had no colonies in Africa and so did not fear Italian 
encroachment into its overseas holdings. Economi- 
cally, the area represented a tiny fraction of the na- 
tion's overseas trade, and few Americans had in- 
vestments in the region that needed to be 
protected. Lastly, 1936 was an election year, and 
neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Alfred Landon 
wanted to make U.S. involvement in the war a cen- 
tral political concern. 







Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, posed with his foot on an 
unexploded bomb after an Italian air bombardment in January 
1936. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS 



Although the war engendered little interest 
among the white population of the United States, 
many African Americans followed the conflict 
closely and lobbied their government to take a 
stronger stand. They were motivated by several fac- 
tors, including the historical importance that Afri- 
ca's longest-lasting black nation represented to the 
continued struggle of African Americans for equali- 
ty. The civil rights activism of the 1930s increasingly 
emphasized social and economic equality as Afri- 
can Americans struggled to cope with the Great 
Depression. They clearly empathized with Ethio- 
pia's attempt to remain free and equal among the 
world's nations. 

Major urban areas, such as New York and 
Cleveland, became centers of political agitation, 
prayer meetings, and demonstrations. Organiza- 
tions such as the Ethiopian Research Council, 
founded in Washington, D.C., in 1934, and the Na- 
tional Association for the Advancement of Colored 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



299 



EUROPE, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



People kept news of the conflict prominent in Afri- 
can-American communities. The interest of African 
Americans in this conflict was matched by people 
of African ancestry across the globe, and the war 
provoked anti-Italian protests in Jamaica, Barbados, 
and Trinidad, as well as inquiries regarding the pos- 
sibility of volunteer soldiers from southern Africa, 
the United States, and Great Britain. 

In contrast, the Italian-American community 
and its organizations repeatedly urged the U.S. 
government not to intervene. They held fundraising 
drives and mass demonstrations to show their sup- 
port for Mussolini's actions, and they contributed 
food, clothing, and money to assist Italy in its con- 
quest. In addition, Italian Americans volunteered to 
serve with Mussolini's forces. This staunch support 
for Italy's actions brought about conflict between 
Italian Americans and African Americans, most no- 
tably a large riot that occurred in March 1935 in 
New York City. 

Italian occupation of Ethiopia ended in 1941, as 
Italian forces were expelled by British and Com- 
monwealth troops working in concert with Ethiopi- 
an exiles and guerilla forces, and Haile Selassie re- 
turned to power. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; ISOLATIONISM; RACE 
AND ETHNIC RELATIONS. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Baer, George W. The Coming of the Italian-Ethiopian War. 
1967. 

Harris, Brice, Jr. The United States and the Italo-Ethiopian 
Crisis. 1964. 

Harris, Joseph E. African-American Reactions to War in 
Ethiopia, 1936-1941. 1994. 

Scott, William R. The Sons of Sheba's Race: African- 
Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1941. 
1993. 

Laura J. Hilton 



EUROPE, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 

World War I exacerbated old problems and created 
new challenges. The struggle to overcome these 



difficulties played an important role in determining 
the character and duration of the Great Depression 
in Europe. 



THE LEGACY OF THE WAR 

The first challenge was to overcome the loss 
and suffering of war. Somewhere between nine and 
eleven million Europeans had died, with even 
greater numbers seriously injured. The slaughter 
cost France and Germany around 10 percent of 
their male workforce, Austria-Hungary and Italy 
more than 6 percent, and Britain 5 percent. If this 
unprecedented slaughter was not bad enough, 
widespread famine and a voracious influenza epi- 
demic brought yet more death in the aftermath of 
the war. The conflict also damaged industry, trans- 
port networks, and homes, with France, western 
Russia, Poland, and Belgium the worst affected. 
But, however deeply the pain of this destruction 
was felt by Europe's population, it did not take long 
for the workforce and infrastructure to recover. By 
the mid-1920s population levels had begun to rise, 
and factories, farms, and railways had been rebuilt. 

Of greater consequence to Europe's long-term 
prospects were many of the economic and financial 
changes induced by the war. While Europe's lead- 
ing industrial powers had been preoccupied with 
producing war supplies, American and Japanese 
businessmen had grown rich thanks to both in- 
creased demand and the absence of European com- 
petition. The disruption to established patterns of 
trade was damaging to the European economy and 
made it hard to recover the financial costs of the 
war. It proved difficult for Europe to recapture these 
markets, especially as American economic suprem- 
acy was underlined by its enthusiasm for new tech- 
nologies and innovative ways of managing labor, 
with the average American factory worker produc- 
ing twice as much per hour as his or her counterpart 
in Europe. Europe's nineteenth-century strength in 
heavy industry, by contrast, was now a source of 
weakness, and the war exacerbated an overcapacity 
in industries like coalmining and shipbuilding that 
was already evident in 1913. 

Not only were American manufactured goods 
usually superior to and less expensive than those 
made in Europe, so too were many American agri- 



300 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



EUROPE 



GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



cultural and primary products. This disadvantage 
hit central and eastern Europe especially hard, inas- 
much as around 70 percent of its workforce relied 
on the land to earn a living. The peace treaties ne- 
gotiated between 1919 and 1923 added to the chal- 
lenge of effecting economic stability in this part of 
Europe. Such new countries as Yugoslavia had to 
build the trappings of a modern national economy 
almost from scratch, while the defeated Central 
Powers were banned from working together to 
overcome their economic problems (the conse- 
quences of this prohibition were especially difficult 
for Austria and Hungary), and they were forced to 
pay heavy reparations to the European Allied Pow- 
ers, although not to America. 

Reparations were payments of money and 
goods levied against Germany and its Central 
Power allies at the peace conference in 1919. Britain 
and France demanded an indemnity to cover not 
just the physical damage wrought by the war, but 
the cost of waging the entire conflict. It took until 
1921 for a reparations commission to fix a precise 
amount; Germany, for example was to pay 132 bil- 
lion gold reichsmarks. The findings of the commis- 
sion's report were, and remain, highly controver- 
sial. In American "Reparations" to Germany, 
1919-1933 (1988) Stephen Schuker argued that al- 
though Germany was plagued by temporary diffi- 
culties, the long-term prospects for Germany's ca- 
pacity to pay were excellent given the economic 
record of the German Empire before 1913. But this 
view was challenged by Gerald Feldman in The 
Great Disorder (1993), which underlined the pro- 
found harm done by reparations to the Weimar Re- 
public. 

Anglo-French demands for reparations were 
also fuelled by the need to pay back their war debts 
to the United States. Although President Woodrow 
Wilson declined to demand reparations from the 
Central Powers, successive U.S. administrations in- 
sisted that Britain, France and Italy, among others, 
pay back some $12 billion worth of loans. As Presi- 
dent Calvin Coolidge put it, "They hired the money, 
didn't they?" After 1919, the victorious European 
powers hoped to trade concessions they might 
make on reparations for a reduction in their war 
debts. Although many European countries were 



able to negotiate some kind of reduction in the 
amounts owed, the United States consistently de- 
nied any link between the ability of the Central 
Powers to pay their reparations to the Allied ability 
to meet its war debts. 

World War I also generated political change 
that affected how economic policy was made and 
what it was expected to achieve. After the sacrifices 
demanded of them in war, voters now expected 
politicians to deliver improved social provisions and 
work opportunities, and when governments failed 
to manage national economies to benefit the ma- 
jority of voters, they were increasingly likely to be 
voted out of office. This tendency was all the more 
pronounced in Europe because many countries, like 
Germany and Austria, became democracies for the 
first time, while established democracies extended 
the franchise. Britain, for example, gave women and 
young men the vote for the first time in 1921. The 
need to manage the home economy to the satisfac- 
tion of the electorate also complicated relations be- 
tween countries. In the 1920s, there were a rising 
number of trade wars both within and beyond Eu- 
rope's frontiers as governments tried to meet the 
expectations of farmers and businessmen to protect 
home markets. These economic conflicts damaged 
diplomatic relations, the operation of the gold stan- 
dard, and prospects for long-term stability of the 
international economy. 

The first big test for the ability of Europeans to 
deal with new economic problems came early in the 
1920s as the demands of reconstruction and repara- 
tions unleashed inflation in many European coun- 
tries, notably in Germany, Austria, and Hungary. At 
first the German government was unwilling to take 
decisive action to calm the rising currency crisis, but 
after the French invaded Germany's industrial 
heartland, the Ruhr, in January 1923, inflation spi- 
raled to over 2,000 percent, and decisive action to 
save the most important economy in Europe be- 
came imperative. It came in the shape of a plan de- 
vised by the American general Charles G. Dawes, 
who proposed a revised schedule for reparation 
payments and a German return to the gold stan- 
dard. Announced in 1924, the plan also encouraged 
foreign investors to purchase German bonds. But 
the scheme quickly snowballed beyond the expec- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



301 



EUROPE, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



tations of its inventors. By 1928, almost eight billion 
dollars had been sunk into Europe, with four billion 
dollars invested in Germany alone. 

The impact of the postwar inflation that spi- 
raled into hyperinflation in much of central and 
eastern Europe played a crucial role in shaping gov- 
ernment economic policy after 1924. The dominant 
preoccupation of government policy became cur- 
rency stabilization centered on the gold standard. 
But the determination to avoid inflation or any sig- 
nificant shift in monetary policy, both of which 
were seen as a gateway to currency chaos, was to 
make little sense in the world after 1929, with fall- 
ing prices, diminishing demand, and rising levels of 
unemployment. The reconstructed gold standard 
helped to tie the fate of the European economy to 
that of the United States. So, too, did the messy 
tangle of war debts, reparations, and Dawes Plan 
loans. Although each type of debt was notionally 
separate, in practice one type of payment was seen 
as dependent on the other. When American com- 
mercial loans began to dry up, as they did after 
1928, the European economy was in very big trou- 
ble. 



THE EUROPEAN BANKING CRISES 

By 1928 it was clear that the Dawes Plan was 
failing. The once mighty stream of American in- 
vestment into Europe had slowed to a trickle. Ne- 
gotiations for a new scheme, dubbed the Young 
Plan, were underway when Wall Street crashed and 
the Great Depression set in. The American Federal 
Reserve's decision to increase interest rates in 1929 
and 1930, coupled with the economic downturn in 
the United States, meant that the American loans 
that had helped to smooth over the cracks in the 
European economy were no longer available. By 
1931, the level of U.S. investment in Europe 
dropped to zero. In response, European countries 
tried to be as "good as gold"; they raised interest 
rates and tried hard to prevent the national budget 
from sliding into deficit, with the aspiration of at- 
tracting back some of the foreign investment they 
had lost. But the strategy had painful consequences. 
Political developments also played a role. Any dis- 
putes about taxation increases or government 
spending, like those that gripped Germany in the 



summer of 1931, had serious financial implications, 
as well as political consequences. 

By June and July 1931 British banks were strug- 
gling to fill the breach in central European finances 
left by the United States. But as much as politicians 
from the left and right of the political spectrum 
blamed "greedy, foreign capitalists" for their woes, 
many of the problems facing banks in central Eu- 
rope in the summer of 1931 were homegrown. Not 
only had much of the foreign investment on which 
the region had become so dependent been spent on 
unproductive projects designed to generate pres- 
tige rather than profits (in Romania over 30 percent 
of international loans had been spent this way), 
banks in central Europe also had a close relation- 
ship with local industry that made them especially 
vulnerable. Austrian industry, for example, was 
very dependent on bank loans, while the banks, in 
turn, owned a large number of shares in Austrian 
industry. When industry failed, so did the banks. 
Until the summer of 1931, Austrian banks worked 
hard to cover up industrial losses, in part by merg- 
ing with other banks. But the wheels came off this 
strategy in spectacular fashion on May 8, 1931, 
when it was revealed that Austria's largest bank, 
the Creditanstalt, had incurred losses of 140 million 
schillings. Investors rushed to the bank to withdraw 
their savings; over a period of twelve days the bank 
lost more than 300 million schillings in domestic 
withdrawals, and a further 120 million schillings 
were removed by foreign investors. No private in- 
stitution had sufficient funds to bale out the Credi- 
tanstalt, so the Austrian government reluctantly 
stepped in to end the crisis by effectively taking 
control of the bank. As a consequence, the Austrian 
state became the owner of sixty-four different Aus- 
trian companies and 65 percent of the nominal cap- 
ital in Austrian businesses. 

The collapse of Austria's banks also triggered a 
wave of selling in the Austrian schilling that the 
Austrian government was powerless to stop. It was 
only by breaking the "rules of the gold standard 
game" in October 1931, through the introduction of 
exchange controls designed to restrict the amount 
and destination of gold and foreign currency leav- 
ing Austria, that the crisis came to an end. These 
controls became an elaborate network of bilateral 



302 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



EUROPE 



GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



payment agreements that controlled the movement 
of money and goods between Austria and other 
countries. 

Banking crises similar to that which had taken 
place in Austria soon engulfed other countries, in- 
cluding Italy, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslo- 
vakia. But Germany, once again, experienced the 
most dramatic collapse. The biggest commercial 
banks — the Darmstadter und Nationalbank 
(DANAT Bank), the Dresdener, and the Deutsche 
bank — began to sustain enormous loses as industry 
failed and nervous investors withdrew their cash. In 
an effort to hang on to their reserves, the banks put 
up interest rates and cut back on loans to business, 
so that even companies that had remained relative- 
ly healthy found their working credit withdrawn 
and faced the prospect of bankruptcy. 

Chaos reigned in the German banking system 
for over two months until 13 July 1931, when all 
German financial institutions closed down. They 
reopened after a few days, but the financial, eco- 
nomic, and political landscape in which they now 
operated had changed dramatically. Political and 
social changes were immediately visible. Confi- 
dence in the future had evaporated, which meant 
that companies and individuals spent even less. 
Unemployment rocketed to over six million people, 
around one-fifth of the German working popula- 
tion, and the extremist political parties, the Com- 
munists and the National Socialist Party of Germa- 
ny (NSDAP, or Nazis), experienced a huge surge in 
political support. There were also economic and fi- 
nancial changes that were less visible to contempo- 
rary observers. The German state, like Austria, had 
taken on important new powers that enabled it to 
control the amount of gold and foreign exchange 
leaving the country. Not only did this mean that 
American and British investors now found their in- 
vestments frozen inside Germany, giving Germany 
important bargaining leverage in diplomatic nego- 
tiations with those two countries, it also meant that 
bilateral payment schemes were set up giving the 
state power to control German trade. Together, 
these developments changed the nature of Germa- 
ny's relationship with the international economy 
and helped make it much easier for the Nazis to 
manage the economy after they took power in 
1933. 



A very different banking crisis took place in 
Britain in September 1931. Here it was not the com- 
mercial banks that came under pressure, but the 
central bank, the Bank of England. The widespread 
collapse of confidence in Europe in the summer of 
1931 had taken its toll on the British economy: The 
pound was sold heavily on the international ex- 
change, interest rates rose, and the financial prob- 
lems for companies, banks, and households multi- 
plied at a frightening rate. As the British 
government argued over whether, and how best, to 
cut the rising budget deficit, the political and finan- 
cial pressure rose. On August 24, 1931, Britain re- 
sorted to a new national government comprised of 
representatives from the Conservative, Labour, and 
Liberal parties to underline national unity in the 
face of the crisis. But the step was not enough to 
keep the pound on the gold standard, nor were the 
efforts of the world's most powerful central banks. 
On September 20, 1931, Britain, along with its im- 
perial and commonwealth partners, left the gold 
standard. It was a move that enabled these coun- 
tries to take the first tentative steps on the road to 
economic recovery. 

POPULAR AND POLITICAL REACTIONS 

The decision of Britain's leading political parties 
to work together to present a unified political front 
was followed by France, Belgium, and the Nether- 
lands in the mid-1930s. The step was triggered, in 
part, by political developments in central and east- 
ern Europe, where traditionally dominant political 
parties — the Conservatives (including National- 
ists), the Liberals, and the Social Democrats — were 
discredited by the economic collapse and their fail- 
ure to develop any new policies. They increasingly 
lost out to those on the far left and far right, typified 
by revolutionary Communist and Fascist parties 
that appeared to offer radical answers to the suffer- 
ing of an increasingly desperate electorate. But it is 
important not to oversimplify the relationship be- 
tween economic misery and political radicalism. 
Many countries around the world experienced in- 
tense economic hardship yet did not succumb to 
political extremism; the United States was the most 
notable example. 

On a human level the most visible measure that 
politicians had failed to staunch the crisis by 1931 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



303 



EUROPE, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 



was the tremendous surge in unemployment. By 
1932 the official figures were impressive, with 6 
million unemployed in Germany and 2.7 million 
jobless in Britain, but it is very likely the real figures 
were much higher. This is especially true in agricul- 
tural Europe, where unemployment was disguised 
as underemployment and characterized by a silent 
slide into abject poverty. 

Some groups in society were hit disproportion- 
ately hard. Young men were especially affected by 
the social and psychological effects of unemploy- 
ment. Theirs was a strong contributory voice to the 
rising intolerance of groups or individuals who 
were perceived to be economic rivals or outsiders. 
The crisis triggered a rising culture of blame as peo- 
ple began to point accusatory fingers at other social 
groups, including bankers and industrialists, or at 
those who appeared to be different from them- 
selves, such as Jews and gypsies. Women workers 
were also vulnerable in this climate. In Britain and 
Germany, for example, married women teachers 
were sacked as part of a campaign against what 
were called "double-earners" (because their hus- 
bands also brought home a wage packet). However, 
in industries beyond the state's control it was often 
male employees who lost out to the women be- 
cause women were cheaper to employ and more 
prepared to work part-time. 

GOVERNMENT RECOVERY POLICY 

Relations between European countries became 
increasingly bitter as the Depression deepened. 
Diplomatic cooperation proved difficult in the at- 
mosphere of intense economic competition, even 
between countries like Britain and France that 
shared a common interest in defending democracy 
and capitalism. Desperate to respond to the clamor 
of French farmers who demanded protection from 
cheap imports, by 1932 France had introduced strict 
quotas on over three thousand different imports, 
German tariffs had risen by over 50 percent, and 
most dramatically of all, Britain retreated into pro- 
tection in the autumn of 1931, ending a commit- 
ment to the ethos of free trade that had lasted 
eighty-five years. Europe was now divided into 
competing economic blocs. 

Freed from gold, the British government 
dropped interest rates, increased spending, and be- 



came the first country in Europe to show signs of 
recovery. The British government's first priority be- 
came fostering domestic recovery; internationalism, 
characterized by its unwavering support for the 
gold standard in the 1920s, was at an end. Belgium, 
the Netherlands, and France, by contrast, clung to 
gold until the 1935 to 1936 period, which helps ex- 
plain why they experienced the worst of their eco- 
nomic and political crises during the mid-1930s — 
terrible timing when it came to facing German ex- 
pansionism and civil war in Spain. 

In Germany, as in a number of other countries 
in central and eastern Europe, the break with eco- 
nomic internationalism was much more overt than 
in Britain. Under the Nazis, emergency measures 
taken by previous governments, notably during the 
banking crisis in 1931, evolved into a complex sys- 
tem of trade and monetary restrictions. The regime 
stepped in to manage trade, the movement of for- 
eign exchange, prices, wages, private investment 
banks, and all other aspects of investment in its 
drive to achieve national self-sufficiency (autarky). 

In common with other countries, the states in 
central and eastern Europe also became heavily in- 
volved in trying to stimulate demand in the econo- 
my. But as the international climate deteriorated, it 
became difficult to distinguish industrial recovery 
from preparations for national defense. In Poland 
in 1936, the government introduced a six -year in- 
vestment plan under which, by 1939, the state con- 
trolled about one hundred industrial enterprises 
and all of Poland's transportation networks. Unfor- 
tunately, the strategies adopted to fight the Depres- 
sion by the smaller countries of central and eastern 
Europe neither assisted the development of their 
economies in the long-run, nor helped to secure 
them from the expansionist ambitions of their 
neighbors, Germany and the Soviet Union. 

See Also: ANTI-SEMITISM; DICTATORSHIP; GOLD 
STANDARD; INTERNATIONAL IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Clavin, Patricia. The Failure of Economic Diplomacy: Brit- 
ain, Germany, France, and the United States, 1931-36. 
1996. 

Clavin, Patricia. The Great Depression in Europe, 
1929-1939. 2000. 



301. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



EVANS 



WALKER 



Costigliola, Frank. Awkward Dominion: American Political, 
Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 
1919-1933. 1984. 

Feinstein, Charles; Peter Temin; and Gianni Toniolo. The 
European Economy between the Wars. 1997. 

Feldman, Gerald D. The Great Disorder: Politics, Econom- 
ics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924. 
1993. 

Garside, R. W. British Unemployment, 1919-1939: A Study 
in Public Policy. 1990. 

Hodne, Fritz. The Norwegian Economy: 1920-1980. 1983. 

Jackson, Julian. The Politics of Depression in France, 

1932-1936. 1935. 
James, Harold. "Financial Flows across Frontiers in the 

Great Depression." Economic History Review 45 

(1992): 594-613. 
James, Harold. The German Slump: Politics and Economics, 

1932-1936. 1986. 

Johansen, Hans Christian. The Danish Economy in the 
Twentieth Century. 1987. 

Jonung, Lars, and Rolf Ohlsson, eds. The Economic Devel- 
opment of Sweden since 1870. 1997. 

Kaser, Michael C, ed. The Economic History of Eastern Eu- 
rope, 1919-1975, Vol. 2: Interwar Policy, the War, and 
Reconstruction, edited by Michael C. Kaser and E. A. 
Radice. 1986. 

Kent, Bruce. The Spoils of War: The Politics, Economics, and 
Diplomacy of Reparations, 1918-1932. 1989. 

Maier, Charles. In Search of Stability: Explorations in His- 
torical Political Economy. 1987. 

Mazower, Mark. Greece and the Interwar Economic Crisis. 
1991. 

Moure, Kenneth. Managing the Franc Poincare: Economic 
Understanding and Political Constraints in French 
Monetary Policy, 1928-1936. 1991. 

Royal Institute for International Affairs. The Balkan States: 
A Review of the Economic and Financial Development 
of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia 
since 1919. 1939. 

Schuker, Stephen. American "Reparations" to Germany, 
1919-1933: Implications for the Third World Debt Cri- 
sis. 1988. 

Teichova, Alice. The Czechoslovak Economy, 1918-1980. 
1988. 

Tracy, Michael. Government and Agriculture in Western 
Europe, 1888-1999, 3rd edition. 1989. 

Whiteside, Noel. Bad Times: Unemployment in British So- 
cial and Political History. 1991. 

Williamson, Philip. National Crisis and National Govern- 
ment: British Politics, the Economy, and Empire, 
1926-1932. 1992. 

Patricia Clavin 



BSfe., 




This small country church in Georgia was one of many 
photographs Walker Evans shot of churches, shops, and other 
buildings during the 1930s while on assignment in the South 
for the Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, 
Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 

EVANS, WALKER 

Walker Evans (1903-1975) was one of the great 
photographers of the twentieth century, a pivotal 
figure in establishing the documentary arts move- 
ment in the United States, and among the signal 
artists responsible for fixing the exact look of the 
Depression for subsequent generations. 

He was born Walker Evans III on November 3, 
1903, in St. Louis, and moved to Kenilworth, Illi- 
nois, a suburb of Chicago, in 1908, and to Toledo, 
Ohio, in 1915. A sensitive but indifferent student, 
Evans suffered his education in a series of mostly 
private boarding schools, including the Loomis In- 
stitute in Connecticut, Mercersbury Academy in 
Pennsylvania, and briefly, Philips Andover Acade- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



305 



EVANS 



WALKER 



my in Massachusetts. Following a rejection from 
Yale University, he began and ended his university 
career with a single semester at Williams College in 
Massachusetts in December 1923. 

After a number of clerical jobs in New York City 
and a renovative thirteen-month stay in Paris, 
Evans returned to New York City in 1927 and began 
the study and practice of the camera in earnest. For 
the next decade and a half, he engaged in a remark- 
able string of publications, exhibitions, and field 
trips that constitute not only the most fecund peri- 
od of his creative life, but also one of the indelible 
landmarks in the history of American photography. 
Starting in 1931 and for the next several years, 
Evans conducted a photographic study of the van- 
ishing Late -Victorian architecture, mostly in New 
England. In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art pres- 
ented "Walker Evans: Photographs of 19th Century 
Homes," which according to biographer James R. 
Mellow was "the first one man photographic exhi- 
bition mounted by a major museum in the United 
States" (Mellow 1999, p. 624). In Havana, Cuba 
(1933), Evans documented the social terrain under 
the dictatorship of Gerado Machado in thirty-one 
illustrations for the radical journalist Carleton Beal's 
text The Crime of Cuba. Beginning in 1935 and for 
the next two years, Evans produced a sweeping cat- 
alog of the American scene in a series of field trips, 
mostly in the southern and central regions, as an 
information specialist for the photographic unit of 
the historical section of the Resettlement Adminis- 
tration (later the Farm Security Administration), a 
unit which ultimately produced some 270,000 pho- 
tographs, including the work of photographers like 
Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, and Ar- 
thur Rothstein. On loan to Fortune magazine in the 
summer of 1936, he made an excursion to Hale 
County, Alabama, with the writer James Agee; 
Evans's photographs and Agee's text would be- 
come the classic study of three tenant families, Let 
Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). In 1938, before 
embarking on a three-year project of subway por- 
traits with a hidden camera (eventually published 
in 1966 as Many Are Called) he attained national 
prominence with the Museum of Modern Art's ex- 
hibition "Walker Evans: American Photographs," a 
summary statement of more than a decade's work, 
and his single most famous collection. 



An Evans composition was the result of both a 
contrarian spirit and a deliberated aesthetic that 
planted itself in opposition to the dominant photo- 
graphic trends in the first quarter of the century; 
specifically, the mystical aestheticism of Alfred 
Stieglitz, the commercial gloss and celebrity por- 
traiture of Edward Steichen, the staged theatrics of 
Margaret Bourke -White, and even the machine - 
age formalism of Laszlo Mholy Nagy (of which pre- 
cocious examples can be found in Evans's early ex- 
periments). Against these, his taste ran to the im- 
mediacy of raw fact, the unadorned directness of 
non- or even anti-art: newsreels, tabloid journal- 
ism, and the home snapshot. An Evans photo can 
disarm the casual eye in its avoidance of romance 
or prettification, frippery or melodrama, its freedom 
from overt forms of camera rhetoric and embellish- 
ment. Actually the restraint of the shot belies a 
fierce distillate of mental energy, an astringent ap- 
preciation of form, and a personal preference for 
the poetics of entropy and depletion, the harmonics 
of disarray and adventitions moments. Evans's 
characteristic subjects were torn posters and bill- 
boards cropped with a surrealist wit; shop fronts 
scrabbled with a patchwork of graffiti and rusty slo- 
gans; gas stations, junk yards, and railway depots; 
dusty vistas of replicated housing and stretch land- 
scapes of smoking factory and clapboard shanty; 
aging Victorian homes, peeling Greek Revival 
buildings, and the chipped framewood of Black 
Baptist churches; and the faces and figures of the 
anonymous caught unguarded in the nick of an in- 
terior event. Evans's treatment of the forms of ne- 
glect and the scourings of time coincided almost ex- 
actly, whether by accident or design, with the look 
and fact of the ongoing social crisis of the Great De- 
pression, and become its representative expression. 

Starting in 1945, Evans spent twenty years as a 
full-time staff photographer for Fortune magazine, 
and another eight years (1964-1972) as professor of 
graphic design at the Yale School of Art and Archi- 
tecture. Throughout the last phase of his career, he 
never stopped collecting penny postcards or road- 
side bric-a-brac, or working obsessively with a Po- 
laroid color camera, with which he produced more 
than two thousand photographs before his death 
on April 10, 1975, in New Haven, Conneticut. 



306 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



E Z E K I £ L 



M R D E C A I 



See Also: AGEE, JAMES; FARM SECURITY 
ADMINISTRATION; PHOTOGRAPHY; 
RESETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION (RA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Fa- 
mous Men. 1960. 

Beals, Carlton. The Crime of Cuba. 1933. 

Evans, Walker. American Photographs. 1938. 

Evans, Walker. Many Are Called. 1966. 

Evans, Walker. Walker Evans. 1971. 

Hambourg, Maria Morris; Jeff L. Rosenheim; Douglas 
Elkund; and Mia Finemon. Walker Evans. 2000. 

Mellow, James R. Walker Evans. 1999. 

Rathbone, Belinda. Walker Evans: A Biography. 1995. 

Alan Spiegel 



EZEKIEL, MORDECAI 

Mordecai Joseph Brill Ezekiel (May 10, 1899-Octo- 
ber 31, 1974) was economic adviser to Secretary of 
Agriculture Henry A. Wallace from 1933 to 1944. 
Ezekiel helped draft the Agricultural Adjustment 
Act of 1933 and other New Deal farm legislation, 
and he was an active participant in the debates of 
the 1930s over planning, fiscal policies, and recov- 
ery strategies. 

Ezekiel earned his doctorate from the Brook- 
ings Institution in 1927 while working for the De- 
partment of Agriculture's Bureau of Agricultural 
Economics. During the 1920s, he gained an inter- 
national reputation for his brilliant applications of 
statistics to economic analysis. In 1930 Ezekiel took 
a position as assistant chief economist for the Fed- 
eral Farm Board, and the experience of the Farm 
Board's ill-fated attempts to stabilize cotton and 
wheat prices convinced him that farmers needed a 
bolder form of government intervention to rescue 
them from the price collapse of the Great Depres- 
sion. Consequently, he collaborated with the econ- 
omist M. L. Wilson of Montana State College to 
propose a government-backed system of emergen- 
cy production controls and benefit payments 
known as the Voluntary Domestic Allotment Plan. 
Major elements of their proposal were incorporated 
in the Agricultural Adjustment Act. 



The Agricultural Adjustment Administration 
(AAA), Ezekiel argued, might assist farmers in the 
Depression crisis, but it could not restore farm 
prosperity because of agriculture's dependence on 
urban and industrial demand and on international 
trade. Consequently, he argued throughout the 
1930s that agricultural recovery demanded reduc- 
ing tariffs and trade barriers and creating systems 
of economic planning to achieve full employment. 
Ezekiel criticized the National Recovery Adminis- 
tration and other New Deal measures for embrac- 
ing economic restriction in place of a broad-based 
recovery strategy. He proposed instead a program 
of "industrial expansion" that he popularized in 
two books, $2,500 a Year: From Scarcity to Abun- 
dance (1936) and Jobs for All through Industrial Ex- 
pansion (1939). Building in part on the "adminis- 
tered price" thesis developed by the economist 
Gardiner Means, Ezekiel argued for a cooperative 
planning system that would use tax incentives and 
production quotas to initiate an expansion of the 
non-farm economy. He also joined with the so- 
called spenders in the New Deal to advocate 
Keynesian policies of fiscal expansion to counter 
the recession of 1937 to 1938. 

Ezekiel's advocacy of economic planning and 
his status as one of the New Deal's highest ranking 
and most visible Jewish figures made him a favorite 
target of New Deal critics. Anti-Semitic diatribes 
often warned of his influence in the "Jew Deal." But 
although he was a respected economist, his plan- 
ning proposals never gained a serious hearing from 
Franklin Roosevelt, and among economists Eze- 
kiel's proposals were far less influential than the fis- 
cal policies advocated by the economist Alvin Han- 
sen. 

During World War II, Ezekiel worked briefly 
with the War Production Board and also helped or- 
ganize the Food and Agriculture Organization 
(FAO). He joined the FAO staff in 1946 after being 
forced to resign from the Department of Agriculture 
under pressure from conservative congressmen. 
Ezekiel stayed with the FAO until 1961 and worked 
to develop its economic research division and its 
policies for economic development. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



307 



E Z E K I E L , M R D E C A I 



See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT Hawley, Ellis W. The New Deal and the Problem ofMonop- 

ADMINISTRATION (AAA); FARM POLICY; oh/: A stud y in Economic Ambivalence. 1966. 

Rosenof, Theodore. Economics in the Long Run: New Deal 
Theorists and Their Legacies, 1933-1993. 1997. 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Hamilton, David E. Trom New Day to New Deal: Hoover, 

Roosevelt, and American Tarm Policy, 1928-1933. n Wamtttom 

1991. " VJI> A ' " S ' X 



30 8 E N C V C L P E D I A F T H E 6 R E A T D E P R E S S I N 




FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT 

The Fair Labor Standards Act, also known as the 
Wages and Hours bill, was signed into law by Presi- 
dent Franklin Roosevelt on June 25, 1938. The Fair 
Labor Standards Act mandated minimum wage, 
maximum weekly hours, and child labor standards 
for workers engaged in interstate commerce. The 
law represented a departure from the policy of strict 
voluntarism that organized labor had supported 
prior to the Great Depression. However, continuing 
concerns on the part of American Federation of 
Labor (AFL) leaders about the state determining 
wage standards helped to shape a law that fell short 
of the aim of those New Dealers who wanted to re- 
quire employers to pay a "living wage." 

The Progressive era had witnessed various at- 
tempts by individual states to regulate working 
conditions for women, children, and those involved 
in hazardous jobs. Judicial hostility to any interfer- 
ence with "liberty of contract" and union fears of 
government intervention becoming a substitute for 
workers' self- organization severely limited the 
scope and effectiveness of such efforts prior to the 
Great Depression. The federal government did not 
become directly involved in trying to enforce mini- 
mum wage and maximum hours standards 
throughout the economy until the National Recov- 
ery Administration (NRA) was established in 1933. 



When the Supreme Court ruled in 1935 that the 
National Industrial Recovery Act was unconstitu- 
tional, Roosevelt considered offering a labor stan- 
dards bill to salvage the wages and hours provisions 
of the industry codes set up under the NRA, but he 
waited until after his reelection to begin pressing 
Congress to pass such legislation. 

New Deal lawyers Benjamin Cohen and Thom- 
as Corcoran prepared the original version of the 
Fair Labor Standards Act, which in May 1937 was 
introduced by Hugo Black in the Senate and by 
William Connery in the House. The Black-Connery 
bill called for fixing an unstated minimum wage 
(widely assumed to be forty cents an hour) and a 
maximum hours standard (assumed to be forty 
hours per week) for workers involved in interstate 
commerce. Workers involved in agriculture or 
holding administrative or supervisory positions 
were deemed "exempt" from coverage under the 
law, as were workers in firms with fewer than six 
employees. Overtime work was to be paid at a rate 
of time and a half. In addition, the bill provided for 
the establishment of a five-person Labor Standards 
Board with discretionary power to set higher wage 
and lower hours requirements for individual indus- 
tries in which there was a demonstrated "inade- 
quacy or ineffectiveness of facilities for collective 
bargaining." Implicit in such a provision was the 
hope that the law would contribute to the establish - 



309 



FAMILY 



N D HOME 



IMPACT 



f 



GREAT DEPRESSION 



N 



merit of "living wage" standards. New Deal propo- 
nents of the law saw the forty-forty standard itself 
as a means of raising the wage level and boosting 
the level of employment, and thereby contributing 
to efforts to end the Depression. The proposal also 
included a ban on child labor. 

In spite of Roosevelt's backing, the Black - 
Connery bill faced tough going in Congress. The 
proposal encountered stiff opposition from the na- 
tion's business leaders and also failed to win the 
support of the AFL, whose leaders feared allowing 
a government board to exercise such wide authority 
over wages. The congressional battle over the Fair 
Labor Standards Act lasted fourteen months, and 
the law that finally emerged was significantly dif- 
ferent from Cohen and Corcoran's original draft. In 
response to the concerns of the AFL and the secre- 
tary of labor, the independent and potentially pow- 
erful Labor Standards Board was eliminated. Ad- 
ministration of the law was given to the 
Department of Labor. The Fair Labor Standards Act 
set an initial minimum wage of only twenty-five 
cents, while providing for the rate to go to forty 
cents in seven years. The law set an initial weekly 
hours standard of forty-four, but called for a reduc- 
tion to forty over three years. Although the law al- 
lowed individual industries to reach the forty-forty 
standard before the end of the phase-in period, the 
limited flexibility in the final bill was intended pri- 
marily to make it possible for southern employers 
to maintain regional differentials for several more 
years. 

The Fair Labor Standards Act was path- 
breaking legislation that immediately improved 
wages for approximately 300,000 workers while re- 
ducing hours for more than one million employees. 
Yet, the standards established by the law were so 
low that full-time workers receiving the law's pro- 
tection could still have incomes that would leave 
them in poverty. Subsequent increases in the mini- 
mum wage have only marginally improved this sit- 
uation. Moreover, by excluding agricultural labor 
and domestic workers, who were not considered to 
be engaged in interstate commerce, the law failed 
to provide any benefits to large numbers of African- 
American and women workers. 



See Also: COLLECTIVE BARGAINING; GUFFEY- 

SNYDER ACT OF 1935; GUFFEY -VINSON ACT OF 
1937. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Douglas, Paul H., and loseph Hackman. "The Fair Labor 
Standards Act of 1938: I." Political Science Quarterly 

53 (1938): 491-515. 

Douglas, Paul H., and loseph Hackman. "The Fair Labor 
Standards Act of 1938: II." Political Science Quarterly 

54 (1939): 29-55. 

Forsythe, fohn S. "Legislative History of the Fair Labor 
Standards Act." Contemporary Problems 6 (1939): 
464-490. 

Hart, Vivien. Bound by Our Constitution: Women, Workers, 
and the Minimum Wage. 1994. 

Paulsen, George E. A Living Wage for the Forgotten Man: 
The Quest for Fair Labor Standards 1933-1941. 1996. 

Larry G. Gerber 



FAMILY AND HOME, IMPACT OF 
THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON 

The Great Depression challenged American fami- 
lies in major ways, placing great economic, social, 
and psychological strains and demands upon fami- 
lies and their members. Families of various class, 
ethnic, racial, and regional backgrounds, exhibiting 
various styles of marital and familial relationships, 
responded in different manners to the stresses and 
demands placed upon them. In 1933, the average 
family income had dropped to $1,500, 40 percent 
less than the 1929 average family income of $2,300. 
Millions of families lost their savings as numerous 
banks collapsed in the early 1930s. Unable to make 
mortgage or rent payments, many were deprived of 
their homes or were evicted from their apartments. 
Both working-class and middle -class families were 
drastically affected by the Depression. 

FAMILY DISORGANIZATION AND 
DEPRIVATION 

From one perspective, the story emerging from 
the Great Depression can be described as one of 
family "disorganization" and deprivation. Marriage 
rates declined, although they started to rise in 1934, 



310 



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A N D 



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GREAT DEPRESSION 



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and the trend toward decreasing birthrates, already 
underway, accelerated during the 1930s. Although 
divorce rates also declined, this seems to have been 
largely the consequence of the inability to pay law- 
yers' fees; desertion rates increased during the de- 
cade. In some cases, two or more families crowded 
together in apartments or homes designed as sin- 
gle-family residences. Some 250,000 youths were 
on the road, travelling by freight train or hitchhik- 
ing in order to find work or more favorable circum- 
stances. From 1929 to 1931, the number of children 
entering custodial institutions increased by 50 per- 
cent. In many economically deprived families, chil- 
dren suffered from malnutrition and inadequate 
clothing. 

Things seemed to be especially difficult for un- 
employed and underemployed male heads of fami- 
lies. Traditional conceptions of gender roles pre- 
vailed during the 1930s; accordingly, men were 
expected to be the breadwinners of their families. 
Unemployed men felt like failures as a result of 
their inability to provide for their families. Such 
feelings of inadequacy were accentuated when, 
often after having used up their life savings, these 
men were forced to endure the humiliating experi- 
ence of applying for relief. Unemployed men often 
found themselves hanging around their homes, ir- 
ritating their wives; quarrels became more frequent 
between husbands and wives. At times, men with- 
drew emotionally and even physically from their 
families and friends. Children of impoverished fam- 
ilies, recalling memories of family life during the 
1930s, often remembered their fathers as emotion- 
ally distant and indifferent. Some unemployed men 
took up drinking. Others went off on long trips, 
looking for employment in other cities. Some de- 
serted their wives and families altogether. 



ADAPTING TO THE DEPRESSION 

From a different perspective, another story of 
the family emerges — one that emphasizes the resil- 
ience and ability of the family to adapt in the face 
of adverse economic circumstances. Some families, 
of course, were not affected by major economic de- 
privation during the 1930s, but even among those 
that were, many were able to maintain relatively 
"normal" patterns of family life — with the father 



MORE SECURITY FOR 
THE AMERICAN FAMILY 




FOR INFORMATION WRITE OR CALL AT THE NEAREST FIELD OFFICE OF THE 

SOCIAL SECURITY BOARD 



The Social Security Board promised to provide greater security 
to American families, as this Depression-era poster testified. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



securely positioned as the head of the family and 
relatively harmonious relationships prevailing 
within the home. In the years after the Depression, 
many recalled the era, perhaps with an exaggerated 
sense of nostalgia, as a period of family together- 
ness and solidarity. Family members listened to the 
radio together (by the 1930s, millions of urban fam- 
ilies owned at least one radio) or engaged in such 
activities as playing Monopoly, a popular game that 
appeared in the mid-1930s. 

Features that could be considered symptoms of 
family disorganization, especially the employment 
of women and children outside the home, can per- 
haps best be regarded as ways in which families ac- 
tively adapted to and coped with economic depri- 
vation. In order to help provide economic support 
for their families, married women increasingly 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



311 



FAMILY AND HOME, IMPACT OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION ON 




A Texas family of migrant agricultural laborers lived in this trailer south of Chandler, Arizona, in 1940 during the cotton picking 
season. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



came to work outside the home during the 1930s, 
generally in low-status, low-paying jobs, often in 
the service and light manufacturing sectors. In spite 
of widespread condemnation of the employment of 
married women and the refusal of many govern- 
ment agencies, schools, libraries, and so on to em- 
ploy them, the percentage of married women in the 
workforce continued to rise during the Depression 
years. Married women also contributed to the liveli- 
hood of their families by intensifying their house- 
hold labor — by, for example, maintaining vegetable 
gardens and preserving the resulting produce, or 
patching and remaking old clothes. Children con- 
tributed to their families as well. Boys worked, usu- 
ally on a part-time basis, in activities such as deliv- 



ering newspapers, doing janitorial tasks, and 
assisting as store clerks. Girls, on the other hand, 
tended to stay home and help with domestic tasks, 
especially when their mothers worked outside the 
home. 

Another example of how family life was actively 
adapted to the social and economic circumstances 
that Americans encountered during the Depression 
era was the creation of a family-oriented union cul- 
ture by the Congress of Industrial Organizations 
(CIO) in late 1930s. As historian Lizabeth Cohen 
has demonstrated, CIO unions came to emphasize 
family life, especially family-oriented social and 
recreational activities, as a means of enhancing soli- 



312 



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GREAT DEPRESSION 



N 



darity among the diverse ethnic and racial groups 
involved in the CIO. Recognizing that working- 
class women played a key role as decision-makers 
in their families, unions attempted to enlist them in 
such activities as campaigns to buy union-made 
products and social events aimed at breaking down 
racial and ethnic barriers between working-class 
families. Indeed, women were conceived of as play- 
ing a guiding role in the elaboration of a family 
union culture. 

Efforts to adapt the family to economic adversi- 
ty during the 1930s did not result in a challenge to 
conventional gender roles. Many married women 
worked for wages outside their homes during the 
Depression years, but their children, often coming 
of age during the post-World War II era, did not 
come to see the employment of married women as 



in itself a positive good. Accustomed at an early age 
to assuming conventional gender roles — as boys 
worked at part-time jobs outside their homes, while 
girls worked at domestic chores within the home — 
the children of the 1930s saw their mothers' em- 
ployment as perhaps necessary under the circum- 
stances, but not as an indication that married 
women should pursue careers rather than devote 
themselves to being housewives. Similarly, al- 
though the CIO encouraged women to join unions 
in industries such as meat-packing, demanded 
equal pay for women, and enlisted working-class 
wives as guides of family union culture, CIO union- 
ists persisted in seeing men as the primary family 
breadwinners. Women were not encouraged to as- 
sume leadership roles in CIO unions, and little ef- 
fort was made to organize workers in the clerical 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



313 



FAMILY 



N D HOME 



IMPACT 



f 



GREAT DEPRESSION 



N 




Like many families during the Depression, this unemployed miner from Zeigler, Illinois, depended on government relief to support 
his wife and nine children in 1939. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



and service sectors, which tended to be dominated 
by women. 

With the advent of the New Deal in March 
1933, the federal government came to assume a 
new role in fostering the economic security and 
welfare of American families. As critics have sug- 
gested, however, New Deal programs tended to as- 
sume the primacy of the male breadwinner within 
the family, thus shoring up traditional gender roles. 
Work relief programs, such as the Works Progress 
Administration (WPA), discriminated against 
women, and women workers were generally not 
adequately covered by the retirement pension and 
unemployment insurance programs established by 
the Social Security Act of 1935. Although the New 
Deal welfare state owed much of its inspiration to 



the idea of the "maternal commonwealth" formu- 
lated by female reformers during the late nine- 
teenth century and the Progressive era, and despite 
the major role that female administrators and social 
workers played in implementing the New Deal 
welfare state, there was little concern for advancing 
the specific interests and rights of women during 
the 1930s. 

African-American families were especially hard 
hit by the Depression. Unemployment rates were 
significantly higher for blacks than for whites in 
Northern cities, and in the South, where most of 
the African-American population continued to live 
during the 1930s, economic conditions were espe- 
cially bad. Black sharecroppers in the South were 
forced to subsist on a minimal level, and increasing- 



3H 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



FARLEY 



AMES 



ly they were evicted from their farms as the result 
of Agricultural Adjustment Administration policies. 
In urban areas, there was an especially high per- 
centage of female-headed families due to high 
mortality rates among black males and their inabili- 
ty to provide for their families as breadwinners. 
Moreover, the eligibility requirements of the Aid to 
Dependent Children program, established by the 
Social Security Act of 1935, apparently contributed 
to the problem by driving black fathers from house- 
holds. Again, however, the issue of female domi- 
nance in many black families is more than simply 
a story of the "disorganization" of the black family. 
In fact, in both Northern cities and the rural South, 
black women tended to be the centers of networks 
of kin, friends, and neighbors — networks by means 
of which scarce resources were shared, thus en- 
abling families to survive under conditions of ex- 
treme economic adversity. In general, New Deal 
measures benefitted blacks less (and sometimes not 
at all) in comparison to whites, though New Deal 
work relief and welfare programs did provide sig- 
nificant assistance for black families, especially in 
Northern cities. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers 
in Chicago, 1919-1939. 1990. 

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of 
American Culture in the Twentieth-Century . 1997. 

Elder, Glenn H., Ir. Children of the Great Depression: Social 
Change in Life Experience. 1974. 

Evans, Sara. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in Amer- 
ica, 2nd edition. 1989. 

Foner, Eric. The Story of American Freedom. 1998. 

Tones, lacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black 
Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Pres- 
ent. 1985. 

Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell Lynd. Middletown in 
Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts. 1937. 

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in 
the Cold War Era. 1988. 

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 
1929-1941. 1984. 

Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: 
A Social History of American Family Life. 1988. 

Wandersee, Winifred D. "Families Face the Great De- 
pression (1930-1940)." In American Families: A Re- 
search Guide and Historical Handbook, edited by Jo- 
seph M. Hawes and Elizabeth I. Nybakken. 1991. 

Dennis Bryson 



THE LEGACY OF THE DEPRESSION 

The Depression era bequeathed a mixed legacy 
to American families and households. Perhaps the 
major positive aspect of this legacy was the idea 
that the economic security and welfare of the family 
should be a fundamental national goal. To be sure, 
this idea was imperfectly realized in the New Deal 
welfare state, which often discriminated against 
women wage-earners and relegated the families of 
blacks and other nonwhites to second-class status. 
Nevertheless, during the 1930s and subsequent 
decades, the federal government did come to play 
a major role in providing for the health, welfare, ed- 
ucation, and housing of American families. 

See Also: CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS, IMPACT 
OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; EDUCATION; 
ELDERLY, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 
ON; GENDER ROLES AND SEXUAL RELATIONS, 
IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; 
HOMELESSNESS; MEN, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON. 



FAP. See FEDERAL ART PROJECT. 



FARLEY, JAMES A. 



James Aloysius Farley (May 30, 1888-June 9, 1976), 
postmaster general of the United States and chair 
of the Democratic National Committee from 1933 
to 1940, was a shrewd political organizer and one 
of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's closest political 
advisers during the Great Depression. Ideologically, 
Farley registered opposition to much of the New 
Deal program, but until he and Roosevelt parted 
company in 1940, they made a formidable team 
that benefited both men and the nation. 

A preeminent New York politician who helped 
orchestrate Roosevelt's presidential landslides in 
1932 and 1936, Farley was born in Grassy Point, 
New York. After graduating from Stony Point High 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



315 



f A R L E Y , JAMES A 




James Farley (right) with Franklin D. Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia, in December 1931. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



School in 1905, he held various Democratic party 
offices, including town clerk. He later formed a 
business and served one term in the state legisla- 
ture before becoming secretary of the New York 
State Democratic Committee, in which capacity he 
organized Roosevelt's successful gubernatorial 
campaigns in 1928 and 1930. In 1932 Farley ar- 
ranged the deal that made John Nance Garner of 
Texas the Democratic vice presidential nominee. 

The postmaster generalship provided Farley 
with immense patronage potentialities, making his 
position crucial for constructing the foundations of 
support for the New Deal. Farley knew personally 
most party leaders throughout the country, corre- 
sponding with them regularly and signing his name 
in green ink. These acquaintances and friendships 



enabled Farley to fortify and invigorate loyalty to 
the Democratic party and the administration. His 
outgoing personality, persuasive techniques, and 
political skills proved effective in securing congres- 
sional and state endorsements for Roosevelt's New 
Deal. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom Far- 
ley enjoyed a constructive relationship, encouraged 
him to recommend appointments for women, who 
constituted 7,560 of the 28,092 postmasters com- 
missioned between 1933 and 1938. 

Although at first a moderate liberal, Farley, un- 
versed with the economic ramifications that result- 
ed in the Great Depression, exhorted the president 
in his second term to balance the budget and re- 
duce public works programs. Farley's disillusion- 
ment deepened steadily. His presidential aspira- 



316 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



FARM CREDIT ADMINISTRATION ( T ( A ) 



tions and strong opposition to Roosevelt's third- 
term nomination strained the relations between the 
two by 1940, when Farley submitted his resignation 
as postmaster general and head of the national 
committee. This ideological rift led the increasingly 
conservative Farley to assail New Deal policies. 
After his unsuccessful efforts to block Roosevelt's 
nomination in 1940 (when Farley sought the nomi- 
nation himself) and 1944, Farley devoted attention 
to business concerns while maintaining interests in 
local, state, and national politics. He died in New 
York City, leaving a legacy as an astute campaign 
manager and political operative during the Great 
Depression. 

See Also: DEMOCRATIC PARTY; ROOSEVELT, 
FRANKLIN D. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Farley, James A. Behind the Ballots: The Personal History 
of a Politician. 1938. 

Farley, James A. Jim Farley's Story: The Roosevelt Years. 
1948. 

Newquist, Gloria A. "James A. Farley and the Politics of 
Victory, 1928-1936." Ph.D. diss., University of 
Southern California, 1966. 

Leonard Schlup 



FARM CREDIT ADMINISTRATION 
(FCA) 

To combat the deepening debt crisis that was van- 
quishing farm owners nationwide, Franklin D. Roo- 
sevelt issued an executive order on March 27, 1933, 
establishing the Farm Credit Administration (FCA). 
The agency extended vital relief to debt-ridden 
farmers throughout the country by refinancing farm 
mortgages and offering credit under favorable 
terms. The FCA was an important part of the Roo- 
sevelt administration's broad program of federal as- 
sistance to agriculture. During its first two years 
alone, the FCA refinanced one-fifth of all farm 
mortgages and saved tens of thousands of farmers 
from foreclosure. 

By 1933 farmers urgently needed mortgage re- 
lief and loans to cover their annual crop-production 



costs. The vast network of locally owned banks that 
had served as the primary source of farm finance in 
rural areas could no longer support loans to farm- 
ers. As farm income and commodity prices plum- 
meted, the system of farm credit collapsed. In 1930 
and 1931, more than 3,600 banks failed. Among the 
hardest hit ones were undercapitalized rural banks 
serving small farming communities. 

In creating the FCA, the Roosevelt administra- 
tion set out to alleviate the indebtedness of farmers 
and to overhaul the government's large but ineffec- 
tual system of farm credit. Nine existing farm agen- 
cies fell under the control of the FCA, including the 
Federal Farm Board, the Federal Farm Loan Board, 
the federal land banks, the federal intermediate 
credit banks, and the loaning activities of the secre- 
tary of agriculture and the Reconstruction Finance 
Corporation. William I. Myers, a Cornell University 
economics professor, conceived this consolidation 
and reorganization of disparate farm agencies into 
the FCA. As David E. Hamilton argues in From New 
Day to New Deal (1991), Myers was committed to 
cooperative public-private partnerships and asso- 
ciative principles. Although the farm debt crisis re- 
quired that the government take the lead in making 
credit available to farmers, the ultimate goal of the 
FCA was to create a cooperative credit system run 
by farmers themselves, financed privately and ad- 
ministered through local credit associations. Roose- 
velt appointed Henry Morgenthau, who had served 
as Roosevelt's commissioner of agriculture when he 
was governor of New York, to the position of gov- 
ernor of the FCA, and he named Myers the deputy 
governor. When Morgenthau became secretary of 
the treasury in 1934, Myers took his place as head 
of the FCA and retained the post until 1938. 

The FCA included four divisions. The Land 
Bank Division controlled the twelve federal land 
banks and fifty joint-stock land banks. The Inter- 
mediate Credit Division supervised the twelve in- 
termediate credit banks that made direct loans to 
cooperatives and helped private banks become ac- 
tive lenders. The Production Credit Division direct- 
ed the twelve regional production credit corpora- 
tions, and the Cooperative Bank Division 
supervised the Central Bank for Cooperatives, 
which made short- and long-term loans to the agri- 
cultural cooperatives. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



317 



FARMERS 



L I D A Y ASSOCIATION 



( f 



In addition to refinancing one-fifth of all farm 
mortgages, the FCA reduced the interest rates on 
federal loans to 3.5 percent and, between 1933 and 
1936, extended about $800 million in long-term 
loans. By 1939, the federal land banks held nearly 
40 percent of the farm mortgage debt. That same 
year, the FCA fell under the control of the depart- 
ment of agriculture, then regained its status as an 
independent agency in 1953. Since 1971, the FCA 
has continued to provide credit to farmers, and has 
assumed the additional responsibility of regulating 
the farm credit system. 

See Also: AGRICULTURE; FARMERS' HOLIDAY 
ASSOCIATION (FHA); FARMERS HOME 
ADMINISTRATION (FMHA); FARM 
FORECLOSURES; FARM POLICY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Case, H. C. M. "Farm Debt Adjustment during the Early 
1930s." Agricultural History 34, no. 4: 173-181. 

Feder, Ernest. "Farm Debt Adjustment during the De- 
pression — The Other Side of the Coin." Agricultural 
History 35, no. 2: 78-81. 

Hamilton, David E. From New Day to New Deal: American 
Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928-1933. 
1991. 

Hoag, W. Gifford. The Farm Credit System: A History of Fi- 
nancial Self-Help. 1976. 

Stokes, W. N., Jr. Credit to Farmers: The Story of the Federal 
Intermediate Credit Banks and Production Credit Asso- 
ciations. 1973. 

Adrienne M. Petty 



FARMERS' HOLIDAY 
ASSOCIATION (FHA) 



The national Farmers' Holiday Association, or FHA, 
was an organization born of the downturn in farm 
and crop prices brought about by the Great Depres- 
sion. FHA members took part in some of the most 
intense agrarian protests of the early years of the 
Depression. In February 1932, Glen Miller, a writer 
for the publication Iowa Union Farmer, argued that 
Iowa farmers should declare a "holiday" in which 
farm products would be kept at the farms where 



they were produced until politicians and the gener- 
al public began to appreciate the importance of 
farmers. This idea resonated with the three thou- 
sand farmers who gathered in Des Moines, Iowa, in 
May 1932 to found the national Farmers' Holiday 
Association. The group consisted primarily of farm- 
ers from Iowa, but also included farmers from Min- 
nesota, Nebraska, Illinois, and Wisconsin, as well as 
many other states. Milo Reno, a popular agricultur- 
al activist and leader of the Iowa Farmers' Union, 
was elected president of the organization. 

Reno's constant campaign theme as leader of 
the Iowa Farmers' Union was that farmers deserved 
the right to be compensated for the costs of farm 
production and to make a reasonable profit on the 
sale of their goods. Reno continued this theme as 
he assumed control of the FHA, and one of the first 
resolutions adopted by the organization called for 
withholding agricultural products from the market- 
place until farmers received fair compensation for 
the cost of production. 

In August 1932, members of the FHA launched 
the first withholding protests in Sioux City, Iowa, 
picketing along highways and threatening farmers 
who refused to cooperate and were attempting to 
bring their goods to market. The farm strikes quick- 
ly spread to other midwestern states as members of 
the local Farmers' Holiday Associations in those 
states began to stage their own protests. Violent en- 
counters continued between protesters and nonco- 
operative farmers in other midwestern states until 
Reno called for an end to the strikes on September 
1, 1932. 

Following Franklin D. Roosevelt's election as 
president in November 1932, Reno and leaders of 
local holiday organizations in several midwestern 
states met in Omaha, Nebraska, to discuss the po- 
tential effect of Roosevelt's presidency on the plight 
of the farmer. The convention crafted a resolution 
that called for the suspension of strikes and block- 
ades of farm commodities to give the new president 
sufficient time to act on the concerns of farmers. 

In the meantime, the FHA focused its attention 
on preventing farm foreclosures through so-called 
penny auctions. During January and February of 
1933, fifteen penny auctions took place in which a 
farm undergoing foreclosure would be auctioned 



318 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



R M E R S 



M E 



ADMINISTRATION 



T M 



off at an extremely low price, sometimes through 
physical intimidation of potential bidders, to a bid- 
der who would sell the property back to its original 
owner. While never condoning the illegal methods 
used by some participants during penny auctions, 
the FHA did actively support the practice in order 
to prevent farm foreclosures. 

In May 1933, Reno and the FHA once again 
called for farm strikes following the U.S. Senate's 
rejection of the Norris- Simpson amendment, 
which would have provided cost of production 
prices for farmers. Reno, however, called off the 
strike after receiving a letter from Minnesota gover- 
nor Floyd Olson expressing his belief that the Roo- 
sevelt administration would address FHA concerns 
and after hearing an encouraging statement on the 
matter from the president. 

During the summer months of 1933 Reno 
began to lose confidence in Roosevelt's New Deal 
farm program, the Agricultural Adjustment Admin- 
istration. The FHA saw the program as an extension 
of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which 
the FHA viewed as a tool of large commercial farm- 
ers. In September 1933 Reno again called for farm 
strikes until the administration and the Congress 
passed measures to address cost of production and 
currency inflation. This time, however, the strike 
movement received a tepid response from many 
midwestern farmers and collapsed within a few 
days. 

Following the collapse of the farm strikes in the 
fall of 1933, the power of the FHA began to de- 
crease rapidly and Reno went from popular nation- 
al figure to relative obscurity. Over the next several 
years, the FHA turned its attention away from cost 
of production issues to other causes of interest to 
farmers. The organization also backed the potential 
third-party candidacies of such political figures as 
Father Charles Coughlin and Senator Huey Long. 
Milo Reno's death on May 5, 1936, effectively 
spelled the end of the FHA, which was absorbed 
back into the Iowa Farmers' Union in 1937. 

See Also: AGRICULTURE; FARM FORECLOSURES. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Olson, lames S., ed. Historical Dictionary of the 1920s: 
From World War I to the New Deal, 1919-1933. 1988. 



Payne, John. "Reno, Milo." In Historical Dictionary of the 
New Deal: From Inauguration to Preparation for War, 
edited by lames S. Olson. 1985. 

Shover, John L. Cornbelt Rebellion: The Farmers' Holiday 
Association. 1965. 

Mark Love 



FARMERS HOME 
ADMINISTRATION (FMHA) 

In 1946 Congress replaced the Farm Security Ad- 
ministration (FSA) with the Farmers Home Admin- 
istration (FmHA). Congress's action grew out of its 
wartime investigations of the FSA, in which the 
agency was criticized for deliberately disregarding 
congressional intent and misusing funds to estab- 
lish and maintain resettlement projects, cooperative 
farms, and land purchase associations. Congressio- 
nal disillusionment with these unconventional pro- 
grams reflected legislators' broader retreat from 
New Deal reforms and their more traditional ap- 
proach to domestic issues during and after the war. 
In creating the FmHA, Congress authorized it to in- 
sure loans, as well to lend money directly. Although 
some FSA programs, including loans to low- 
income individuals who lacked other sources of 
credit for farm purchase, farm operating and reha- 
bilitation loans to individuals, and loans for rural 
water systems, were continued by the new agency, 
the FSA's more controversial rural rehabilitation 
and resettlement projects, migratory labor camps, 
and loans to cooperative associations for land pur- 
chase were discontinued. The FmHA also contin- 
ued the emergency crop and feed loan program for- 
merly administered by the Farm Credit Association. 

In the ensuing decades the scope of the 
FmHA's programs expanded. The Federal Housing 
Act of 1949 broadened the agency's role in issuing 
and guaranteeing loans to farmers for housing. In 
1961 Congress authorized the agency to finance 
housing for nonfarm rural residents and general 
water projects for rural municipalities. Soon there- 
after the FmHA extended credit for construction of 
low-cost rural apartments and certain types of rural 
recreational facilities. Increasingly during the 1960s 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF T H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



319 



FARM 



F R E C L S 



R E S 



the agency shifted away from direct loans for hous- 
ing and toward insuring loans from private sources. 
During the 1970s, concerns about revitalizing rural 
regions led to additional changes. In 1972, the 
agency began loaning funds for health facilities and 
public buildings such as fire stations and communi- 
ty centers in rural areas. Two years later the agency 
became involved in guaranteeing private loans to 
businesses in an effort to encourage business and 
industrial development in the countryside. By 1983 
the agency had invested $52.9 billion in programs 
for farmers, such as farm operating, ownership, and 
emergency loans; $42.1 billion for rural housing; 
$13.3 billion for development of community facili- 
ties, most notably water and sewage systems; and 
nearly $5.5 billion in guaranteed loans to rural busi- 
nesses. In 1994, in an attempt to streamline rural 
services, the Rural Development Mission Area 
within the Department of Agriculture was created 
to replace agencies including the FmHA. 

See Also: FARM POLICY; FARM SECURITY 
ADMINISTRATION (FSA); HOUSING. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Baldwin, Sidney. Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline 
of the Farm Security Administration. 1968. 

Benedict, Murray R. Farm Policies in the United States, 
1790-1950: A Study of the Origins and Development. 
1953. 

United States Department of Agriculture. A Brief History 
of the Farmers Home Administration. 1984. 

Brian Q. Cannon 



FARM FORECLOSURES 

During the Great Depression, farm foreclosures be- 
came a disturbingly routine feature of rural life. Be- 
tween 1929 and 1933, a third of all American farm- 
ers lost their farms in the worst disaster to hit 
American agriculture. Hundreds of thousands of 
farm-owning families had their hard-earned land 
seized from under them. The record number of 
foreclosures during the late 1920s and 1930s disillu- 
sioned farmers and contributed to an unprecedent- 
ed degree of federal intervention to improve the 
farm economy. 



What contributed to the large number of fore- 
closures was a farm debt problem that began during 
the agricultural depression of the 1920s and grew 
more severe by 1929. Farmers were knee-deep in 
debt, with about two-fifths of all farmers holding a 
mortgage and nearly three-fourths requiring credit 
to produce a crop from year to year. With crop 
prices declining, farmers were not able to pay off 
their mortgage loans. For instance, farm prices for 
cash crops, such as wheat, cotton, tobacco, and 
corn, fell steadily beginning in 1920. The price of 
corn dropped 78 percent, from 1.85 per bushel in 
June 1920 to 41 cents per bushel in December 1921. 
Prices rebounded somewhat during the mid-1920s, 
but plunged once again after the stock market crash 
in 1929. Between 1929 and 1932, crop and livestock 
prices plummeted by almost 75 percent. The impact 
on farm earnings was staggering. Farm income de- 
clined by 60 percent, from $13.8 billion to $6.5 bil- 
lion, and the cash proceeds from marketing farm 
products in 1932 were about one-third lower than 
they had been in 1919. 

As farmers defaulted on loans and made fewer 
deposits, many small country banks were forced to 
go out of business. In 1930 and 1931, more than 
3,600 banks failed. Those banks, life insurance 
companies, and farm mortgage lenders that man- 
aged to survive had little choice but to drastically 
reduce the amount of credit they made available to 
farmers. 

Consequently, farm foreclosures became more 
prevalent throughout the 1920s, and grew to sober- 
ing proportions by the 1930s. While the average 
foreclosure rate between 1913 and 1920 was 3.2 per 
1,000 farms, it jumped to 17.4 per 1,000 farms in 
1926, and by 1933 had reached 38.8 per 1,000 farms. 
During 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, 
more than 200,000 farms underwent foreclosure. 
Foreclosure rates were higher in the Great Plains 
states and some southern states than elsewhere. As 
Lee J. Alston argues in his article "Farm Foreclo- 
sures in the United States During the Interwar Peri- 
od" (1983), farm distress also was more severe in 
rural areas that were far from urban areas because 
farm families had fewer opportunities to supple- 
ment their earnings with off-farm employment. 

The devastating scale of foreclosures prompted 
many farmers to challenge the workings of capital- 



320 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FARM FORECLOSURES 




This farm foreclosure sale, held in Iowa in 1933, was one of many such sales that occurred throughout the Midwest during the 
Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



ism. Throughout the country, farmers vented their 
anger at public auctions that banks held to sell fore- 
closed property. In a phenomenon that came to be 
known as "penny auctions," farmers attending the 
auctions placed ridiculously low bids on the avail- 
able land. Anyone who attempted to significantly 
outbid these farmers faced jeers from the crowd and 
often risked violent reprisals. In many cases, dis- 
gruntled farmers managed to block foreclosure 
sales. 

As farmers decried the increase in farm foreclo- 
sures and bank failures, the Herbert Hoover admin- 
istration attempted to tackle the farm debt problem 
by establishing for the first time a government bu- 
reaucracy dedicated to helping farmers maintain 



prices. With a budget of $500 million, the Federal 
Farm Board was charged with making loans to farm 
marketing cooperatives and establishing corpora- 
tions that would raise farm prices by buying sur- 
pluses. However, Hoover did not commit enough 
money to the Farm Board to make it work. 

It was left to the Franklin Roosevelt administra- 
tion to address the farm debt crisis through its New 
Deal programs. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 
1933 grappled with the underlying problem of fall- 
ing farm prices through its crop production control 
program. The Farm Credit Administration provided 
much-needed mortgage relief to farmers. The Fed- 
eral Farm Bankruptcy Act of 1934, also known as 
the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act, enabled 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F U E 6 R E A F DEPRESSION 



321 



FARM 



POLICY 



some dispossessed farmers to regain their land 
even after foreclosure on their mortgages. Howev- 
er, the Supreme Court ruled this law unconstitu- 
tional in 1935. A number of states passed laws that 
attacked farm foreclosures directly. Between 1933 
and 1935, twenty-five states passed farm foreclo- 
sure moratorium laws that temporarily prevented 
banks and other creditors from foreclosing on farm- 
ers who could not afford to make their mortgage 
payments. Despite these measures, there was no 
significant decline in the average rate of farm fore- 
closures until after 1940. 

See Also: FARM CREDIT ADMINISTRATION (FCA); 
FARMERS' HOLIDAY ASSOCIATION (FHA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alston, Lee J. "Farm Foreclosures in the United States 
During the Interwar Period." Journal of Economic 
History 43 (1983): 885-903. 

Hamilton, David E. From New Day to New Deal: American 
Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928-1933. 
1991. 

Perkins, Van L. Crisis in Agriculture: The Agricultural Ad- 
justment Administration and the New Deal, 1933. 1969. 

Saloutos, Theodore, and John D. Hicks. Agricultural Dis- 
content in the Middle West, 1900-1939. 1951. 

Adrienne M. Petty 



FARM POLICY 

Farmers were among those hardest hit by the Great 
Depression. Their problems, however, had been 
around for nearly a decade. During World War I, 
European agriculture had been largely destroyed, 
and the U.S. government had been purchasing 
farm products. The result was inflated prices for 
many crops. From 1916 to 1919, for example, net 
farm income rose from $4 billion to $10 billion. In 
1920, however, a combination of agricultural recov- 
ery in Europe and an end to government purchases 
of wheat created a situation in which the market 
was flooded with surplus crops. A bushel of wheat 
quickly fell from $2.50 to less than a dollar. As 
prices tumbled, a decline exacerbated by the stock 
market crash of 1929, American farmers went from 
producing 16 percent to 9 percent of the national 
income. 



When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president 
in 1933, he promised in his inaugural speech on 
March 4, 1933, to restore the health of agriculture. 
If the purchasing power of farmers was restored, he 
believed, farmers would in turn help boost the de- 
mand for manufactured goods. This could be ac- 
complished, Roosevelt and many others believed, 
by decreasing production. Throughout the 1920s, 
agriculture had been characterized by overproduc- 
tion as more crops were produced than the market 
could handle, thereby effectively driving down the 
prices. Farmers, then, were seen by Roosevelt as the 
key to bringing the nation out of the Depression. 

Under the direction of Secretary of Agriculture 
Henry A. Wallace, the Roosevelt administration 
drew up the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The the- 
ory was that if production could be limited, then 
prices would rise, demand for farm commodities 
would more nearly match supply, and agriculture 
would recover. With these aims, the Act was 
pushed through Congress in May 1933. The Agri- 
cultural Adjustment Act gave subsidies to farmers 
based on the acreage of farmland that landowners 
either allowed to lie fallow or used for the produc- 
tion of non-surplus crops. For every bushel of corn, 
for example, that corn farmers did not raise, the 
government would pay them thirty cents. Over the 
next two years, while many Americans were starv- 
ing, over thirty million acres of cotton, corn, and 
wheat fields were taken out of production, with 
farmers receiving over $1.1 billion in government 
subsidies. 

The goals of the Agricultural Adjustment Act 
were largely attained; from 1932 to 1936, the price 
of a bushel of wheat almost tripled. And hogs, 
which had been selling at $3.34 per hundred 
pounds, rose to $9.37. In terms of overall income, 
farmers witnessed a rise of $1.8 billion to $5 billion. 
If landowners benefited from the Agricultural Ad- 
justment Act, those who worked their lands, such 
as tenant farmers and sharecroppers, did not. Al- 
though landowners were supposed to share the 
government payments with their tenants, they 
often failed to do so. Landowners, particularly in 
the South, pocketed the cash while evicting their 
tenants or sharecroppers, or cutting their acreage 
and simply not allowing them to grow cash crops. 



322 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FARM 



POLICY 




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A Farm Security Administration representative tries to convince three brothers in Box Elder county, Utah, in 1940 to form a 
cooperative to buy a tractor to replace their horses. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



In addition to the Agricultural Adjustment Act, 
the Roosevelt administration launched the Tennes- 
see Valley Authority, which was designed, in part, 
to aid the farmers of the rural South. In short, this 
public corporation held as central goals the genera- 
tion of electricity along the Tennessee River and the 
making and distributing of nitrogen-based fertiliz- 
er. Thus, while attempts were made to limit the 
production of cash crops through the Agricultural 
Adjustment Act, other attempts were simulta- 
neously made to increase the productivity of the 
farmers of the rural South. 

While the droughts, floods, and dust storms 
(such as the 1935 to 1940 dust storms that caused 
the Dust Bowl in the states of Oklahoma, Texas, 
Kansas, and Colorado) helped to reduce harvests 



and push up prices, new technologies counteracted 
the effects of such natural disasters, increasing pro- 
ductivity and driving small farmers from the land. 
In the 1930s, hybrid corn was developed and be- 
came increasingly popular among farmers in the 
Midwest. This new type of corn proved more resis- 
tant to disease and insects. In addition, the stalks 
grew straight and strong, the crop ripened all at 
once, and the ears were all at the same height, 
which meant that by using another new technolo- 
gy — the gasoline tractor — productivity would be in- 
creased. Even with other crops, such as cotton and 
new mechanical cotton-pickers, technology was 
used to increase production while the Roosevelt ad- 
ministration was simultaneously attempting to 
limit production. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



323 



f A R M SECURITY ADMINISTRATION ( T S A ) 



In Butler v. U.S. (1936) the U.S. Supreme Court 
ruled the Agricultural Adjustment Act to be uncon- 
stitutional. To replace it, Congress passed the Soil 
Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act in 1936. 
This law aimed at eliminating soil-depleting crops 
and subsidizing farmers with general revenues 
rather than a special tax. In 1938, however, produc- 
tion quotas returned with a second Agricultural Ad- 
justment Act. This farm bill, much like the original 
1933 Act, gave the federal government the authori- 
ty both to pay farmers not to plant crops and to set 
market prices for agricultural goods. Until World 
War II pulled the nation out of the Depression, sub- 
sidization served to reduce price inflation for agri- 
cultural goods and to increase net farm income. 

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT; AGRI- 
CULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMINISTRATION 
(AAA); AGRICULTURE; LAND USE PLANNING. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 
1933-40. 1989. 

Conrad, David E. The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of 
Sharecroppers in the New Deal. 1965. 

Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle. The Rise and Fall of the 
New Deal Order, 1930-1980. 1989. 

Hamilton, David E. From New Day to New Deal: American 
Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928-1933. 
1991. 

Kennedy, David. Freedom from Fear: The American People 
in Depression and War, 1929-1945. 1999. 

Kirkendall, Richard S. Social Scientists and Farm Politics in 
the Age of Roosevelt. 1966. 

Perkins, Van. Crisis in Agriculture: The Agricultural Adjust- 
ment Administration and the New Deal, 1933. 1969. 

Kim Richardson 



FARM SECURITY 
ADMINISTRATION (FSA) 

Through such novels as Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco 
Road (1932) and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of 
Wrath (1939), the American public became aware 
of the extent of farm poverty in the United States, 
which was not merely a product of the Depression 



but of long-term structural forces in the economy. 
The growth of tenancy, the impoverishment of 
soils, chronically low income, high levels of debt, 
and poor social services had produced a rural popu- 
lation that was "ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill- 
nourished," in the words of President Franklin D. 
Roosevelt's second inaugural address. 

Initially, the New Deal's agricultural programs 
actually contributed to rural misery. The Agricultur- 
al Adjustment Administration's (AAA) crop subsi- 
dization programs often did not reach the tenants 
and sharecroppers who were in most need of feder- 
al support, and these programs also encouraged 
landowners to displace tenants and mechanize 
their holdings. The Farm Security Administration 
(FSA), however, followed a different trajectory than 
the AAA, giving priority to welfare and social re- 
form goals and targeting poor, marginal farmers. 

The FSA succeeded the Resettlement Adminis- 
tration (RA), which had been created by executive 
order in May 1935. Various existing federal pro- 
grams relating to land conservation, resettlement, 
subsistence homesteads, greenbelt communities, 
and rural rehabilitation were consolidated under 
the RA. Rexford G. Tugwell, the RA's first adminis- 
trator, had ambitions for a technocratic program of 
land reform, reclamation, and relocation as the ad- 
ministration's primary initiatives against rural pov- 
erty. 



THE FSA'S DEPRESSION-ERA PROGRAMS 

The FSA was created by the Bankhead-Jones 
Farm Tenancy Act of July 1937 and was established 
as a division within the Department of Agriculture. 
Its first administrator was Will Alexander, who re- 
signed in 1940 and was succeeded by Calvin B. Bal- 
dwin. The FSA developed a more focused agenda 
and a more practical range of measures to help 
small farmers stay on the land and to improve the 
farmer's lot within agriculture. Rural rehabilitation 
grants or loans constituted the most important as- 
pect of the agency's work. The bulk of the FSA's ex- 
penditures were used for rehabilitation loans of be- 
tween $240 and $600, which were intended to 
finance farm improvements. Some 700,000 families, 
about one-ninth of the total number of farm fami- 
lies in the United States, received FSA loans. The 



324 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



FARM SECURITY 



D M I N I 5 T R A T I N 



F S A 




An FSA county supervisor examines a sheep belonging to a rehabilitation client in Gage county, Nebraska, in 1938. Library of 
Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



FSA also inherited from the RA some 195 commu- 
nity resettlement projects, which were designed to 
provide small farmers with productive land and 
modern facilities, the economic benefits of group 
marketing and purchasing arrangements, the social 
benefits of cooperative community services, and the 
expertise of the FSA's agricultural and home man- 
agement supervisors. Although these "instant com- 
munities" were criticized by FSA opponents for 
their flouting of the "American way," the resettle- 
ment projects never accounted for more than 10 
percent of the FSA's expenditures and they were 
downgraded in importance after 1937. 

Central to the political defense of the FSA's 
work was its role in helping tenants to become 
landowners. It is ironic that, while historians have 



come to regard the AAA as the New Deal's most 
revolutionary agency because of its influence in 
driving small farmers off the land, the FSA, conven- 
tionally described as one of the New Deal's most 
progressive agencies, was trying to retain them 
there. However, the FSA's performance never 
matched its Jeffersonian rhetoric. The adminis- 
tration helped only 44,300 tenants to purchase 
land, with applications exceeding awards by a ratio 
of about twenty to one. Tenant purchase alloca- 
tions accounted for only 13 percent of the aid 
dispensed by the Administration. The FSA also 
established camps for migratory laborers, and 
group medical services for small farmers, as well as 
various cooperative projects and debt adjustment 
programs. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



325 



f A R M SECURITY ADMINISTRATION ( T S A ) 










A rura/ couple in Weld County, Colorado, discuss their farm plan with an FSA supervisor in October 1939. Library of Congress, 
Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



Such an ambitious agenda required a large and 
decentralized bureaucracy; thus the FSA was divid- 
ed into twelve administrative regions. Each regional 
headquarters was supplemented by offices at state, 
district, and county levels, with project managers 
directing operations at the grass roots. By 1941 the 
FSA was organized in every state. Approximately 
three thousand county offices employed more than 
four thousand rural rehabilitation supervisors and 
more than four thousand home management su- 
pervisors around the country. However, the south- 
ern United States was the FSA's primary focus. 
More than 50 percent of county offices were located 
in the South, as were more than 60 percent of the 
rehabilitation and home management supervisors 
employed by the administration. Some eight thou- 
sand group projects were established in the South, 



and southern farmers accounted for 60 percent of 
all rehabilitation loans issued, 47 percent of the re- 
habilitation credit advanced, and 70 percent of all 
tenant purchase loans. Furthermore, over 20 per- 
cent of the FSA's resettlement projects were located 
in FSA region 4, which comprised the states of Ar- 
kansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. 

Southern blacks accounted for approximately 
22 to 25 percent of the FSA's rehabilitation clients, 
tenant purchase borrowers, and resettled farmers. 
Although this percentage did not equal the need 
among black farmers, the administration sought to 
ensure that its programs would benefit black Amer- 
icans. Will Alexander, who was also director of the 
Commission on Interracial Cooperation, was sup- 
ported by administrators within the FSA, including 



326 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



FARM 



S E C 



R I T Y 



D M I N I 5 T R A T I N 



F S A 



Constance Daniel and Joseph H. B. Evans, who 
were given specific responsibility for racial matters. 
To promote the agency to African Americans, the 
FSA purposefully channelled information about its 
programs through the black press and sought to ex- 
pand the number of African-Americans in the 
FSA's own workforce. However, localism often un- 
dermined these efforts, despite the fact that each of 
the three southern regional directors had a black 
advisor; by 1941 there were only eighteen African- 
American employees among the 1,500 total em- 
ployees of FSA's region 4. 

Although the FSA's programs and leaders were 
not radical, the agency was regarded with suspicion 
and hostility in some quarters. In the South, espe- 
cially, the FSA was underappreciated by the re- 
gion's leadership groups, in part because the ad- 
ministration challenged the central aspects of the 
plantation system: landlords' control of labor, mer- 
chants' monopoly of credit, and white control of 
race relations. The agency also worked outside 
those institutions, including the Extension Service, 
land grant colleges, county agricultural agents, and 
the American Farm Bureau Federation, that main- 
tained close relationships with the Department of 
Agriculture and through which federal aid to agri- 
culture was traditionally channelled. In addition, 
the FSA attracted criticism from representatives of 
the constituencies that it intended to serve. The 
Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the Socialist 
Party derided the administration's maintenance of 
the small farmer as "subsidized peasantry" and 
called for the establishment of agricultural coopera- 
tives to make farming efficient by achieving econo- 
mies of scale. Furthermore, the FSA often encoun- 
tered the opposition of local communities, 
particularly when it attempted to establish camps 
for migratory laborers nearby. 

The FSA's own clients provided no significant 
political counterweight to these powerful and well- 
connected adversaries. Invariably poor, disfran- 
chised, and unorganized, the FSA's constituency 
was politically marginal. It was, therefore, vital to 
the future of federal aid for small farmers to culti- 
vate a public and congressional mood of sympathy 
for their plight. This entailed overcoming reserva- 
tions about the "un-American" nature of assistance 



programs, reassuring individualist Americans who 
were apprehensive about the social and economic 
expansion of the federal government's role, and 
convincing the economy-minded that the cost was 
justified. 

To this end, the FSA maintained an Informa- 
tion Division, which was responsible for promoting 
the agency to the media and to politicians, as well 
as for disseminating policy and good practice in the 
regions. The Information Division's Historical Sec- 
tion, headed by Roy E. Stryker, compiled a visual 
documentary record of America in Depression and 
wartime. Over an eight-year period, FSA photogra- 
phers took more than 145,000 negatives, of which 
77,000 were developed into prints. Although initial- 
ly intended to provide instructional material to re- 
gional offices, the Historical Section organized ex- 
hibitions, developed filmstrips, and supplied 
photographic copy to the media in order to gener- 
ate support for the FSA's programs and raise 
awareness of the issues that they addressed. Many 
of the photographs produced by the project are re- 
garded as exemplary works of cultural significance, 
and the photographers who produced them, in- 
cluding Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben 
Shahn, are celebrated as leading exponents of doc- 
umentary photography. 



THE FSA DURING WARTIME 

After Roosevelt's announcement of a program 
of national defense in May 1940, the FSA adjusted 
its role to support preparedness. It initiated a "Food 
for Defense" program that sought to increase pro- 
duction of premium foodstuffs, such as hogs, chick- 
ens, and dairy products. The agency also became 
responsible for farm families displaced by the ac- 
quisition of land for defense purposes, and the FSA 
was assigned to provide accommodation for de- 
fense workers. Under the Lanham Defense Hous- 
ing Act of October 1940, the FSA embarked on a 
number of prefabricated housing programs, such as 
those at Radford and Pulaski in western Virginia. 
After Congress appropriated funds for the Tempo- 
rary Shelter Program for defense workers in March 
1941, the FSA established trailer parks in the princi- 
pal industrial centers. There were strong elements 
of continuity in the agency's wartime preparedness 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



327 



FASCISM 



work, which grew out of the FSA's well-established 
organizational and policy objectives of stimulation 
of productivity, diversification of small farms, and 
provision of aid to displaced persons and homeless 
workers. 

Although the FSA sought to adapt to the na- 
tion's wartime needs, its political position eroded as 
agriculture became crucial to lend-lease and to the 
war effort. The Farm Bureau, which represented the 
nation's larger farmers, was determined to termi- 
nate the FSA, and the bureau found allies in con- 
servatives of both parties, including Senator Ken- 
neth McKellar of Tennessee, Representative 
Clarence Cannon of Missouri, and Representative 
Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois. In December 1941 
there was a serious move by Senator Harry Byrd of 
Virginia to abolish the agency; although Byrd's ef- 
fort was unsuccessful, the FSA's funding was cut by 
30 percent for the 1942 to 1943 fiscal year. In April 
1943, the House passed an appropriations bill that 
effectively terminated the FSA, although the agency 
was not officially disbanded until 1946 and some of 
its credit functions were subsequently adopted by 
the Farmers Home Administration. The FSA was 
unable to survive the prospering of the agricultural 
community during wartime and the burgeoning 
power of the Farm Bureau, whose administrators 
were able to use the wartime emergency to disman- 
tle much of the apparatus by which the federal gov- 
ernment managed the agricultural economy, as 
well as eliminate competition and ensure an ade- 
quate labor supply for its members. The Farm Bu- 
reau and its political allies were united by an under- 
lying ideological objection to the FSA that related 
not only to the social class and race of the FSA's 
constituents, but to the association of welfare and 
state intervention with alien and radical ideas. 

See Also: EVANS, WALKER; FARM POLICY; LANGE, 
DORTHEA; RESETTLEMENT ASSOCIATION (RA); 
SHAHN, BEN. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Baldwin, Sidney. Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline 
of the Farm Security Administration. 1968. 

Conkin, Paul K. Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal 
Community Program. 1976. 

Conrad, David E. The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of 
Sharecroppers in the New Deal. 1965. 



Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land: The Transformation of 
Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880. 1985. 

Dykeman, Wilma, and James Stokely. Seeds of Southern 
Change: The Life of Will Alexander. 1976. 

Grubbs, Donald H. Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Ten- 
ant Farmers' Union and the New Deal. 1971. 

Holley, Donald. Uncle Sam's Farmers: The New Deal Com- 
munities in the Lower Mississippi Valley. 1975. 

Hurley, F. Jack. Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the 
Development of Documentary Photography in the Thir- 
ties. 1972. 

Kidd, Stuart. "Bureaucratic Dynamics and Control of the 
New Deal's Publicity: Struggles between Core and 
Periphery in the FSA's Information Division." In The 
Roosevelt Years: New Perspectives on American History, 
1933-1945, edited by Robert A. Garson and Stuart 
Kidd. 1999. 

Kirkendall, Richard. "The New Deal and Agriculture." In 
The New Deal, Vol. 1: The National Level, edited by 
John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David 
Brody, 1975. 

Mertz, Paul E. New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Pover- 
ty. 1978. 

Stuart Kidd 



FASCISM 

The Communist International in 1933 defined fas- 
cism in power as "the open terrorist dictatorship of 
the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most im- 
perialist elements of finance capital." Others have 
interpreted fascism as a middle-class radical move- 
ment, a cultural revolution, a state power indepen- 
dent of classes, and as a reaction to or a force for 
modernization. 

Fascism is an ultra-right movement that 
emerged in a period of crisis in European society. 
Like other right-wing parties and movements be- 
fore World War II, fascism opposed democracy, lib- 
eralism, socialism, and communism and empha- 
sized support for hierarchy, nationalism, militarism, 
aggressive imperialism, and women's subordina- 
tion. In seeking power, fascist movements were or- 
ganized around a charismatic leader, used the tech- 
niques of mass politics to win support from the 
middle strata of war veterans, shop owners, arti- 
sans, and white-collar workers, and sought to con- 



328 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



FASCISM 



trol the streets with the use of paramilitary bands. 
When they came to power, fascists ended parlia- 
mentary systems and terrorized their opponents. 
The Nazi variant claimed a race-based superiority 
for "Aryans" and embraced a virulent anti- 
Semitism both to designate a scapegoat for Germa- 
ny's problems and to be able to bribe supporters 
with property and positions taken from German 
Jews. 

The first fascist movement was that of Italy's 
Benito Mussolini, who came to power with the aid 
of conservative elites seeking to put down the revo- 
lutionary workers' movement arising after World 
War I. The international influence of fascism greatly 
increased when the Nazis assumed power in Ger- 
many in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression. 
Significant fascist movements arose in Hungary, 
Austria, and Romania, and smaller fascist move- 
ments, such as the Falange in Spain, became im- 
portant with support from Germany and Italy. Ger- 
many's power led many authoritarian leaders in 
Europe to ally with the Nazis. Support for the fas- 
cist example existed in Latin America, but only Ar- 
gentina favored the Axis in World War II. The third 
Axis power, Japan, was authoritarian, militaristic, 
nationalist, anticommunist, and aggressive, but its 
attempt at a fascist mass politics, the Imperial Rule 
Assistance Association, had limited impact. 

Fascism had limited appeal in the United States 
in the 1930s, but, given its growth internationally, 
liberals and leftists were worried about the poten- 
tial for it. Important cultural manifestations of this 
fear were Sinclair Lewis's play It Can't Happen Here, 
performed simultaneously by seventeen Federal 
Theatre Project troupes in 1935, and such films as 
Anatole Litvak's Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) 
and Frank Capra's Meet John Doe (1941). 

Small, distinctly fascist organizations in the 
United States included the Silver Shirt Legion and 
the Defenders of the Christian Faith, but more im- 
portant were ethnic-based groups. Mussolini re- 
ceived favorable press coverage in the United States 
before his alliance with Adolf Hitler, and there was 
majority support for his government in Italian- 
American communities on nationalist grounds. 
Most Italian -American newspapers supported 
Mussolini, and fascist organizations were influen- 




Fascist leaders Benito Mussolini (left) of Italy and Adolf Hitler 
of Germany during a parade ceremony, 1939. Muzej Revolucije 

Narodnosti Jugoslavia, courtesy of United States Holocaust 
Memorial Museum Photo Archives 



tial in the community. However, Italian Americans 
opposed the anti-Semitic decrees issued by Musso- 
lini in 1938. The German-American Bund, which 
emphasized anti-Semitism, anti- communism, and 
alleged unfair treatment in the United States of 
German Americans, gained a degree of control over 
some German-American community groups. Re- 
calling the negative attacks on everything German 
in the World War I period, German-American or- 
ganizations were slow to criticize the Nazis. In 
1938, with increased criticism of Nazi anti- 
Semitism and fears rising that Nazism was an ex- 
ternal and internal danger to the United States, 
German Americans spoke out against Nazism. 

Important movements that may be regarded as 
semi-fascist include the National Union for Social 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



3Z9 



FATHER DIVINE 



Justice led by Father Charles Coughlin. Emerging as 
an important radio personality in the early Depres- 
sion years, Coughlin's organization was anti- 
communist and organized around devotion to him 
personally. Coughlin was stridently anti-Semitic 
and hostile to the Allied cause in World War II. 
Whether the movement led by Huey Long can also 
be characterized as fascist or semi-fascist is in dis- 
pute. Long was authoritarian in his conduct of the 
government of Louisiana, anti- communist, and 
demagogic in his calls to make "Every Man a King" 
and "Share Our Wealth." On the other hand, Long 
opposed the oligarchy in Louisiana, called for tax- 
ing the rich, and did not appeal to racism in a region 
in which movements of the political right usually 
emphasized racism. 

Important Americans who lent support to fas- 
cism included Henry Ford, who disseminated the 
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion forgery in the 
1920s, employed the leader of the Bund, and ac- 
cepted a medal from Nazi Germany in 1938. Famed 
aviator and isolationist Charles Lindbergh likewise 
accepted a medal, as did IBM president Thomas J. 
Watson, although Watson returned his in 1940. 

See Also: COUGHLIN, CHARLES; DICTATORSHIP; 
EUROPE, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; HITLER, 
ADOLF; MUSSOLINI, BENITO; SPANISH CIVIL 
WAR. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Baldwin, Neil. Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Produc- 
tion of Hate. 2001. 

Bayor, Ronald H. Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Ger- 
mans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929-1941. 
1988. 

Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Move- 
ments to the New Right in American History. 1988. 

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father 
Coughlin, and the Great Depression. 1982. 

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the 
World, 1914-1991. 1994. 

Jeansonne, Glen. Messiah of the Masses: Huey P. Long and 
the Great Depression. 1993. 

Levine, Lawrence W. The Unpredictable Past: Explorations 
in American Cultural History. 1993. 

Payne, Stanley G. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945. 1995. 

Warren, Donald. Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father 
of Hate Radio. 1996. 

Martin Halpern 



FATHER DIVINE 



Father Divine (May 1879-September 10, 1965), the 
noted and controversial founder of the Peace Mis- 
sion movement, gained national prominence dur- 
ing the Great Depression for his ability to feed and 
provide jobs for the poor, as well as for his follow- 
ers' claims that he was God. 

Born George Baker in Rockville, Maryland, in 
1879, Divine grew up in poverty and segregation, 
the son of ex-slaves who were menial laborers. Al- 
though he had limited educational opportunities, 
he became an avid reader of religious literature. In 
1899, he moved to Baltimore, where he worked as 
a gardener and taught Sunday school in a storefront 
church. During these years, Baker formulated a 
unique theology that blended New Thought (the 
mind power philosophy that encouraged believers 
to channel God's inner presence for happiness, 
prosperity, and health), African-American Chris- 
tianity, Pentecostalism, and other religious ideolo- 
gies. In 1912, convinced that he had achieved one- 
ness with God, he set out as an itinerant preacher 
and attracted a small following who recognized his 
divinity. 

In 1919, Baker, now known as Father Divine, 
settled with his flock and lived peacefully in Sayvil- 
le, Long Island. But with the onset of the Depres- 
sion, Divine's congregation expanded and his white 
neighbors turned hostile and complained, which 
lead to his conviction in 1932 for maintaining a 
public nuisance. Only four days after handing down 
the maximum sentence, the presiding judge died 
suddenly. The incident propelled Father Divine into 
the national limelight. 

After his conviction was overturned, Divine re- 
located his headquarters to Harlem, where interest 
in his teachings boomed. Thousands attended 
Peace Mission banquets and rallies. Nationwide 
disciples followed his example by pooling their re- 
sources to open up Peace Missions and collective 
business endeavors. Additionally, Divine cam- 
paigned vigorously for civil rights, sponsoring voter 
registration drives and various challenges to segre- 
gation. Divine emerged as a critic of Franklin De- 
lano Roosevelt. Charging that Roosevelt's New 
Deal perpetuated dependency, Divine preached 



330 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



F A 



L K N £ R 



WILLIAM 



self-reliance and collective capitalism. He also at- 
tacked Roosevelt's refusal to address racial issues 
and endorse anti-lynching legislation. 

The Peace Mission movement was one of the 
few genuinely integrated organizations of the 1930s 
and offered hope to a variety of Americans. Cer- 
tainly, many were drawn to Father Divine for their 
basic needs. But his social agenda, as well as his 
conviction that everyone could achieve success 
through positive thinking, was particularly empow- 
ering for both blacks, whose community had his- 
torically languished economically in depression, 
and whites who were also confronting economic 
chaos. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; CHARITY; RELIGION. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Watts, Jill. God, Harlem U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story. 
1992. 

Weisbrot, Robert. Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial 
Equality. 1983. 



Jill Watts 



FAULKNER, WILLIAM 



William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 
1897-July 6, 1962) is one of America's most impor- 
tant and highly regarded writers of fiction. Al- 
though his literary career spanned four decades, al- 
most all of his most important work dates from 
between 1929 and 1942, a period beginning with 
the appearance of his novels Sartoris (1929) and The 
Sound and the Fury (1929), and closing with Go 
Down, Moses (1942). Faulkner's work is perhaps 
most noted for its complex narrative structure and 
its dazzling use of language and voice. 

Born in New Albany, Mississippi, into a promi- 
nent (though somewhat declining) north Mississip- 
pi family, Faulkner spent most of his childhood 
down the road in Oxford, where his family moved 
in 1902. In 1915, Faulkner dropped out of high 
school to pursue a career in writing, first as poet 
and later as fiction writer. Encouraged and sup- 



ported by Oxford lawyer Phil Stone, Faulkner 
began a series of travels that took him to the North- 
east, Canada, Europe, and New Orleans, with occa- 
sional stops back in Oxford. Strongly influenced by 
Sherwood Anderson, whom he first met in 1924 
while living in New Orleans, Faulkner published 
his first two novels, Soldier's Pay (1926) and Mos- 
quitoes (1927), to limited critical success. 

In the late 1920s, Faulkner returned to Oxford 
and turned his literary efforts almost exclusively to 
works exploring life in north Mississippi. In a num- 
ber of his best novels and stories, including Sartoris 
(1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay 
Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August 
(1932) , Absalom 1 . Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished 
(1938), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses 
(1942), Faulkner portrayed with often dizzying 
complexity the life and history of his fictional Mis- 
sissippi county, Yoknapatawpha. Something close 
to tragic doom cloaks almost all of Faulkner's work, 
particularly in his portrayal of the South's massive 
cultural transformations wrought by forces of intol- 
erance, modernization, and greed. 

Faulkner's critical reputation — and financial 
solvency — floundered precariously until the late 
1940s, when publication of Malcolm Cowley's The 
Portable Faulkner initiated a resurgence of interest. 
Capping this stunning critical reappraisal was 
Faulkner's receiving of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Lit- 
erature. Although he continued to write until his 
death in 1962, little of Faulkner's later fiction 
matches the power, intensity, and complexity of his 
work from the late 1920s through the early 1940s. 

Faulkner is now regarded as one of America's 
and the world's greatest writers. His writing style, 
dense and packed at times to the bursting point, 
embodies his belief that every moment of existence 
is pressured almost to suffocation by all that has 
come before — the past, as he said, is never past. His 
experiments with narrative form and structure mark 
Faulkner as one of the greats of high modernism, 
and profoundly influenced the shape of the twenti- 
eth-century novel. Nowhere was his influence 
more dominant than in the development of twenti- 
eth-century Southern literature, where not only his 
narrative fireworks but also his thematic con- 
cerns — particularly the grinding conflict between 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



331 



F A U S E T 



CRYSTAL 



BIRD 



the traditional and the modern — became for several 
generations touchstones of Southern expression. 

See Also: LITERATURE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. 1974. 

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha 
Country. 1963. 

Gray, Richard. The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Bi- 
ography. 1994. 

Minter, David. William Faulkner: His Life and Work. 1980. 

Singal, Daniel. William Faulkner: The Making of a Mod- 
ernist. 1997. 

Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. 
1993. 

Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. 



FAUSET, CRYSTAL BIRD 

Elected as a Democrat from Philadelphia, Pennsyl- 
vania, Crystal Bird Fauset (June 27, 1894-March 28, 
1965) was the first African-American woman state 
legislator in the United States. She was born in 
Princess Anne, Maryland, and grew up in Boston. 
From 1918 to 1926, she worked for the Young 
Women's Christian Association (YWCA) as field 
secretary and adviser for the Program for Younger 
Girls. In 1931, Bird graduated with a bachelor's de- 
gree from the Teachers College of Columbia Uni- 
versity in New York. She was married to Arthur 
Huff Fauset from 1935 to 1944. 

During the early years of the Great Depression, 
Oscar DePriest was the lone black congressman 
and thus blacks sought political change primarily at 
the state and local level. Here Bird was effective. 
From 1933 to 1935 she worked for Swarthmore 
College's Institute of Race Relations in Pennsylva- 
nia. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became pres- 
ident, Crystal Bird became a member of the Demo- 
cratic Party; as director of Negro women's activities 
in Philadelphia, she encouraged black women to 
participate in politics. After this, she was appointed 
director of the Women and Professional Project in 
the Works Progress Administration (WPA) pro- 
gram in Philadelphia, where she succeeded in get- 
ting more black women employed. 



In 1935, while serving on the Federal Housing 
Advisory Board, Fauset advocated better urban 
housing for the poor. In 1938 she won election to 
the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where 
she sponsored legislation protecting women in the 
workplace. In 1939, however, Fauset resigned her 
house seat, and through the influence of her friend, 
first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she became assistant 
director of education and recreation programs for 
the Pennsylvania WPA. Two years later, Fauset be- 
came a member of the so-called Roosevelt black 
cabinet in Washington, D.C., which included Mary 
McLeod Bethune and Arthur W. Mitchell, among 
others. As head of the race relations division of the 
Office of Civilian Affairs (OCD), Fauset promoted 
civil defense planning in the black community, re- 
cruited blacks for the military, and monitored com- 
plaints about race discrimination. Disappointed 
with the Roosevelt administration's record on civil 
rights, she bolted the Democratic Party in 1944 to 
support Republican presidential candidate Thomas 
E. Dewey, who rewarded Fauset's switch to the 
GOP by appointing her to the Republican National 
Committee's division on Negro affairs. During the 
postwar period Fauset was a strong supporter of 
African independence and she was active in local 
politics in Philadelphia. She died in Philadelphia in 
1965. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; DE PRIEST, OSCAR; 
RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Banner-Haley, Charles Pete T. To Do Good and To Do 
Well: Middle-Class Blacks and the Depression, Phila- 
delphia, 1929-1941. 1993. 

Smith, Eric Ledell. "Crystal Bird Fauset Raises Her Vote 
for Human Rights." Pennsylvania Heritage 13, no. 1 
(winter 1997): 34-39. 

Weatherford, Doris. "Crystal Bird Fauset." In American 
Women's History: An A to Z of People, Organizations, 
Issues, and Events. 1994. 

Eric Ledell Smith 



FCA. See FARM CREDIT ADMINISTRATION. 



332 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL 



R T PROJECT ( F A P ) 



FCC. See FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS 
COMMISSION. 



FCIC. See FEDERAL CROP INSURANCE 
CORPORATION. 



FDIC. See FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE 
CORPORATION. 



FEDERAL ART PROJECT (FAP) 

The Federal Art Project (FAP) was created in Au- 
gust 1935 as one of several cultural programs within 
the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 
New Deal. Other agencies were established simul- 
taneously to support American theater, writing, and 
music. The FAP, under the direction of Holger 
Cahill from its inception until its closing in 1943, 
marked an important symbolic change in federal 
governmental subvention for the visual arts. Before 
its creation, state art patronage had been funded 
entirely by the U. S. Treasury and had been gov- 
erned by the principle of commissioning great art 
that celebrated the United States and its history 
since the American Revolution. Murals were com- 
missioned and painted in federal buildings such as 
courts, customs houses, and post offices. Works of 
the highest quality, based on European history- 
painting conventions and values, were placed in all 
the federal buildings in Washington, D.C., essen- 
tially as propagandistic adornments. In contrast, 
the purpose of the FAP, as part of the WPA, was not 
to commission the best artists to celebrate the na- 
tion-state, but to provide work relief for the thou- 
sands of painters, sculptors, and graphic designers 
who had been thrown out of work by the Depres- 
sion in the early 1930s. 

Holger Cahill, who had been a museum direc- 
tor and specialist in American crafts history before 
leading the FAP, had a Utopian sense of the possi- 
ble future of his organization and its role in creating 
a cultural democracy in the United States. Although 
this vision chimed with the idealism of some radical 




Crystal Bird Fauset, 1943. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division. FSA/OWI Collection 



(left-wing) New Dealers in government, the actual 
history of the FAP demonstrates the pragmatism of 
New Deal agencies and the contingent turns and 
twists in Roosevelt's statecraft during the 1930s. 

The FAP operated a number of programs that 
utilized artists and artworks in different and some- 
times contradictory ways. Cahill had overall control 
but considerable power was held by the managers 
of specific sections that dealt with recruitment of 
artists, organization of their work patterns, and de- 
termination of their art tasks. The FAP operated na- 
tionally, in every state, and was fairly decentralized 
in management. The majority of artists, however, 
were based in New York City, and it was their work 
that attracted the most attention, both from the 
mass media and from other parts of government 
disturbed by the leftist profile the arts program 
began to develop by 1936. 

The FAP Easel Division paid artists to paint and 
sculpt in return for a weekly wage. This employ- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



333 



FEDERAL ART PROJECT (TAP 




Among its many initiatives, the Federal Art Project (FAP) 
organized free art classes, as announced by this poster during 
the late 1930s. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs 
Division, WPA Poster Collection 



merit of artists as wage laborers in some ways was 
the most radical aspect of the program because it 
ostensibly treated painters and sculptors as no dif- 
ferent from any other kind of worker in American 
society. Controversies recurred over how and 
whom to select for the program, and how to assess 
their work alongside all the other forms of manual 
labor supported by New Deal agencies. Many well- 
known artists found work on this scheme in New 
York, including Stuart Davis and Willem de Koo- 
ning. Unfortunately, many of the thousands of 
paintings and sculptures produced were destroyed 
either directly by the government (who retained 
control of them) on a variety of grounds — some 
local officials had reasoned, for instance, that the art 



works were created only for the duration of the 
Federal Art Project and therefore should be de- 
stroyed when the project ended — or inadvertently, 
through its lack of care in their storage or mainte- 
nance in situ. 

The FAP also operated a mural division that 
commissioned artists to design and install large- 
scale paintings in a range of federal buildings, in- 
cluding hospitals, prisons, and airports. Some of 
these artists who produced work as part of this 
scheme became well known in the 1950s as abstract 
expressionists, including Arshile Gorky, who paint- 
ed a mural called Aviation: Evolution of Forms under 
Aerodynamic Limitations (1936) at Newark Airport, 
and Philip Guston, who worked on a mural called 
Maintaining America's Skills (1939-1940) at the New 
York World's Fair WPA pavilion. Many hundreds of 
murals were placed in buildings across the country 
in a process that involved the local representatives 
of prospective host institutions. Relatively few cases 
of dissatisfaction are recorded. FAP art, on the 
whole, was subject to relatively few charges of pro- 
paganda. 

By the late 1930s, however, anticommunist 
forces in government and in the press attacked the 
FAP as a left-wing organization, saw that its fund- 
ing was reduced or suspended, and attempted to 
intimidate its administrators, who, for the most 
part, continued to believe that the program was an 
instrument for radical social change in the country. 
By that time, however, the radicalism of the New 
Deal had evaporated, a casualty of the decline in 
popular support for peacetime Roosevelt, the re- 
emergence of a conservative coalition in Congress, 
and the end of already heavily strained alliances be- 
tween the administration and antifascist organiza- 
tions in the United States. 

By the end of 1943 the FAP had been wrapped 
up, reorganized, and renamed, shorn entirely of the 
idealism and populism that had motivated its lead- 
ers and many of its artists for nearly eight years. 
Artists who had painted easel pictures, or murals in 
federal buildings, or organized art education in the 
FAP's community art center scheme, or contributed 
drawings to its Index of American Design, had either 
been sacked or set to work for the military, produc- 
ing camouflage patterns or illustrations for guide- 



334 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL ARE P R J E C E ( F A P ) 




The Federal Art Project sponsored the -painting of murals in public buildings across the country, including these by Reginald 
Marsh on the dome of the New York City Customs House in Manhattan. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



books for U. S. soldiers about to invade the coun- 
try's enemies. Only about $35 million was ever 
spent on FAP activities — less than one percent of 
federal works funding in the New Deal. In symbolic 
terms, however, as an intervention into the nation's 
culture motivated by a history of democratic ideal- 
ism that long preceded Roosevelt's presidency, the 
FAP was important, and it continues to figure in de- 
bates about the role of artists and the place of art 
in contemporary American society. 



See Also: AMERICAN SCENE, THE; ART; CAHILL, 
HOLGER; FEDERAL ONE; WORKS PROGRESS 
ADMENISTRATION (WPA). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Berman, Greta. The Lost Years: Mural Painting in New 
York City under the Works Progress Administration 
Federal Art Project, 1935-1943. 1978. 

Cahill, Holger. New Horizons in American Art. 1936. 

Christensen, Erwin O. The Index of American Design. 
1950. 

Contreras, Belisario R. Tradition and Innovation in New 
Deal Art. 1983. 

Harris, Jonathan. "Art, Histories and Politics: The New 
Deal Art Projects and American Modernism." Ideas 
and Production 5 (spring 1986): 104-119. 

Harris, Jonathan. Federal Art and National Culture: The 
Politics of Identity in New Deal America. 1995. 

Harrison, Helen A., ed. Dawn of a New Day: The New York 
World Fair, 1939-40. 1980. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



335 



FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION 



F C C 



McDonald, William F. Federal Relief Administration and 
the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the 
Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration. 
1969. 

McKinzie, Robert. The New Deal for Artists. 1973. 

Marling, Karal A. Wall-to-W all America: A Cultural Histo- 
ry of Post-Off ce Murals in the Great Depression. 1982. 

Melosh, Barbara. Engendering Culture: Manhood and 
Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theatre. 1991. 

O'Connor, Francis V. Federal Support for the Visual Arts: 
The New Deal and Now. 1969. 

O'Connor, Francis V., ed. Art for the Millions: Essays from 
the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the Works 
Progress Administration Federal Art Project. 1973. 

Park, Marlene, and Gerald E. Markowitz, eds. New Deal 
for Art: The Government Art Projects of the 1930s, with 
Examples from New York City and State. 1977. 

Jonathan Harris 



FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS 
COMMISSION (FCC) 

The Federal Communication Commission (FCC), 
an independent governmental agency, has the re- 
sponsibility of regulating both wired and wireless 
communication in the United States. Created in 
1934, the FCC took over responsibilities that had 
been divided between the Interstate Commerce 
Commission, the U.S. Post Office and the Depart- 
ment of Commerce. Its broad mandate gave it juris- 
diction over radio, telegraph, wire, and cable opera- 
tions and, by extension, made it responsible for 
television and other forms of new communication 
as they appeared on the scene in ensuing decades. 
It replaced the Federal Radio Commission, set up 
by the Radio Act of 1927, and was charged with the 
orderly development of broadcasting — but not cen- 
sorship of content — as well as with ensuring tele- 
phone and telegraph services at reasonable rates. It 
also was given supervision of the National Emer- 
gency Broadcast system, a coordinated effort to use 
licensed communications services for national de- 
fense purposes. 

The importance of radio during the Depression 
helped lead to quick passage of the legislation es- 
tablishing the FCC. There was widespread agree- 



ment that the Radio Commission had failed to solve 
technical, economic, and political questions in- 
volved in broadcasting and that unified regulation 
of communications was needed. President Herbert 
Hoover, who had been behind passage of the 1927 
legislation, however, blocked a more comprehen- 
sive act with a pocket veto in 1933. Soon after tak- 
ing office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt estab- 
lished a committee to study communication issues. 
It recommended in January 1934 that a federal 
agency be set up to ensure competition, regulate 
charges, extend services, and oversee mergers in 
the communications field. In a message to Con- 
gress on February 26, 1934, Roosevelt proposed 
transferring existing regulatory functions to a new 
federal commission. 

The president's position was in line with New 
Deal policies on regulation in general. Under his 
leadership Congress established three other regula- 
tory bodies, the National Labor Relations Board, 
the Civil Aeronautics Authority, and the Securities 
and Exchange Commission. Including the FCC, 
these bodies were vested with wide-ranging discre- 
tionary power limited only by narrow judicial re- 
view. Their aim was to provide a forum in which the 
clash of business and governmental interests could 
be resolved peacefully in the depths of the Depres- 
sion. The establishment of these agencies showed 
New Deal interest in regulating combinations of 
businesses rather than protecting individual small 
businesses. In the case of the FCC, Congress acted, 
in effect, to permit a concentrated radio system, 
which became increasing dominated by commer- 
cial networks, as radio grew in political, economic, 
and social importance during the 1930s. 

The FCC came into existence when Congress 
passed the Communications Act on May 31, 1934, 
and Roosevelt signed it into law on June 19. Pas- 
sage came after David Sarnoff, president of the 
Radio Corporation of America (RCA), and other in- 
dustry leaders testified at congressional hearings 
that consolidated regulation was essential for es- 
tablishment of effective national communication 
policy. Under the act, the Congress vested almost 
unlimited discretion in the FCC, giving it authority 
to allocate the airwaves by issuing licenses to 
broadcasters for a period of three years. The com- 



336 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL CROP INSURANCE C R P R A E I N ( F C I C ) 



mission was directed to take into account public 
convenience, interest, and necessity. 

The legislation called for a bipartisan commis- 
sion of seven members appointed by the president 
with the consent of the Senate to serve for seven 
years each, with one member to be named chair. 
The commission held its first meeting in Washing- 
ton on July 11, 1934, and voted unanimously to 
continue the status quo in broadcast regulation put 
in place by the Federal Radio Commission. Herbert 
L. Pettey, who had been named secretary of the 
radio commission after serving as radio director of 
Roosevelt's 1932 presidential campaign, was ap- 
pointed FCC secretary, and other employees of the 
radio commission also moved over to the FCC. 

The agency was organized into four main oper- 
ating divisions. The common carrier bureau regu- 
lated communications services; the broadcast bu- 
reau licensed radio stations; the safety and special 
radio service bureau supervised aviation, emergen- 
cy, taxi, and amateur communications; and the en- 
gineering bureau conducted licensing examina- 
tions. Established with a budget of $1,146,885 and 
a staff of 442, the FCC initially oversaw about eight 
hundred commercial and educational radio sta- 
tions. 

In following years, a multitude of technical and 
political issues confronted the FCC as television, 
computers, and satellite communication emerged. 
Critics contended the FCC was too responsive to 
business and not attuned to educational interests. 
Nevertheless, the wide-ranging and vaguely de- 
fined powers given the commission in 1934 allowed 
it to deal with enormous changes in communica- 
tion in the twentieth century. 

See Also: COMMUNICATIONS ACT OF 1934; 

COMMUNICATIONS AND THE PRESS; RADIO. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Barnouw, Eric. The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting 
in the United States, 1933-1953, Vol. 2. 1968. 

Emery, Walter B. Broadcasting & Government: Responsibili- 
ties and Regulations. 1971. 

Federal Communications Commission Annual Reports, 
1935-1940. 

General Records of the Federal Communications Com- 
mission, 1934-1971. Record Group 173.5. U.S. Na- 



tional Archives and Records Administration, Wash- 
ington, D.C. 

Herbert L. Pettey Collection. Library of American Broad- 
casting. University of Maryland, College Park, Mary- 
land. 

Rosen, Philip. The Modern Stentor: Radio Broadcasting & 
the Federal Government. 1920-1934. 1980. 

Schwartz, Bernard, ed. The Economic Regulation of Busi- 
ness and Industry: A Legislative History of U.S. Regula- 
tory Agencies, Vol. 4. 1973. 

Taishoff, Sol. "Radio Status Quo as FCC Convenes." 
Broadcasting 6, no. 1 (1934): 30-31. 

Maurine H. Beasley 



FEDERAL CROP INSURANCE 
CORPORATION (FCIC) 

The Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) 
was established by Congress under the Federal 
Crop Insurance Act, or Title V of the Agricultural 
Adjustment Act of 1938. Thereby, the United States 
became the first nation to extend crop insurance to 
farmers. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace 
championed crop insurance not only as a means of 
reducing farmers' economic risk but as a way to sta- 
bilize grain supplies and promote what Wallace 
called an ever-normal granary. 

Wallace chaired a presidential Committee on 
Crop Insurance from 1936 to 1937. Acting upon the 
committee's recommendation, Congress created 
the FCIC within the Department of Agriculture. 
Congress authorized the FCIC to insure 50 to 75 
percent of a farmer's average wheat harvest against 
losses from "unavoidable" calamities, including 
"drought, flood, hail, wind, winterkill, lightning, 
tornado, insect infestation, [or] plant disease." 
County committees for the Agricultural Adjustment 
Administration calculated premiums for the pro- 
gram. Premiums and claims could be paid in wheat 
or cash, but the FCIC maintained its reserves in 
grain in order to be able to compensate for changes 
in wheat prices. Planners hoped the program would 
even out the grain supply, with the government 
stockpiling wheat in abundant years when few 
claims were payable, and selling wheat from its 
storehouses in years of low harvests and numerous 
claims. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



337 



FEDERAL CROP INSURANCE CORPORATION ( F C I C 




A farmer -posts an ever-normal granary sign to his corn crib. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



In 1939, its first year of operation, the FCIC in- 
sured 165,775 farms and disbursed 2.6 million more 
bushels in indemnities than it collected in premi- 
ums. In 1940 the agency began insuring cotton as 
well as wheat. From 1939 to 1943, the U.S. Treasury 
heavily subsidized the FCIC. As a result of the 
FCIC's poor financial performance, Congress elimi- 
nated the program in mid-1943, only to reinstitute 
and expand it while doubling the FCIC's budget in 
1944. Beginning in 1945, Congress also permitted 
the FCIC to experiment with insuring any crop if 
adequate data existed for determining premiums. 
As a result of continued losses, Congress scaled 
back the FCIC's operations in 1947. In 1948, the 
agency insured farmers in only 375 counties, down 
from 2,500 counties in the preceding year. The 
changes helped to place the FCIC on a firmer finan- 



cial footing, and during the 1950s and 1960s the 
agency gradually extended its activities as it experi- 
mented with insuring many crops on a piecemeal 
basis. Despite the modest expansion, by 1974 the 
agency insured only 7.5 percent of the nation's har- 
vested cropland. In 1980, Congress removed key re- 
strictions that it had imposed on the agency in 1947 
and permitted the FCIC to insure any crop for 
which sufficient actuarial data existed in any agri- 
cultural county. In 1994, the nation's lawmakers 
made crop insurance a prerequisite for federal loans 
or payments under governmental price support 
programs. Congress ended its experiment with 
mandatory participation in 1996, but it prohibited 
growers from receiving any disaster benefits from 
the government unless they had purchased crop in- 
surance. In 2000, Congress permitted private com- 



338 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL DEPOSIT 



INSURANCE 



C R P R A T 



N 



( E D I C ) 



panies to submit proposals to the FCIC for insur- 
ance plans that either supplemented or supplanted 
insurance contracts offered by the agency. 

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT; FARM 
POLICY; WALLACE, HENRY A. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Benedict, Murray R. Farm Policies in the United States, 
1790-1950: A Study of the Origins and Development. 
1953. 

Kramer, Randall A. "Federal Crop Insurance, 
1938-1982." Agricultural History 57 (1983): 181-200. 

Risk Management Agency Online. U.S. Department of 
Agriculture . http://www.rma.usda. gov/aboutrma/ 
history.html 

United States Department of Agriculture. Farmers in a 
Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940. 
1940. 

United States Department of Agriculture. First Annual 
Report of the Manager of the Federal Crop Insurance 
Corporation. 1939. 

Brian Q. Cannon 



FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE 
CORPORATION (FDIC) 

They became, unwittingly, the most powerful 
image of the Great Depression, standing nervously 
in long lines, clutching their deposit books, hoping 
against hope to get inside before the bank closed its 
doors, leaving them penniless. Today, their visages 
survive only in the memories of America's "greatest 
generation" or in the imaginations of television 
viewers watching another holiday season broadcast 
of Frank Capra's 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life. The 
long lines of nervous bank depositors disappeared, 
thanks to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corpora- 
tion (FDIC), arguably the New Deal's most endur- 
ing and least controversial legacy. Knowing that the 
FDIC, an agency of the federal government, would 
guarantee all individual bank deposits up to a cer- 
tain maximum, anxious depositors no longer need- 
ed to demand cash at teller windows, and bankers 
no longer had to engage in fire sale liquidations of 
assets to satisfy them. In doing so, the Federal De- 



posit Insurance Corporation ended the gravest 
threat ever to financial instability in the United 
States. 

During the 1920s and early 1930s, the Ameri- 
can banking system underwent a financial melt- 
down because of undercapitalization, real estate 
speculation, the agricultural depression, problems 
on Wall Street, and overcompetition in some mar- 
kets. Between 1918 and 1933, more than thirty 
thousand financial institutions — banks, savings 
banks, savings and loan associations, credit unions, 
and insurance companies — declared insolvency. 
The problem became so severe in the spring of 1933 
that recently inaugurated President Franklin D. 
Roosevelt had to declare a national bank holiday, 
closing every bank in the United States and scram- 
bling for short-term and long-term solutions to the 
problem. 

During the end stage of the Herbert Hoover ad- 
ministration, when the banking crisis was reaching 
catastrophic proportions, Congressman Henry 
Steagall, a Democrat from Alabama, proposed the 
establishment of a federal agency to insure individ- 
ual bank accounts. Such an agency, Steagall ar- 
gued, would help preserve bank capital and prevent 
another crisis. If individual depositors knew that 
the government guaranteed their deposits, they 
would be less likely to make a so-called run on the 
bank to empty their accounts. Bankers would then 
be saved from the need to generate cash by calling 
in loans and selling stocks, bonds, and real estate, 
often at highly deflated prices, which badly eroded 
their capital reserves and permanently weakened 
them. Most private bankers, however, bitterly op- 
posed the measure, and President Hoover was not 
inclined to undertake such a vast expansion of fed- 
eral authority. 

By March 1933, however, with Hoover out of 
the White House, the opposition of private bankers 
melted away. The nation was caught in an unprece- 
dented financial crisis, and the private sector pos- 
sessed neither the resources nor the will to address 
it. Congressman Steagall attached his proposal for 
a federal agency to guarantee bank deposits to what 
later became known as the Banking Act of 1933. At 
first, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opposed the 
notion of federal deposit insurance, not so much 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



339 



FEDERAL EMERGENCY R E L I E E A D M I N I S E R A E I N ( F E R A ) 



because of any personal philosophical disagree- 
ments but because Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, 
the influential chairman of the Senate Appropria- 
tions Committee, worried that federal deposit in- 
surance would concentrate too much power in 
Washington, D.C. As the legislation was written 
and debated, however, Glass's opposition waned, 
and so did the president's. 

The measure went through Congress with little 
opposition, and on June 16, 1933, President Frank- 
lin D. Roosevelt signed it into law. The legislation 
established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corpora- 
tion (FDIC), which insured individual bank ac- 
counts up to $5,000. All national banks had to sign 
up for FDIC insurance, and all state banks wanting 
to enroll also had to agree to become part of the 
Federal Reserve System, requirements that auto- 
matically brought more stability to financial mar- 
kets. The insurance program went into effect on 
January 1, 1934, financed with $150 million in fed- 
eral appropriations and premium payments by 
member banks. 

In a matter of weeks, the value of the FDIC be- 
came obvious. Americans treated non-FDIC banks 
like financial pariahs. Bankers had no choice, if they 
had any hope of surviving and profiting, but to join 
the FDIC. By the end of 1935, more than 14,400 
banks had enrolled for FDIC insurance, and bank- 
ers displayed the FDIC sign at every teller's win- 
dow. Those signs became American icons, proof 
that every bank displaying one was safe; if it was 
not, the federal government would make good on 
the deposit. During 1934, only thirty-two banks 
failed in the United States, the fewest in a genera- 
tion. Since then, the American banking system, 
from the perspective of depositors, has become the 
safest in the world, thanks largely to the FDIC. 

See Also: BANKING PANICS (1930-1933); GLASS - 
STEGALL ACT OF 1933. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burns, Helen M. The American Banking Community and 
New Deal Banking Reforms: 1933-1935. 1974. 

Kennedy, Susan E. The Banking Crisis of 1933. 1973. 

Olson, James S. Herbert Hoover and the Reconstruction Fi- 
nance Corporation, 1931-1933. 1977. 



Olson, James S. Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Fi- 
nance Corporation and the New Deal, 1933-1940. 
1988. 

James S. Olson 



FEDERAL EMERGENCY RELIEF 
ADMINISTRATION (FERA) 

Before 1929 public relief was not designed to cope 
with the continuing effects of mass unemployment. 
The responsibility for helping the destitute lay with 
towns, townships, and county governments whose 
efforts were supplemented by private charities. 
There was great faith in the ability of community 
representatives to judge who was, and who was 
not, entitled to public assistance. In order to pre- 
vent the growth of dependency, relief was always 
minimal and usually given in kind rather than cash. 

As early in the Great Depression as the winter 
of 1930 to 1931, however, it was clear that the exist- 
ing system could not provide sufficient help for the 
destitute in some parts of the country. Legitimate 
demands for assistance grew, but tax revenues de- 
clined and taxpayers resisted further calls on their 
contributions to local budgets. Gradually states 
were obliged to assist their local units, but state cof- 
fers were soon exhausted and in some cases consti- 
tutional limitations severely restricted the contribu- 
tions states could make to the relief problem. 
Private charities engaged in vigorous fund-raising, 
but by 1932 many donors had lost the will, or the 
ability, to maintain contributions at a high level. In 
the vast majority of cases, public and private relief 
was given without proper investigation by a trained 
social worker, and record keeping ranged from 
poor to nonexistent. Many relief agencies expected 
the able-bodied to perform a physical task, such a 
wood chopping, before assistance would be given. 

Before long the demands for federal interven- 
tion, which had previously been limited to help 
with natural disasters, became too strong to resist. 
In July 1932 the Emergency Relief and Construction 
Act made $300 million available for distribution to 
the states by the Reconstruction Finance Corpora- 
tion (RFC). Federal funding could be secured by 



3t0 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL EMERGENCY RELIEF ADMINISTRATION ( F E R 




These unemployed men wait outside the FERA office in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1935 in hope of finding temporary work. 
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



governors in the form of a loan, but only if it was 
shown that the resources of their states were insuf- 
ficient to meet legitimate relief needs. In other 
words, federal loans were to supplement, but not 
replace, the states' own efforts. By March 1933 the 
$300 million had been exhausted, but the problems 
remained acute, and the public waited to see how 
the new president would respond. 

THE FOUNDATION OF THE FERA 

On May 12, 1933, Congress established the 
Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). 
Initially $500 million was made available for the 
FERA to distribute to the states as grants rather 
than loans. The loan policy of the RFC was discon- 
tinued, and in June 1934 the requirement that the 
loans be repaid was waived. However, as with the 



RFC, all FERA applications had to be made by gov- 
ernors, who were required to give detailed informa- 
tion on how the grant would be used and to provide 
a full accounting of the resources available within 
the state. Like RFC funds, FERA funds were allocat- 
ed on the understanding that they supplemented 
rather than replaced local efforts. The FERA, under 
its administrator, Harry Hopkins, was authorized to 
analyze requests and distribute the funds to indi- 
vidual states within the constraints of a newly de- 
vised regulatory framework. 

The $500 million allocated by Congress was di- 
vided into two equal parts, with $250 million avail- 
able to states on a matching basis. States could se- 
cure one dollar of federal money for every three that 
had been spent on unemployment relief over the 
previous three months, provided the standards of 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



3tl 



FEDERAL EMERGENCY R E L I E E A D M I N I S E R A E I N 



F E R A ) 



relief administration were consistent with those laid 
down by the FERA. The majority of grants ad- 
vanced during the first few months of the FERA 
were made using this rigid formula, but it was soon 
clear that many states were unable to meet the 
matching requirements. 

The second portion of $250 million was given 
to the administrator to allocate on a discretionary 
basis, and all future funding was distributed in this 
manner. This was a recognition that the impact of 
the Depression was regionally variable, as was the 
ability of individual states to cope with the prob- 
lems posed by it. The imposition of a national for- 
mula was, therefore, unrealistic, but the FERA 
wanted to ensure that each state did what it could 
to help its own destitute. Hopkins was also deter- 
mined to impose minimum professional standards 
for the delivery of relief, including the development 
of useful work relief projects that would both raise 
the morale of those employed on them and gener- 
ate public support. Because its principal concern 
was loan repayment, the RFC had required gover- 
nors to provide financial information with their ap- 
plications. However, the FERA had a more broadly 
based agenda. 

In order to make equitable discretionary alloca- 
tions, the FERA demanded from all states monthly 
reports that included details of the numbers receiv- 
ing relief, the case load, case load costs, the admin- 
istration of relief operations, and the influence of 
seasonal factors on relief numbers. In addition, the 
states provided information on economic condi- 
tions, on taxation policy, on current and future 
debt, and on the possibility of raising additional tax 
revenue. The data played a crucial role in determin- 
ing monthly discretionary allocations and in build- 
ing up an accurate national picture of a wide range 
of complex social problems. Moreover, FERA field 
officers advised state relief administrations on fed- 
eral policy; they also encouraged the adoption of 
best practice in, for example, determining eligibility 
for relief and methods of social investigation, and 
they provided a valuable link between Washington 
and those implementing policy. As the quality of 
the monthly state reports improved and the ac- 
counts of the field agents were absorbed, it became 
clear that hardship had many different causes and 
affected a wide variety of individuals and families. 



The relationships that developed between the 
FERA, the states, and their political subdivisions 
were important to the functioning of FERA. Each 
state was required to create a central body known 
as the State Emergency Relief Administration 
(SERA), which each month would distribute FERA 
grants, usually to county relief committees. Ap- 
pointments to SERAs had to be approved by Hop- 
kins and private welfare agencies were excluded 
from the administration of FERA funds. Relief cli- 
ents did not receive their wages or their grocery or- 
ders directly from the FERA, but from local relief 
agencies. The FERA was a state- and locally-run 
initiative based on cooperation with the federal 
government. However, where Hopkins judged co- 
operation deficient, the FERA could assume control 
of the state's relief administration, and during 1934 
and 1935 six states had their relief programs feder- 
alized. 



THE BUDGETARY DEFICIENCY PRINCIPLE 

All applicants for relief were investigated by so- 
cial workers at a local relief station in order to deter- 
mine their eligibility. There was widespread sup- 
port for the view that successful applicants for relief 
who were fit for work should perform some task 
that would help maintain work habits. Hopkins and 
his colleagues were determined that FERA work re- 
lief would emphasize projects that were of value to 
the community, and they encouraged the elimina- 
tion of demeaning make-work tasks designed sole- 
ly as a deterrent. 

The general rule with all work relief projects 
was that they should not compete with private 
business and that remuneration must be sufficient 
to maintain morale but not so generous that private 
sector jobs became unattractive. The FERA issued 
regulations outlining the types of projects that were 
acceptable, but the selection, planning, and man- 
agement of them was a matter for states and locali- 
ties. Relief work was heavily skewed towards road 
improvements and the construction of public build- 
ings. The unskilled were easily accommodated, but 
there were relatively few opportunities for white- 
collar workers and women. Hourly wage rates 
matched those for similar work in the private sec- 
tor. 



3W 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL EMERGENCY R E L I E E A D M I N I S E R A T I N 



F E R 



However, the weekly relief wage, or the value 
of relief in kind, was determined by the budgetary 
deficiency principle. In the course of assessing relief 
eligibility, social workers, following FERA guide- 
lines, conducted a detailed investigation of the pos- 
sible sources of income for each applicant. For ex- 
ample, help from churches or local charities, 
income from part-time work or the sale of garden 
produce, or the existence of savings were recorded. 
The investigation also required the social worker to 
visit the applicant's home, and an assessment was 
made of the applicant's needs: What was the cost 
of food, housing, fuel, and other necessities re- 
quired to ensure that living standards did not fall 
below an unacceptable minimum. The difference 
between the incomings and the needs represented 
the deficiency in the applicant's budget and the 
amount of relief, either in work relief wages or in 
kind, to which the applicant was entitled. 

The advantage of this system was that differ- 
ences in circumstances, including the cost of living, 
could be taken into account. Moreover each relief 
applicant was, in theory, subject to a proper case- 
work investigation. However, the exercise was ini- 
tially very time consuming and also called for regu- 
lar reinvestigation to ensure that any changes in the 
client's deficiency budget could be taken into ac- 
count. There were also formidable managerial 
problems on relief projects because there was no 
standard working week. Each worker was em- 
ployed only for as long as it took to earn the defi- 
ciency in his or her budget. 

Although the FERA emphasized the need for 
carefully planned work relief projects paying wages 
in cash, it proved difficult for some states to deliver 
this program for their fit needy unemployed. In No- 
vember 1933, the federal government decided to 
introduce a new initiative, the Civil Works Admin- 
istration (CWA), which took over the FERA's role 
until April 1934. For a short while the CWA provid- 
ed work for some four million unemployed, wheth- 
er they were in need of relief or not. 



EMERGENCY RELIEF PROGRAMS 

After the CWA wound down, a new work relief 
program was introduced with the FERA and the 
states resuming the relationship they had estab- 



lished before November 1933. The budgetary defi- 
ciency principle that had been suspended under the 
CWA was reactivated and over five million cases re- 
ceived emergency relief each month during the first 
half of 1935. Although FERA officials were strong 
supporters of work relief for the able-bodied, dur- 
ing the first six months of 1935 less than half of all 
relief cases received work relief wages; the remain- 
der were direct relief cases. Only some of the direct 
relief recipients were unemployable. It was clear 
that a number of states lacked the zeal and mana- 
gerial efficiency required to establish effective work 
relief projects. In 1935 Roosevelt announced a 
major change in relief policy. With the creation of 
the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the 
federal government would provide a work relief 
program that would cater to the needy able-bodied. 
Unemployables would be cared for by the states 
and would no longer be a federal responsibility. 
When the president stated that he wanted the fed- 
eral government to quit the business of relief, it was 
care of unemployables he had in mind. During the 
second half of 1935 the FERA was gradually elimi- 
nated. 

The realization of the complexity of economic 
distress had persuaded FERA administrators to de- 
velop four special emergency relief programs that 
targeted specific groups. They were Rural Rehabili- 
tation, Relief for Transients, College Student Aid, 
and Emergency Education. With the demise of the 
FERA, care for transients became the responsibility 
of the states. 

CONCLUSION 

The FERA was a bold initiative of great signifi- 
cance. The federal government assumed responsi- 
bility for the welfare of millions of Americans, both 
employable and unemployable, and did so by 
means of grants, not loans. FERA staff sought to 
improve relief administration standards, and they 
accommodated local problems and tried to support 
work relief wherever possible. Thanks to the FERA, 
relief provision became more generous and pay- 
ment in cash rather than kind became much more 
common. The collection of detailed information on 
relief provision across the nation meant that both 
urban and rural hardship was better understood 
and could be addressed more systematically. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



3U 



FEDERAL 



U S I N 6 A D M I N I S T R 



T I N 



f H A 



Total FERA grants to the states amounted to 
$3,022,602,326, which represented just over 70 per- 
cent of the entire expenditure on emergency relief 
during this period. Because so much of the alloca- 
tion was distributed on a discretionary basis, some 
poverty-stricken states, mostly in the South, had 
over 90 percent of their spending on emergency re- 
lief provided by the federal government. This was 
an extraordinary and necessary intervention by 
Washington. The flexibility of the FERA and the 
high administrative standards it sought to impose 
on all states made it an excellent foundation for fu- 
ture relief initiatives. 

See Also: CIVIL WORKS ADMINISTRATION (CWA); 
EMERGENCY RELIEF AND CONSTRUCTION ACT 
OF 1932; HOPKINS, HARRY; WORKS PROGRESS 
ADMINISTRATION (WPA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brock, William R. Welfare, Democracy, and the New Deal. 
1988. 

Brown, Josephine Chapin. Public Relief , 1929-1939. 1940. 

Burns, Arthur E., and Edward A. Williams. Federal Work, 
Security, and Relief Programs. 1941. 

Final Statistical Report of the Federal Emergency Relief Ad- 
ministration. 1942. 

Hopkins, Harry. Spending to Save: Fhe Complete Story of 
Relief 1936. 

Patterson, James T. The New Deal and the States: Federal- 
ism in Transition. 1969. 

Peter Fearon 



FEDERAL HOUSING 
ADMINISTRATION (FHA) 

Created by the Federal Housing Act of 1934, the 
Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was the 
core of the early New Deal's strategy to revive the 
construction industry and expand home ownership. 
The agency did not build homes or loan money but 
provided federal insurance for private mortgages to 
protect creditors against default and thereby en- 
couraged banks to loan more money for housing 
construction and home improvements. Federal 
mortgage insurance also enabled private lenders to 



charge lower interest rates and extend mortgage re- 
payment periods, which helped to reduce the na- 
tional rate of mortgage foreclosure from 250,000 
non-farm units in 1932 to 18,000 in 1951. It also 
brought about lower down payment requirements 
(average FHA-backed mortgages were for 93 per- 
cent of home value compared with 58 percent for 
savings and loan association mortgages in the 
1920s). Furthermore, the FHA's real assessment 
regulations did much to establish minimum stan- 
dards for housing construction throughout the 
building industry. From 1935 to 1939, the agency 
insured 400,000 housing units, representing 23.4 
percent of the total number of units financed 
through the mortgage market during this period. 
Over the next five-year period its mortgage insur- 
ance was substantially extended to cover 806,000 
units, 45.4 percent of total units that received mort- 
gage finance. Between 1934 and 1972 the FHA 
helped nearly eleven million families to own their 
homes and another twenty-two million to improve 
their properties. Thanks in part to its insurance pro- 
gram, middle-income and lower-middle-income 
families gained access to home ownership and the 
number of families living in owner-occupied units 
rose from 44 percent to 63 percent over this period. 

Reflecting the rationale for its creation, the FHA 
was more concerned to revive home construction 
than to help cities. In the words of its first adminis- 
trator, oil executive James Moffett, it also acted like 
a "conservative business operation" intent on en- 
couraging sound loans by lending agencies, with 
the agency itself delivering a small profit on its op- 
erations for the federal government. As a result, the 
FHA was reluctant to insure rental housing, the 
predominant form of accommodation for low- 
income inner-city residents, because it viewed such 
property as a relatively nonliquid asset, capable of 
delivering only long-term profits, and subject to 
profit constraints like rent control, maintenance 
costs, and tenant problems. Between 1934 and 1937 
it insured only twenty-one rental projects, none of 
which was intended to provide low-income accom- 
modation. There was a brief policy change in 1938 
when the agency insured a low-cost prefabricated 
municipal project constructed by Works Progress 
Administration labor in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that 
was planned to become a model for other munici- 



3U 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FHE GREAT DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL MUSIC P R J E ( E 



F M P 



pal ventures until the American Federation of 
Labor's opposition to the use of relief labor killed 
off the scheme. 

The FHA also favored suburban over inner-city 
development as a sounder actuarial risk. Its ideal 
home was a bungalow or a colonial set on an ample 
lot with a driveway and garage. Consequently its 
insurance of single-family units exceeded that of 
multi-family units by a ratio in excess of four to one 
between 1940 and 1950. The agency also evaluated 
the suitability of neighborhoods for mortgage risk 
through adoption of the conservative appraisal 
methods of the Home Owners Loan Corporation. 
It trained underwriters to measure the quality of an 
area based primarily on its social and economic sta- 
bility and its protection from so-called adverse in- 
fluences. Consequently the FHA refused to insure 
in neighborhoods that suffered blight or were 
deemed likely to do so. As late as 1966, for example, 
it did not insure a single mortgage in Camden, New 
Jersey, a declining industrial city. Its banker-like ap- 
proach to what constituted sound property invest- 
ment also made it prejudicial against heteroge- 
neous and racially mixed neighborhoods, as well as 
districts where African Americans were deemed 
likely to settle. FHA redlining excluded half of De- 
troit's neighborhoods and one-third of Chicago's 
from its insurance program in 1940. The agency 
also promoted racial segregation through its active 
encouragement of restrictive covenants, even after 
these were ruled unenforceable by the U.S. Su- 
preme Court's Shelley v. Kraemer judgment in 1948. 

The FHA worked in favor of white suburban- 
ization and against the interests of the increasingly 
nonwhite inner cities. It helped to transform the 
American suburb from a rich person's preserve into 
a middle-class enclave. The consequences for the 
other America became evident when urban disor- 
der focused attention on the nation's ghettos in the 
1960s. In 1968 former Senator Paul Douglas of Illi- 
nois reported for the National Commission on 
Urban Problems: "The poor and those on the 
fringes of poverty have been almost completely ex- 
cluded. These and the lower middle class, together 
constituting the 40 percent of the population whose 
housing needs are greatest, [have] received only 11 
percent of the FHA mortgages." 



See Also: CETIES AND SUBURBS; HOME OWNERS 
LOAN CORPORATEON (HOLC); HOUSENG; 
NATEONAL HOUSENG ACT OF 1934. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gelfand, Mark I. A Nation of Cities: The Federal Govern- 
ment and Urban America, 1933-1965. 1975. 

Jackson, Kenneth T. "Race, Ethnicity and Real Estate Ap- 
praisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and 
the Federal Housing Administration." journal of 
Urban History 6 (1980): 419-452. 

Morgan, Iwan. "The Fort Wayne Plan: The FHA and Pre- 
fabricated Municipal Housing in the 1930s." The 
Historian 47, no. 4 (1985): 538-559. 

Iwan Morgan 



FEDERAL MUSIC PROJECT (FMP) 

The U. S. federal government created the Federal 
Music Project (FMP) in July 1935 as part of the 
Works Progress Administration (WPA). Because it 
was a relief project, the Federal Music Project es- 
caped much of the controversy that Congress and 
other sources aimed at many other New Deal pro- 
grams. Nikolai Sokoloff, the director of the project, 
was given the responsibility of elevating America's 
musical standards. To do this, he employed well- 
trained and highly skilled music teachers, singers, 
and instrumentalists, and he promoted the under- 
standing of and an appreciation for music in line 
with the ideals of President Franklin Roosevelt. 

The Federal Music Project pursued its goals in 
a number of ways. It offered free or low-cost con- 
certs to the public, as well as music lessons for poor 
adults, music appreciation programs for children, 
and training for music teachers. The project ulti- 
mately led to higher standards for musical perfor- 
mance in the United States, and encouraged in- 
creased participation by amateurs in music 
presentation. The project established new orches- 
tras throughout the country in cities that had never 
had orchestras, and it set up bands, theater groups, 
opera and vocal companies, black music groups, 
dance troops, and many other forms of musical en- 
sembles. The Federal Music Project also sponsored 
radio programs and summer park performances, as 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E E U E 6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



31.5 



FEDERAL MUSIC P R J E C E ( F M P ) 




This violin class, held in New York City in 1936, was one of many music classes sponsored by the WPA's Federal Music Project. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



well as numerous concerts by itinerant musical 
groups, many given in high schools. 

The program provided work to composers, 
teachers, and performers, as well as copyists and li- 
brarians, who did a great service by compiling, pre- 
serving, and centralizing scores, indexes, bibliogra- 
phies, and other materials that had previously been 
scattered throughout the country. The Federal 
Music Project also created a permanent body of un- 
published orchestral works. 

Foremost among the project's significant 
achievements was the establishment of composers' 
forum laboratories, which helped define American 
music by promoting its performance. The first 



forum was set up in New York in 1935, and they 
were later established in other cities. Composers 
whose work was selected for laboratory perfor- 
mances rehearsed the musicians themselves, con- 
ducted the orchestra, and essentially organized the 
entire performance. The composer and musicians 
also conducted after-performance discussions, 
where they described what they felt made the 
music distinctly American. 

The Federal Music Project achieved a number 
of firsts in its list of accomplishments. It was the first 
federal project to use money for a cultural under- 
taking, and its creation marked the first time the 
government assumed responsibility for improving 



3t6 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF E H E G R E A F DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL MUSIC PROJECT 



F M P 



American cultural life and encouraging Americans 
to use their leisure time more creatively. Moreover, 
the project was egalitarian in that it was explicitly 
established to serve all Americans. 

There were, of course, many problematic as- 
pects of the project. Although the Federal Music 
Project promoted culture, there were questions 
about whose version of culture should be pres- 
ented? Should "lowbrow" as well as "highbrow" 
culture be promoted by the project? What did the 
phrase "quality of American life" really mean? 
What constitutes fine art? Moreover, the very idea 
of a national music proved controversial. 

Despite these issues, the project made an hon- 
est attempt to grapple with the challenge laid down 
by nineteenth-century poet and essayist Ralph 
Waldo Emerson: Emerson challenged American 
artists and intellectuals to create a distinctively 
American intellectual and artistic tradition. The 
issue was relevant in the 1930s when most Ameri- 
can composers still preferred to study and perform 
in Europe before returning to the United States, 
and the American musical elite worshipped the Eu- 
ropean masters. Many American musicians thus 
found themselves at odds with the direction of 
American popular culture, in which a lively popular 
music scene was challenging old assumptions. 

The recreation and education divisions of the 
Federal Music Project sought to solve this problem 
by identifying ways in which people who were not 
performers could participate in the music. The proj- 
ect set great emphasis on teaching music to the 
masses, and during the 1930s music programs be- 
came part of the public school curriculum. In addi- 
tion, the WPA began to develop rural music pro- 
grams in 1936. These programs initially focused 
entirely on art music, and ignored indigenous 
music. This neglect ended in November 1937 when 
Charles Seeger became deputy director of the Fed- 
eral Music Project and began to promote many va- 
rieties of American music. Under Seeger, the proj- 
ect began to promote folk music and recreation 
associated with music. Seeger's goal was to have 
every American singing, playing an instrument, or 
both. The project also sponsored fieldwork on folk 
music, most of it in the South and Appalachian 
Mountain area, where, in spite of terrible rural pov- 
erty, there was a vital and rich folk tradition. 



Seeger enlisted the support of First Lady Elea- 
nor Roosevelt in his endeavors. She commissioned 
Seeger to plan a program of American folk music 
for the visiting British Royal Family. Seeger next 
turned to music education as a means of encourag- 
ing appreciation and performance of American 
music; he also promoted the collection and preser- 
vation of American folk and ethnic music. Seeger 
was aware that Europeans regarded jazz as the 
greatest American musical contribution of the 
twentieth century, whereas "serious" American 
composers tended to neglect it. Seeger thus began 
a program to encourage the performance and study 
of British folk music, colonial music, and African - 
American music. 

By 1939, Congress began to cut the Federal 
Music Project budget, along with the budgets of 
other New Deal programs and agencies. In 1939 the 
project was renamed the WPA Music Program. 
After a year under state control, Congress ended 
the program entirely. 

In spite of setbacks, the Federal Music Project 
can claim a great number of achievements. The 
project helped bring about social change by, for ex- 
ample, hiring many women and placing them in 
charge of arts projects. The Federal Music Project 
also influenced the style of American musical and 
theatrical performance, engendered a great interest 
in American music, especially American folk music, 
and through its programs for collecting and docu- 
menting America's indigenous music, aided the 
understanding of the development of American art 
forms. Despite its accomplishments, however, the 
Federal Music Project never became a model for 
subsequent federal aid to the arts. 

See Also: EDUCATION; FEDERAL ONE; MUSIC; 
WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alexander, Charles C. Nationalism in American Thought, 
1930-1945. 1969. 

Bailey, Walter 13., ed. The Arnold Schoenberg Companion. 
1998. 

Botkin, Benjamin A., ed. A Treasury of Southern Folklore: 
Stories, Ballads, Traditions, and Folkways of the People 
of the South. 1949. 

Browder, Laura. Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in De- 
pression America. 1998. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



3U 



FEDERAL N A E I N A L M R E G A G E A S S C I A E I N 



F N M A ) 



Canon, Cornelius Baird. "The Federal Music Project of 
the Works Progress Administration: Music in a De- 
mocracy." Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 
1963. 

Durham, Weldon B., ed. American Theatre Companies, 
1931-1986. 1989. 

Ekirch, Arthur A., Jr. Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of 
the New Deal on American Thought. 1969. 

Graff, Ellen. Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York 
City, 1928-1942. 1997. 

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American Peo- 
ple in Depression and War, 1929-1945. 1999. 

Mulcahy, Kevin V., and C. Richard Swaim, eds. Public 
Policy and the Arts. 1982. 

Mulcahy, Kevin V., and Margaret Jane Wyszomirski, eds. 
America's Commitment to Culture: Government and the 
Arts. 1995. 

Pescatello, Ann M. Charles Seeger: A Life in American 
Music. 1992. 

Santoro, Gene. Myself When I Am Real: The Life and 
Music of Charles Mingus. 2000. 

Tick, Judith. Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for 
American Music. 1997. 

Frank A. Salamone 



FEDERAL NATIONAL MORTGAGE 
ASSOCIATION (FNMA) 

At the request of President Franklin Roosevelt, the 
Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), 
popularly known as Fannie Mae, was chartered on 
February 10, 1938, as a wholly owned and con- 
trolled subsidiary of the federal Reconstruction Fi- 
nance Corporation (RFC). Fannie Mae was de- 
signed primarily to increase the availability of 
mortgage credit in order to stimulate the home 
construction industry and reduce unemployment. 
When credit was in short supply due to a recession, 
Fannie Mae would purchase home mortgages that 
were made by private lenders and had been insured 
by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). 
When credit became more plentiful, Fannie Mae 
would resell the mortgages to other lenders, there- 
by smoothing out the highs and lows of the eco- 
nomic cycle. It was also hoped that Fannie Mae's 
purchases would lower national interest rates and 
generate lender confidence in FHA-insured loans. 



The establishment of Fannie Mae marked the 
culmination of the federal government's involve- 
ment in housing markets during the Great Depres- 
sion. Both the Home Owners Loan Corporation, 
created in 1933 to refinance troubled mortgages, 
and the FHA, established in 1934 to insure new 
mortgages, substantially increased funds available 
to homeowners. The National Housing Act, which 
created the FHA, also authorized the chartering of 
private national mortgage associations to help mar- 
ket federally insured mortgages. The mortgage as- 
sociations were to be supervised by the head of the 
Federal Housing Administration and they were au- 
thorized to purchase mortgages with funds raised 
through the public sale of notes, bonds, and other 
obligations. It was hoped that primary lenders who 
sold their existing mortgages would use their new 
funds to finance additional mortgages. 

Contrary to the expectations of policymakers, 
investors did not form private mortgage associa- 
tions and home financing continued to be scarce. 
The first, reluctant experiment with federal mort- 
gage acquisition occurred when the RFC Mortgage 
Company, set up in March 1935 to support the 
commercial real estate market, agreed to purchase 
some FHA-insured mortgages in order to help the 
ailing construction industry. Fannie Mae finally 
opened its doors in 1938 with a charter issued by 
the Federal Housing Administration and $11 mil- 
lion provided by the RFC. 

Fannie Mae remained a relatively small opera- 
tion in its early years. Under its founding president, 
Sam Husbands, Fannie Mae issued just two series 
of obligations to pay for mortgage acquisitions, 
raising $29.7 million in 1938 and $55.5 million in 
1939. Since its inception Fannie Mae has under- 
gone many changes. In 1948 it was authorized to 
purchase loans insured by the Veterans Adminis- 
tration as well. Congress partially privatized Fannie 
Mae in 1954 and completed the process in 1968 
when it set up a new scaled-back federal agency, 
the Government National Mortgage Association 
(Ginnie Mae). Fannie Mae has continued to grow, 
becoming the third largest corporation in the Unit- 
ed States, with total assets of $800 billion in 2001. 
Fannie Mae is credited with helping to expand 
homeownership in the immediate postwar years. 



3U 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF E H E G R E A E DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL 



N E 



However, critics have charged that the secondary 
mortgage market, which it created, hurt urban 
communities by allowing financial institutions to 
transfer savings funds out of cities and into mort- 
gage loans made in profitable suburban develop- 
ments throughout the country. 

See Also: CITIES AND SUBURBS; FEDERAL HOUSING 
ADMINISTRATION (FHA); HOME OWNERS LOAN 
CORPORATION (HOLC); HOUSING; 
RECONSTRUCTION FINANCE CORPORATION 
(RFC). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bartke, Richard W. "Fannie Mae and the Secondary 
Mortgage Market." Northwestern University Law Re- 
view 66 (1971): 1-78. 

Federal National Mortgage Association. Background and 
History. 1975. 

Hays, R. Allen. The Federal Government and Urban Hous- 
ing: Ideology and Change in Public Policy. 1995. 

Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbaniza- 
tion of the United States. 1985. 

Musolf, Lloyd D. Uncle Sam's Private, Profitseeking Corpo- 
rations: Comsat, Fannie Mae, Amtrak, and Conrail. 
1983. 

Eduardo F. Canedo 



FEDERAL ONE 



Federal One was established with an appropriation 
of $27 million under the auspices of the Works 
Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935. It was to 
provide work relief to unemployed artists and to 
preserve their skills until they could be absorbed 
into the private sector. In effect, Federal One sought 
to occupy the vacuum left by private patronage of 
the fine arts and mass support for the popular arts 
due to the austerity of the Depression. Between 
1929 and 1933, as the prices paid for paintings de- 
clined by two-thirds and magazines dismissed 
graphic artists because of declining revenues, ten 
thousand artists became unemployed. Theater 
workers were equally hard hit as the number of 
Broadway productions was drastically reduced and 
the number of employed actors fell by 50 percent. 



Creative and commercial writers also suffered as 
the revenues of the publishing industry were 
halved, and when newspapers sales declined, the 
employment of many journalists and advertising 
copywriters was terminated. Musicians, whose job 
security had already been hurt by the advent of 
sound in motion pictures, experienced the impact 
of the Depression as hotels cancelled their small 
ensembles, symphony orchestras were disbanded, 
and fewer pupils paid for private music lessons. In 
1933, two-thirds of the membership of the Ameri- 
can Federation of Musicians was unemployed. 

Efforts by professional associations and unions 
to promote self-help were ineffective, and, with the 
exception of New York and a handful of state relief 
agencies, no major initiative was taken by govern- 
ment to provide relevant work for unemployed 
artists. Some of the New Deal's earliest agencies, 
including the Federal Emergency Relief Adminis- 
tration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and, in 
particular, the Civil Works Administration, aided 
artists, but the effort did not match the need. 

Four major arts were organized under the aegis 
of Federal One: the Federal Art Project, the Federal 
Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project, and the 
Federal Writers' Project. Their respective national 
directors — Holger Cahill, Hallie Flanagan, Nikolai 
Sokoloff, and Henry Alsberg — headed complex and 
extensive bureaucracies with a network of state and 
local offices throughout the United States. Howev- 
er, the directors were not exclusively concerned 
with the disbursement of funds and the develop- 
ment of projects to provide assistance to unem- 
ployed artists. The four directors had clear ideas 
about the nature of culture and sought to use the 
federal government to promote them. 

Historian Jane De Hart Mathews refers to the 
New Deal elite's "quest for a cultural democracy"; 
its aim was to make art more accessible ("art for the 
millions") by creating new civic institutions for the 
arts and by transforming attitudes and values about 
how art was produced and to whom it communi- 
cated. Federal One challenged the metropolitan 
dominance of the arts by taking arts to the people 
through gallery and company tours, and the Feder- 
al Music Project, with its three hundred ensembles, 
established orchestras in states such as Oklahoma 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



349 



FEDERAL 



N E 



and Utah, where none had existed previously. Fed- 
eral One also sought to reach wider audiences by 
making art more comprehensible and relevant to 
contemporary issues and by incorporating regional 
and ethnic distinctions in its productions and pre- 
sentations. The Federal Theatre Project established 
production companies in forty states, organized six- 
teen African -American units in eleven cities, and 
performed plays in languages other than English. 
Its Living Newspaper productions courted contro- 
versy by addressing contemporary issues, such as 
slum housing, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and 
the plight of American agriculture. It is estimated 
that the Federal Theatre Project organized some 
1,200 productions that played to twenty-five mil- 
lion Americans, 65 percent of whom were attend- 
ing the theater for the first time. 

Federal One sought to stimulate involvement 
as well as appreciation. The Federal Art Project pro- 
vided free art classes for sixty thousand people each 
month, while the Federal Music Project employed 
six thousand music teachers who organized pro- 
grams in schools, parks, and hospitals, developing 
the music skills of some fourteen million pupils. 
The vision of Federal One was extremely ambitious. 
It sought to sponsor a cultural renaissance in Amer- 
ica through a mass movement. The aim was to inte- 
grate the artist into society and to make the arts in- 
tegral to everyday life. 

Despite frequent criticisms of some American 
failings, the projects were self-consciously and as- 
sertively nationalistic in both their themes and their 
forms; one WPA poster declared, "Out of the spirit 
of a people arises its art." The nationalism of Feder- 
al One is most evident in the Federal Writers' Proj- 
ect's American Guide series, a collection of 378 
books and pamphlets describing all of America's 
states, principal cities, and highways. Federal One 
sought to orient Americans to their history, as well 
as to their geography. The arts projects worked to 
connect contemporary life with American tradi- 
tions. The Federal Writers' Project, for example, 
employed writers to make inventories of state and 
local archives and to collect the testimony of ex- 
slaves; a Folklore Studies Division launched oral 
history projects to preserve American folklore and 
humor. The Federal Art Project's Index of American 



Design recorded the history of the decorative arts 
from early settlement to 1890, while the Federal 
Writers' Project compiled an index of American 
composers that catalogued about seven thousand 
compositions by 2,200 composers. In addition, a 
joint committee on folk arts organized recordings of 
the songs and music of Latino Americans, Native 
Americans, African Americans, and Cajuns, as well 
as music from the Appalachian region. These were 
not antiquarian endeavors; the sponsors of these 
projects believed that they were accumulating re- 
positories of American art and expression that 
would inspire contemporary musicians, artists, and 
writers. Such an emphatic nationalism has led 
some cultural historians to claim that Federal One 
sought to distract Americans from the crisis of the 
Depression by affirming the United States and by 
imposing a false, purposeful consensus upon 
America's history and the character of its people. 
However, if a cultural hegemony to buttress the lib- 
eral economic and social programs of the New Deal 
was ever a goal, it was never attained. 

Initiatives in 1938 to make Federal One a per- 
manent agency met with failure. A broad range of 
interests was hostile to the organization. Some pol- 
iticians were concerned about waste and inefficien- 
cy and questioned the relevance of the subsidiza- 
tion of culture in a period of mass unemployment. 
Republican politicians, in particular, claimed that 
the cultural projects were a propaganda arm of the 
Democratic Party. Federal One was also associated 
with radicalism and, during its investigations in 
1938 and 1939, the House Committee on Un- 
American Activities claimed that the projects had 
been infiltrated by Communists. Even the arts "es- 
tablishment" did not favor making Federal One 
permanent because of the inconsistent quality of 
the work it produced. 

In 1939, following an investigation by the 
House Committee on Appropriations, the Federal 
Theatre Project was terminated and Federal One 
was abolished. The remaining projects were trans- 
ferred to the supervision of the states with the ex- 
pectation that the states would contribute 25 per- 
cent of their costs and terminate the contracts of 
workers who had served for eighteen months. De- 
prived of central direction, the remaining arts proj- 



350 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL 



RESERVE S Y S E E M 



ects began to lose their creative dynamism, and 
after 1940 project workers were transferred to the 
war preparedness campaign. However, it is doubt- 
ful that, even at its height, Federal One came close 
to challenging the metropolitan bias of American 
cultural production or to integrating the artist se- 
curely in American life. Perhaps Federal One will be 
best remembered by those who were assisted by 
the projects during the Depression and who estab- 
lished international reputations in the postwar pe- 
riod: artist Jackson Pollock, stage and screen direc- 
tor Elia Kazan, actor Burt Lancaster, and writers 
Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and Arthur Miller, to 
name but a few. 

See Also: AMERICAN GUIDE SERIES; FEDERAL ART 
PROJECT (FAP); FEDERAL MUSIC PROJECT (FMP); 
FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT (FTP); FEDERAL 
WRITERS' PROJECT (FWP); SLAVE NARRATIVES; 
WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alexander, Charles C. Here the Country Lies: Nationalism 
and the Arts in Twentieth Century America. 1980. 

Billington, Ray Allen. "Government and the Arts: The 
W.P.A. Experience." American Quarterly 13 (1961): 
467-479. 

Bindas, Kenneth J. All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: 
The WPA's Federal Music Project and American Soci- 
ety. 1996. 

Harris, Jonathan. Federal Art and National Culture: The 
Politics of Identity in New Deal America. 1995. 

Mathews, Jane De Hart. "Arts and the People: The New 
Deal Quest for a Cultural Democracy." Journal of 
American History 62 (1975): 316-339. 

McDonald, William F. Federal Relief Administration and 
the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the 
Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration. 
1969. 

McKinzie, Richard D. The New Deal for Artists. 1973. 

Meltzer, Milton. Violins and Shovels: The WPA Arts Proj- 
ects. 1976. 

O'Connor, John, and Lorraine Brown, eds. The Federal 
Theatre Project: "Free, Adult, Uncensored." 1980. 

Penkower, Monte N. The Federal Writers' Project: A Study 
in Government Patronage of the Arts. 1977. 

Stuart Kidd 



FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM 

The Federal Reserve System (Fed) came into exis- 
tence in 1913. To overcome fears that a unified U.S. 
central bank would become too closely allied to the 
federal government and to big money interests, the 
Fed was made up of twelve regional reserve banks 
each with a high degree of local autonomy. A Fed- 
eral Reserve Board, located in Washington D.C., 
operated as a supervisory body with a duty to en- 
sure that the Federal Reserve banks complied with 
the law. All national banks, that is institutions that 
had received their charter from the federal govern- 
ment, were required to join the Fed. State banks 
were permitted to join if they could meet the rela- 
tively high reserve requirements laid down by the 
new system. 

THE EARLY EXPERIENCE: 1913-1921 

Few bankers wanted a strong central bank, and 
there was widespread support for regional division. 
In fact the dual system of national and state banks 
that the majority of bankers wished to retain had 
been preserved. After 1913 the commercial banking 
sector was made up of national banks, which were 
members of the Fed, and state banks, some of 
which joined the Fed while others remained non- 
members. In 1921, only 9,779 of the 29,018 com- 
mercial banks were members of the reserve system. 
Even in 1929 the structure was essentially the same. 
The Fed had 8,522 members while non-members 
numbered 15,173. 

Among the objectives of the new system were 
the provision of ample credit for legitimate busi- 
ness, the stabilization of interest rates, and the 
maintenance of the gold standard. A key aspiration 
stressed by the supporters of central banking was 
the avoidance of financial panics and the attendant 
bank failures to which the American financial sys- 
tem was prone. Multiple bank failures during the 
depression of 1907 had proved to be a decisive 
turning point in the argument for the creation of a 
central bank. 

Almost as soon as the Fed was established, the 
economy was affected by the demands of World 
War I. The Fed successfully lubricated the wheels of 
credit and after April 1917, when the United States 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



351 



FEDERAL RESERVE S Y S E E M 



entered the conflict, it directed credit to essential 
users and also supported the Treasury in its aim of 
keeping interest rates low so that the costs of war 
borrowing would be minimized. Unfortunately this 
action helped to fan the flames of inflation. When, 
in 1920, the Fed raised interest rates in order to 
bring rising prices under control, the severe post- 
war Depression of 1920 and 1921 quickly followed. 
Only after 1921 did the Fed begin to operate under 
normal peacetime conditions. 



MONETARY POLICY: 1922-1928 

During this period the New York Reserve Bank, 
under its influential governor, Benjamin Strong, 
emerged as the leading institution. It had become 
apparent that if the reserve banks insisted on be- 
having independently, each raising or lowering dis- 
count rates or purchasing or selling securities, mon- 
etary policy would lack cohesion. Strong advocated 
the coordination of open market operations, and in 
1922 a committee was formed to supervise the sale 
and purchase of government securities. With this 
tool, Monetary policy could be used to counter the 
impact of both booms and slumps and seasonal 
fluctuations in credit, so that the monetary authori- 
ties could influence events rather than simply react 
to them. 

Some scholars believe that the Fed intervened 
directly to ensure that the minor recessions of 1924 
and 1927 did not develop into full-blown Depres- 
sions. During each, the Fed adopted liberal credit 
policies by purchasing government securities and 
lowering discount rates. As the economy recovered 
rapidly in both cases, it would seem that the policies 
were very effective. However, compelling evidence 
suggests that the motives for the Fed's actions were 
linked to international rather than domestic issues. 
The Reserve wanted to keep U.S. interest rates low 
in order to assist European countries in either re- 
turning to the gold standard or staying on it. Credit 
was extended to European central banks, and low 
U.S. interest rates encouraged capital to flow to the 
old world. In other words, the domestic benefits of 
expansionary monetary policy were entirely sec- 
ondary. 

While the Fed encouraged the adoption of the 
gold standard overseas, it efficiently managed the 



massive influx of gold into the United States during 
the war and post-war years. The gold was effective- 
ly sterilized and not allowed to exert inflationary 
pressure. Indeed, this period is one of remarkable 
price stability given the economy's vigorous 
growth. However, the actions of the Fed in accu- 
mulating a large gold reserve, a strategy also pur- 
sued by the French, put pressure on other gold 
standard countries that were attempting to operate 
the system with inadequate reserves. 

By 1928 the domestic advantages of reserve 
bank monetary co-operation had become apparent. 
For example, collective action had reduced seasonal 
fluctuations in interest rates, and bankers were be- 
coming more confident in their ability to use mone- 
tary policy effectively. Bank failures, however, con- 
tinued to be a problem. Between 1921 and 1929, 
some 776 national banks, 229 state banks, and 
4,416 non-member banks closed their doors. The 
vast majority of the failed institutions were small 
banks adversely affected by farm misfortune. The 
figures reflect the fact that big banks joined the Fed, 
and the small, usually under-capitalized unit banks, 
remained outside and were unable to call on central 
bank help when in need. 



THE FED AND THE ONSET OF THE 
DEPRESSION 

In 1928 danger signals from the New York 
Stock Exchange (NYSE) were becoming a concern. 
The Fed reacted to growing stock market specula- 
tion by introducing a tight money policy. Intended 
to make borrowing for speculation less attractive, 
the higher interest rates were expected to reduce 
frenetic speculative activity. Unfortunately, this pol- 
icy was totally ineffective as speculative activity ac- 
tually increased. However, the policy did have an 
adverse effect on economic performance, and in the 
middle of 1929 it was clear that the economic boom 
had come to an end. Wall Street quickly absorbed 
these signs, the stock market collapsed in October 
1929, and then the Fed, seeing speculation 
quashed, reduced interest rates. 

The economic recovery that followed the crash 
did not last long. From the middle of 1930 the econ- 
omy began a long slide, which took it to a trough 
in the winter of 1932 and 1933. A sustained recov- 



35Z 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E G R E A E DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL 



RESERVE S Y S E E M 



ery did not begin until the spring of 1933. A central 
feature of the Great Depression was extensive bank 
failure. Indeed, in mid-March 1933 there were ap- 
proximately 12,600 fewer commercial banks than 
had been open for business in June 1929. Yet one 
of the duties of the reserve system was to act as a 
bulwark against bank failure. Why did the Fed fail 
in this task? 

Scholars usually identify three banking crises in 
which the failures were concentrated: the first took 
place in 1930, the second in the fall of 1931, and fi- 
nally the banking system reached an almost total 
state of collapse in the winter of 1932 and 1933. 
There is now widespread agreement that the 1930 
wave of bank failures was part of a regional prob- 
lem and had little national impact. However, the 
1931 crisis was far more serious and occurred after 
Great Britain left the gold standard and devalued 
sterling. Speculators who had previously worried 
about the ability of the Bank of England to support 
the pound now turned their attention to the dollar. 
To give speculators a clear message that protecting 
the currency was a priority, the Federal Reserve 
raised interest rates and pursued a tight money pol- 
icy. This was a logical move to protect the dollar, 
but it was disastrous for a banking system under 
great pressure. The beleaguered banks needed low 
interest rates and an easy money policy that would 
give them ready access to central bank support, 
quite the reverse of what was provided. As some in- 
stitutions failed, panic spread and even soundly run 
banks could not keep their doors open when faced 
with so many customers who wished to withdraw 
deposits. Exactly the same thing happened during 
the "lame duck" period between Roosevelt's elec- 
tion in November 1932 and his inauguration in 
March 1933. Uncertainty led to further speculation 
against the dollar and the Fed responded by raising 
interest rates. By this time the financial sector had 
been exposed to such shocks that most state gover- 
nors were forced to close their banks in order to 
save them from failing. The creation of the Recon- 
struction Finance Corporation in January 1932, with 
powers to assist troubled banks, is a clear indication 
that the Fed was failing to do its job. In February, 
the Glass- Steagall Act liberalized the Fed's dis- 
count provisions but, unfortunately, this move 
came too late to have a major impact. 



Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz are highly 
critical of the Federal Reserve and believe that its 
perverse decisions, which led to the failure of so 
many banks and a severe contraction in the money 
supply, transformed a recession into a major de- 
pression. However, the actions of the Fed in de- 
fending the dollar were consistent with the policies 
that seemed so effective in 1924 and in 1927, when 
external factors determined action. Elmus Wicker, 
the most authoritative of banking historians for this 
period, is cautious in his assessment of Federal Re- 
serve policy. Unlike most commentators he does 
not believe that the Fed initiated the 1931 banking 
crisis, but he is critical of the failure to implement 
vigorous open market operations in 1930 and in 
1931 that could have prevented the dramatic fall in 
depositor confidence. Even though most of the 
failed banks were not reserve members, the Fed 
wins few friends for its policy choices in the worst 
years of the Depression. Most scholars debate 
whether the failures were just bad or disastrous. 



THE FEDERAL RESERVE AND THE NEW 
DEAL 

There was unanimous agreement that the 
banking sector needed assistance to achieve stabili- 
ty, and the first response of the Roosevelt adminis- 
tration was to create a breathing space by declaring 
a national bank holiday. On March 9, 1933, the 
Emergency Banking Act gave the executive branch 
of the government power to reopen banks once 
they had been examined and declared sound. The 
Banking Act (June 16, 1933), gave the Fed increased 
control over bank credit, called for greater co- 
ordination of open market operations and the legal 
recognition of an Open Market Committee. The act 
forbade the payment of interest on demand depos- 
its by member banks and also regulated the interest 
payments on time deposits. The decision to sepa- 
rate commercial and investment banks so that the 
former could no longer underwrite securities 
gained widespread support. In spite of a lack of en- 
thusiasm on the part of both the president and 
bankers, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corpora- 
tion (FDIC) was established to ensure that deposi- 
tors would be so confident in the security of their 
deposits that bank runs would become a thing of 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



353 



FEDERAL SAVINGS 



AND LOAN 



I N S 



RANGE 



C R P R A E I N 



the past. All members of the Federal Reserve Sys- 
tem were obliged to join FDIC. 

A further refinement of the banking system 
came with the Banking Act (1935), which brought 
about fundamental changes in the Federal Reserve 
System. Marriner Eccles had assumed the chair- 
manship of the Board of Governors. An experi- 
enced banker with a forceful personality and 
known by Congress to be no friend of Wall Street, 
Eccles insisted on greater centralization and more 
power for the board. The 1935 Act was one of the 
most significant pieces of legislation in U.S. finan- 
cial history establishing with its predecessor a 
structure for banking that was to last half a century. 
It created a Federal Reserve Board consisting of 
seven members to be appointed by the president 
and confirmed by Senate. The Federal Open Mar- 
ket Committee, which had consisted of the twelve 
governors of the Federal Reserve banks, was re- 
placed by one consisting of the board and just five 
representatives from the Reserve Banks. The new 
Committee, which had far more authority than the 
one it replaced, came to play a leading role in shap- 
ing policy. It exercised a firm control over interest 
rates, the provision of credit, and the money supply. 
The board also gained the power to approve the ap- 
pointments of the presidents, as they came to be 
called, of reserve banks and the authority to alter 
the reserve requirements of member banks. 

The 1935 act transferred power from the re- 
serve banks to the Reserve Board. This shift was 
possible because of Eccles's determination and au- 
thority combined with a congressional distrust of 
the reserve bankers that was shared by many mem- 
bers of the public. The U.S. president also acquired 
new powers of appointment to the board. 

It is ironic that the Fed, having relentlessly pur- 
sued policies that most scholars believe made the 
impact of the Depression more acute, was given so 
much additional power by New Dealers. Moreover, 
an early action of the newly constituted board was 
to tighten the reserve requirements of member 
banks, which were viewed as excessive and a po- 
tential inflationary threat. This action, together with 
the imposition of a restrictive fiscal policy as Roose- 
velt strove to balance the federal budget, contribut- 
ed to the onset of the deep recession of 1937 and 
1938. 



See Also: BANKING PANICS (1930-1933); FEDERAL 
DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC); 
GOLD STANDARD; GLASS-STEAGALL ACT OF 
1933; MONETARY POLICY; RECESSION OF 1937; 
STOCK MARKET CRASH (1929). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Calomiris, Charles W. and Eugene N. White, "The Ori- 
gins of Federal Deposit Insurance." In The Regulated 
Economy. A Historical Approach to Political Economy, 
edited by Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap. 
1994. 

Chandler, Lester V. American Monetary Policy 1928-1941. 
1971. 

Eccles, Marriner, S. Beckoning Frontiers. Public and Person- 
al Recollections. 1951. 

Friedman, Milton, and Anna J. Schwartz, A Monetary 
History of the United States 1867-1960. 1963. 

Kennedy, Susan Estabrook. The Banking Crisis of 1933. 
1973. 

Smiley, Gene. The American Economy in the Twentieth 
Century. 1994. 

Wheelock David C. The Strategy and Consistency of Feder- 
al Reserve Monetary Policy, 1924-1933. 1991. 

White, Eugene N. "Banking and Finance in the Twenti- 
eth Century." In The Cambridge Economic History of 
the United States, Vol. Ill: The Twentieth Century, ed- 
ited by Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman. 
2000. 

Wicker, Elmus. Federal Reserve Monetary Policy 
1917-1933. 1966. 

Wicker, Elmus. The Banking Panics of the Great Depression. 
1996. 

Peter Fearon 



FEDERAL SAVINGS AND LOAN 
INSURANCE CORPORATION 
(FSLIC) 

The Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corpora- 
tion (FSLIC) was created by the federal government 
on June 27, 1934, to secure the stability of the sav- 
ings and loan industry. The main purpose of sav- 
ings and loans, also known as S&Ls, was to receive 
deposits from individuals and institutions and rein- 
vest those funds in residential mortgages. During 
the banking crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s, 



354 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL 



SAVINGS AND LOAN 



I N S 



R A N C E CORPORATION 



many savings and loans collapsed. If a bank or sav- 
ings and loan failed, depositors who had not with- 
drawn their money lost everything. After the onset 
of the Great Depression many unemployed work- 
ers could not repay their loans and nearly one- 
quarter of all home mortgages went into default. 
Between 1930 and 1935 nearly one thousand sav- 
ings and loans collapsed, wiping out almost $300 
million in assets. 

In 1934 Congress moved to boost both the sav- 
ings and loan and the residential construction in- 
dustries with the National Housing Act. One provi- 
sion created the Federal Housing Administration 
(FHA) that encouraged banks and savings and 
loans to make loans for building homes, farm build- 
ings, and small business establishments. The FHA 
insured the loans so that if the debtor defaulted, the 
FHA would reimburse the creditor. Because of the 
reduced risk, creditors demanded lower down pay- 
ments and extended the length of mortgages. More 
people were able to manage these new loans and 
buy their own homes. Title IV of the National 
Housing Act created the FSLIC to insure deposits 
in savings and loans up to $5,000. Depositors knew 
that if their savings and loan failed the FSLIC would 
reimburse them for the amount in their account up 
to a $5,000 limit. Federally chartered savings and 
loans had to pay a mandatory fee for coverage, 
while those with state charters could voluntarily in- 
sure their deposits with the FSLIC by paying the 
fee. The FSLIC, modeled after the Federal Deposit 
Insurance Corporation (FDIC) created the previous 
year, revived public confidence in the stability of the 
industry. As a result, people returned their deposits 
to savings and loans and the frequency of runs was 
diminished. Smaller savings and loans were more 
able to compete with larger institutions because 
they also held the confidence of the public. Savings 
and loans were able to loan more money for hous- 
ing purchases and construction and consequently 
contributed to the recovery of the residential real- 
estate market. 

The housing policies of the New Deal that cre- 
ated the FSLIC, FHA, Home Owners Loan Corpo- 
ration, and Federal National Mortgage Association 
(Fannie Mae) stimulated private home building and 
individual homeownership by coordinating private 



and public institutions. Before the New Deal only 
two out of five Americans owned their homes. The 
New Deal built a system of home building finance 
that allowed private money to fund the construc- 
tion of postwar suburbia. By the 1970s two out of 
three Americans lived in owner-occupied houses. 

Along with insurance for the industry came 
regulation. In 1934 Congress established the Feder- 
al Home Loan Bank Board to maintain the stability 
of savings and loans by restricting their financial 
practices. The New Deal housing and banking poli- 
cies ultimately demonstrated, however, that the ex- 
pansion of the state did not result in the reduction 
of private power and flexibility. In fact historian 
David M. Kennedy argues in Freedom from Tear 
(1999) that these reforms actually liberated capital. 
Government regulations made people secure about 
depositing their money in banks and savings and 
loans. As a result, banks and S&Ls had a reliable 
cash reserve which freed them to make loans and 
invest in mortgages. 

Traditionally most savings and loans were mu- 
tuals or community-based institutions owned by 
the depositors themselves. But in the 1980s the fed- 
eral government initiated deregulatory measures, 
which transformed the savings and loan industry. 
Speculators were allowed to convert savings and 
loans into stock corporations. This freedom enabled 
savings and loans to raise more capital but the new 
owners were less concerned with the local commu- 
nity and more interested in quick profit. The De- 
pository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary 
Control Act of 1980 raised the deposit insurance 
from $40,000 to $100,000. This change, along with 
higher interest rates, doubled the amount of money 
deposited in the savings and loans and as a result 
increased the taxpayers' burden when savings and 
loans failed in great numbers at the end of the de- 
cade. As more money was deposited, savings and 
loans were forced to meet rising interest rate pay- 
ments to depositors. Congress freed them to en- 
gage in commercial lending and non-mortgage 
consumer lending to help them meet the new com- 
mitments. Many critics contend the increase in cov- 
erage emboldened savings and loans to provide ris- 
kier loans than they might have otherwise. The 
1984 Depository Institutions Act permitted devel- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



355 



FEDERAL S U R P L 



S COMMODITIES CORPORATION 



T S C C 



opers to own savings and loans and allowed own- 
ers of these institutions to lend to themselves. Sav- 
ings and loans quickly took advantage of the new 
rules to engage in high-risk speculation, particular- 
ly in commercial real estate. When these deals 
failed so did many savings and loans. Over five 
hundred savings and loans collapsed during the 
1980s and created a crisis that forced the FSLIC into 
insolvency in 1989. Responsibility for FSLIC's in- 
surance obligations fell to the FDIC. The U.S. gov- 
ernment expects taxpayers will have to pay more 
than $500 billion over thirty years to bail out the 
failed savings and loan associations. 

See Also: CITIES AND SUBURBS; FEDERAL HOUSING 
ADMINISTRATION (FHA); FEDERAL NATIONAL 
MORTGAGE ASSOCIATION (FNMA); HOME 
OWNERS LOAN CORPORATION (HOLC); 
HOUSING; NATIONAL HOUSING ACT OF 1934. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burns, Helen M. The American Banking Community and 
New Deal Banking Reforms 1933-1935. 1974. 

Eichler, Ned. The Thrift Debacle. 1989. 

TDIC Learning Bank: The Educational Source for Students, 
Teachers, and Parents. Available from http:// 
www.fdic.gov/about/learn/learning/index.html 

Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Trontier: The Suburbaniza- 
tion of the United States. 1985. 

Kennedy, David M. Treedom from Tear: The American Peo- 
ple in Depression and War, 1929-1945. 1999. 

Phillips, Ronnie J. The Chicago Plan & New Deal Banking 
Reform. 1995. 

Turck, Karsten F. The Crisis of American Savings & Loan 
Associations: A Comprehensive Anaysis. 1998. 

Waldman, Michael. Who Robbed America? A Citizen's 
Guide to the S&L Scandal. 1990. 

Woerheide, Walter. The Savings and Loan Industry: Cur- 
rent Problems and Possible Solutions. 1984. 

David Eisenbach 



FEDERAL SURPLUS COMMODITIES 
CORPORATION (FSCC) 

The famous "slaughter of the innocents" (the 
slaughter of some six million piglets to prevent a 



surplus of pork in the market) that took place dur- 
ing the early months of the Agricultural Adjustment 
Administration's (AAA) surplus reduction program 
led to a public outcry against the emergency pur- 
chases. The idea of government-sponsored waste at 
a time of intense need nationwide led to a redirec- 
tion of federal policy, and the creation of a new di- 
vision, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation 
(FSRC), within the country's primary relief organi- 
zation, the Federal Emergency Relief Administra- 
tion (FERA). The mission of the FSRC was to divert 
surplus agricultural commodities from the open 
market to state and local relief administrations for 
the use of destitute families, thus redistributing 
products as it removed price-depressing surpluses 
from the market. The original members of the FSRC 
were Henry A. Wallace, the secretary of agriculture; 
Harold L. Ickes, the emergency administrator of 
public works; and FERA head Harry L. Hopkins. 
The governor of the Farm Credit Administration 
was later added to the group. Thus, some of Presi- 
dent Franklin Roosevelt's top aides were involved 
with this aspect of federal relief. 

The commodities that the FSRC accumulated 
for redistribution came from the Agricultural Ad- 
justment Administration's crop adjustment pro- 
gram purchases, as well as from state relief pur- 
chases. The FSRC was responsible not only for 
processing the commodities, work that was often 
contracted out, but also for initial storage and distri- 
bution of the surplus goods. Once the FSRC re- 
ceived surplus crops it passed title to the states; thus 
state and local relief agencies were directly respon- 
sible for distributing the goods under the regulatory 
control of the federal corporation. 

Between October 1933 and October 1935, the 
FSRC distributed to the states a variety of surplus 
commodities with a value totaling $265,271,056. In 
November 1935, the program was transferred to 
the AAA and renamed the Federal Surplus Com- 
modities Corporation (FSCC). The corporation was 
reorganized again in 1937, though it still retained its 
function as a purchaser and distributor of surplus 
agricultural commodities. 

The FSCC sought to encourage consumption, 
and its primary function was to distribute products 
to relief clients "over and above" the aid they re- 



356 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL 



S U R P L 



COMMODITIES 



CORPORATION 



( F S C C ) 




Surplus foods being sold at bargain prices in 1936. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



ceived based upon need. Thus the FSRC and FSCC 
augmented relief benefits, while avoiding direct 
competition with private industry. Among the 
foods the corporation distributed were beef, pork, 
sausage, mutton, lard, rice, fruits, eggs, and cereals. 
The corporation also handled various processed 
goods that had been produced by state work relief 
industries, including clothing, mattresses, bedding, 
and towels from textile factories, and preserved 
meats, fruits, and vegetables from canneries. In ad- 
dition, the FSCC coordinated a state-level school 
lunch program from 1936 to 1940; in 1939 it initiat- 
ed an experimental Food Stamp Program, the pre- 
cursor to the modern food stamp program. The cor- 
poration was abolished in 1940 and its functions 
were reorganized into the Surplus Marketing Ad- 



ministration, with duties shifting to meet wartime 
demand. 

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMIN- 
ISTRATION (AAA); FEDERAL EMERGENCY RELIEF 
ADMINISTRATION (FERA). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Watkins, T. H. The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of 
the Great Depression in America. 1999. 

Williams, Edward Ainsworth. "Federal Aid for Relief." 
Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1939. 

Sara M. Gregg 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



357 



FEDERAL E H E A E R E P R J E C E ( F E P 




Bossa Moona, a musical that ran in New York City in 1935, was one of numerous shows produced by the African-American 
unit of the WPA's Federal Theatre Project. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT (FTP) 

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was a New Deal 
initiative that was spawned by hard times. Part of 
the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the 
Federal Theatre Project democratized modern 
American culture, signaling a distinct openness to 
new formats and ideas. Devised in part as a welfare 
measure, the American theater in the 1930s gained 
a major infusion of federal money, fostered an ex- 
plosion of new talent, and stimulated wide public 
involvement. The actor, director, and producer John 
Houseman later saw this as "the most creative and 
dynamic approach that has yet been made to an 
American National Theater." Although the project 



was terminated in 1939 due to its political vulnera- 
bility and the overall erosion of support for the New 
Deal, its influence as a model for expanding the 
public sphere remains. 

The Depression accentuated a broad set of 
problems affecting the theater industry. More than 
twenty thousand theater workers were unem- 
ployed. Half of New York City's theaters closed and 
regional theaters across the nation were hard hit. 
Yet the Federal Theatre Project also grew out of the 
inadequacies of American commercial theater, in- 
adequacies that had become clear to many by the 
early 1930s. Syndicates and the star system had 
grown powerful, reinforcing formulaic productions 
that standardized content, form, promotion, and 



358 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF E H E G R E A E DEPRESSION 



FEDERAL E H E A E R E P R J E C E ( E E P ) 



distribution of the theater industry's product. The 
movie industry had also siphoned off much of its 
market. Vaudeville, as well as regional and reperto- 
ry theater companies, was badly hurt by the grow- 
ing Depression. Yet even within this context there 
were signs of creative vitality: the "little theater 
movement," the Group Theater, and the attractions 
of European and Soviet theater all created an atmo- 
sphere of expectation, experimentation, and the 
politicization of social issues in American theater. 

Although some theater workers had earlier re- 
ceived minor assistance from the Civil Works Ad- 
ministration and the Civilian Conservation Corps 
(CCC), funding for a full-scale Federal Theatre 
Project was tunneled through the WPA, which was 
created in April 1935. The Federal Theatre Project 
was officially launched that August when the direc- 
tors of the writers', music, art, and theater projects, 
collectively known as Federal Project Number One, 
were announced. President Roosevelt's close asso- 
ciate and WPA head Harry Hopkins chose Hallie 
Flanagan, an old friend from Iowa, to be director of 
the Federal Theatre Project. 

Hopkins made an inspired choice. Born in 
1890, Flanagan was a gifted drama teacher and pro- 
ducer who had worked at Vassar College in Pough- 
keepsie, New York. Upon taking office she noted 
that "while our aim is to put to work thousands of 
theater people, our more far-reaching purpose is to 
organize and support theatrical enterprises so ex- 
cellent in quality, so low in cost and so vital to the 
communities involved that they will be able to con- 
tinue after federal aid is withdrawn." She later 
noted the novelty of the government getting into 
the theater business, saying, "We all believed that 
theater was more than a private enterprise, that it 
was also a public interest which, properly fostered, 
might come to be a social and educative force." En- 
ergetic and politically sensitive, Flanagan originally 
worked out of the old McLean Mansion in Wash- 
ington, D.C., and dealt with a welter of bureaucratic 
nightmares — workers needed to prove residence 
for a year in a city where they would collect their 
checks, for example. 

The Theatre Project employed more than 
twelve thousand theater workers at its peak, in- 
cluding numerous actors and directors who later 




LLhi\ W 



A 1935 stage production by the Jewish unit of the Federal 
Theatre Project. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



became famous, such as Orson Welles, E.G. Mar- 
shall, Sidney Lumet, John Houseman, Burt Lancas- 
ter, and Will Geer. Units were established in thirty- 
one states and New York City. Overall the Federal 
Theatre Project produced more than one thousand 
productions and one thousand performances each 
month before nearly a million people. Seventy- 
eight percent of these audience members were ad- 
mitted free of charge. Major radio networks carried 
the Federal Theatre of the Air to an estimated ten 
million listeners, while the Federal Theatre Project's 
National Service Bureau provided research, consul- 
tation, and play-reading services to all the units. It 
even created a Federal Theater Magazine and an Au- 
dience Research Department in October 1936 to 
track public interest in its productions. 

Numerous productions were staged that raised 
provocative questions about the social and eco- 
nomic conditions of the time. Classic or ideological- 
ly conservative dramas such as Shakespeare's Mac- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE 6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



359 



FEDERAL E H E A E R E PROJECT 



F E P 



beth and T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral were 
counterpoised with contemporary themes and new 
formats. One of the most controversial was a pro- 
duction of It Can't Happen Here, based on Sinclair 
Lewis's novel about fascism in the United States. 
The "Living Newspapers" productions were de- 
rived from social issues of the day and were often 
produced simultaneously in several cities. They 
used photographs, short films, animated se- 
quences, and other novel techniques to gain audi- 
ence attention. 

The Federal Theatre Project placed special em- 
phasis on promoting minority culture. Black theater 
companies were established in a dozen cities. For- 
eign language companies performed works in Yid- 
dish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Al- 
though Flanagan wielded power from Washington, 
the Federal Theatre Project allowed considerable 
regional variation in its productions. States experi- 
mented with theaters for the blind, and puppeteers 
toured CCC camps. Some project employees assist- 
ed local dramatic clubs, while others provided his- 
torical information for playwrights. 

However, the Federal Theatre Project was the 
most vulnerable of all New Deal cultural programs 
when it came to censorship. Its productions were 
sometimes provocative and many theater workers 
were outspoken advocates on the political left. 
Some Federal Theatre Project employees demon- 
strated when the government cut the project's 
funding. WPA chief Harry Hopkins had originally 
said that "what we want is a free, adult, uncensored 
theater," but that proved difficult to accomplish, es- 
pecially after southern committee chairmen in Con- 
gress began voicing their concerns. Censorship 
quickly reared its head against the first Living 
Newspaper production, Ethiopia, which addressed 
the Italian invasion of that African nation. The 
White House feared international repercussions 
and sought to constrain elements of the production, 
which led to the resignation of the Federal Theatre 
Project's New York director, the playwright Elmer 
Rice. 

Issues surrounding federal cutbacks, censor- 
ship, and criticism of the leftist political content of 
some of the Federal Theatre Project's productions 
grew after the 1936 election. By 1938, the Dies 



Committee held hearings into what some of its 
members labeled communist subversion of the 
Federal Theatre Project. Newspapers provided few 
opportunities for the Federal Theatre Project to de- 
fend itself against committee allegations of work- 
ers' association with the Communist Party. On June 
30, 1939, the House Appropriations Committee 
suspended use of WPA funds for any theater activi- 
ties, and the Federal Theater Project ended abrupt- 
ly. A grand experiment had ended in a manner that 
presaged the red-baiting of the postwar era. 

See Also: CRADLE WILL ROCK, THE; FEDERAL ONE; 
FLANAGAN, HALLIE; WELLES, ORSON; WORKS 
PROGRESS ADMENESTRATION (WPA). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

De Hart, Jane Sherron. The Federal Theater, 1935-1939: 
Plays, Relief, and Politics. 1967. 

Dworkin y Mendez, Kenya C. "The Tradition of Hispanic 
Theater and the WPA Federal Theater Project in 
Tamp-Ybor City, Florida." In Recovering the U.S. His- 
panic Literary Heritage, Vol. 2, edited by Erlinda 
Gonzalez-Berry and Charles M. Tatum. 1996. 

Flanagan, Hallie. Arena: The History of the Federal Theater. 
1940. 

Fraden, Rena. Blueprints for a Black Federal Theater, 
1935-1939. 1996. 

Mangione, Jerre G. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal 
Writers' Project, 1935-1943. 1972. 

Manning, Susan. "Black Voices, White Bodies: The Per- 
formance of Race and Gender in How Long 
Brethren." American Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1998). 

Melosh, Barbara. Engendering Culture: Manhood and 
Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater. 1991. 

Redd, Tina. "Birmingham's Federal Theater Project 
Negro Unit: The Administration of Race." In Afri- 
can-American Performances and Theater History: A 
Critical Reader, edited by Harry ]. Elam, Ir., and 
David Krasner. 2001. 

Schwartz, Bonnie Nelson. Voices from the Federal Theater. 
2003. 

Sporn, Paul. Against Itself: The Federal Theater and Writ- 
ers' Projects in the Midwest. 1995. 

Witham, Barry. "Lhe Economic Structure of the Federal 
Theater Project." In The American Stage: Social and 
Economic Changes from the Colonial Period to the Pres- 
ent, edited by Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller. 1993. 

Gregory W. Bush 



360 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF E H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



f E D E R A L WRITERS 



PROJECT 



F W P 



FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT 
(FWP) 

The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was created in 
1935 as part of the service branch of the Works 
Progress Administration (WPA) to provide work 
relief for writers and to develop writing and re- 
search projects approved by the WPA. In July 1935 
Henry Alsberg was appointed project director. The 
project was organized into state branches across the 
country, and special units were also established in 
Puerto Rico, New York City, and Washington, D.C. 
From 1935 until the WPA's demise in 1943, about 
seven thousand people worked for the FWP, in- 
cluding a number of the most important American 
writers of the 1930s and 1940s. It produced several 
keystone anthologies of American writing that re- 
main central to the study of American literature. 
The FWP also made the first comprehensive at- 
tempt to document American folklore and oral his- 
tory, and created a series of guidebooks to states 
and regions of the United States that remain unpar- 
alleled in scope and quality. 

The largest state branches of the Federal Writ- 
ers' Project existed in Illinois and New York. Chica- 
go was the center of the Illinois Project, which at- 
tracted the most important writers of the Midwest. 
Among them were Arna Bontemps and Jack Con- 
roy, who gathered material for their important mi- 
gration study They Seek a City; novelist Nelson Al- 
gren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm; 
dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham; 
novelists Willard Motley and Frank Yerby; novelist 
Saul Bellow; and poet Margaret Walker. While 
working for the FWP, Richard Wright gathered ma- 
terials for his 1941 book, Twelve Million Black Voices, 
in collaboration with Farm Security Administration 
photographer Edward Rosskam. Many of these 
Chicago writers comprised what critic Robert Bone 
later termed the Chicago Renaissance in American 
literature. 

Notable writers who worked for the New York 
City Project included novelist and short story writer 
John Cheever; poet Waring Cuney; novelist Ralph 
Ellison (who drew on FWP interviews with Harlem 
residents in writing the 1952 classic Invisible Man); 
poet Claude McKay; social historian Roi Ottley; 



poet Kenneth Fearing; and novelist Anzia Yezier- 
ska. Many of the New York City writers, such as 
Earl Conrad, Sol Funaroff, and Claude McKay, had 
ties to the organized Left, including to the Commu- 
nist Party; FWP writer Philip Rahv famously broke 
with the Communist Party and became an editor at 
the important literary journal Partisan Review. 
Other major American writers who participated in 
state FWPs include Zora Neale Hurston in Florida, 
John Steinbeck in California, and Conrad Aiken in 
Massachusetts. Among the important literary an- 
thologies to emerge from the Federal Writers Proj- 
ect were American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and 
Verse, published in 1937, and Poetry, published in 
1938. Special issues of literary journals, such as the 
winter 1938 Frontier and Midland, were devoted en- 
tirely to FWP writings, and the May 11, 1938, New 
Republic included a feature titled "Federal Poets: An 
Anthology." 

Yet it was in folklore and ethnic studies that the 
FWP made its most original contributions. From 
1936 to 1937 scholar John A. Lomax served as na- 
tional advisor on folklore to the FWP. Between 1936 
and 1938, project writers conducted interviews with 
former slaves in more than a dozen states. During 
1938, Benjamin A. Botkin served as both folklore 
consultant and folklore editor to the Federal Writ- 
ers' Project. In 1944, Botkin assembled a selection 
of the slave interviews into Lay My Burden Down: 
A Folk History of Slavery. Botkin also collected in- 
dustrial folktales gathered such writers as Jack Con- 
roy and Nelson Algren into A Treasury of American 
Folklore, which was published in 1944. FWP record- 
ings of African-American musicians led to the re- 
lease of records by Louis Armstrong and such com- 
pilations as News and the Blues: Telling It Like It Is. 
Other significant ethnic studies conducted by the 
project include The Italians of New York, published 
in 1938, Jewish Families and Family Circles of New 
York, published in 1939, The Armenians in Massa- 
chusetts, published in 1937, and The Hopi and The 
Navaho, published by the FWP in Arizona in 1937 
and 1938, respectively. 

In addition to the state and area guidebooks, 
the project also produced regional studies, both se- 
rious and light. Notable studies of regional folklore 
and folk music included Sodbusters: Tales of South- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



361 



F E R 



eastern South Dakota and South Carolina Folk Tales: 
Stories of Animals and Supernatural Beings. Baseball, 
bird-watching, reptiles and amphibians, and skiing 
were subjects of other FWP books. Materials col- 
lected by FWP staffers also appeared in important 
books published after the demise of the project, in- 
cluding Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake's Black 
Metropolis, a monumental study of Chicago's South 
Side, and Jerre Mangione's The Dream and the Deal, 
still the most comprehensive first-person account 
of the Federal Writers' Project. 

In September 1939 the Works Progress Admin- 
istration changed its name to the Work Projects 
Administration, and the Federal Writers' Project 
became known as the WPA Writers' Program. The 
FWP, hobbled by funding cuts and accusations of 
communist influence, produced its last guidebook 
(on Oklahoma) in 1941. The WPA itself disbanded 
June 30, 1943. 

The Federal Writers' Project was one of the 
great successes of the Roosevelt administration. It 
nurtured and sustained some of the most important 
American literary careers of the 1930s and 1940s, 
and its focus on social documentary approaches in- 
fluenced the realism and naturalistic themes of 
American letters during the Depression and World 
War II. Oral historians such as Studs Terkel and ar- 
chival enterprises such as Folkways Records ex- 
tended the methods and findings of the FWP into 
the contemporary period. The FWP's attention to 
migration, urbanization, folk culture, ethnic studies, 
labor, and race also predicted the themes of gov- 
ernment and university study of American culture 
and society in the postwar period. 

See Also: AMERICAN GUIDE SERIES; FEDERAL ONE; 
FOLKLORISTS; WORKS PROGRESS ADMIN- 
ISTRATION (WPA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bone, Robert. "Richard Wright and the Chicago Renais- 
sance." Callaloo 9, no. 3 (1986): 446-468. 

Botkin, B. A., ed. Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of 
Slavery. 1945. 

Brewer, leutonne. The Federal Writers' Project: A Bibliog- 
raphy. 1994. 

Cappetti, Carla. Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnogra- 
phy, and the Novel. 1993. 



Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. Black Metropolis: 
A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. 1993. 

Federal Writers' Project. American Stuff: An Anthology of 
Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal Writers' 
Project. 1937. 

Mangione, lerre. The Dream and the Deal: The Federal 
Writers' Project, 1935-1943. 1972. 

Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties Amer- 
ica. 1973. 



Susman, Warren, ed. 
1929-1945. 1973. 



Culture and Commitment 



Swados, Harvey, ed. The American Writer and the Great 
Depression. 1966. 

Bill V. Mullen 



FERA. See FEDERAL EMERGENCY RELIEF 
ADMINISTRATION. 



FHA. See FARMERS' HOLIDAY ASSOCIATION; 
FEDERAL HOUSING ADMINISTRATION. 



FIELDS, W.C. See HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM 
INDUSTRY; HUMOR. 



FIRESIDE CHATS 



During his twelve years as president, Franklin Roo- 
sevelt delivered thirty-one radio addresses called 
"fireside chats," a name coined in May 1933, imme- 
diately before the second of them, by Harry M. 
Butcher, a CBS radio executive. The public, the 
press, and Roosevelt himself adopted the homey 
appellation, and the label stuck. These speeches 
were intended to be relatively brief and informal re- 
ports to the American people, delivered in a con- 
versational tone and in simple, unadorned lan- 
guage. Roosevelt, who had experimented with this 
use of the radio when he was governor of New 
York, was a master of that form of communication; 
he had a clear, bell-like voice and developed an un- 
pretentious and good-humored style that endeared 
him to millions of Americans across the country. 

The first fireside chat was given on March 12, 
1933, only a week after Roosevelt's inauguration. It 



362 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FIRESIDE C H A E S 




President Franklin D. Roosevelt, preparing to deliver a fireside chat in April 1935. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



addressed the banking crisis, and the everyday lan- 
guage and easy tone of the opening sentences set 
the pattern for all the fireside chats that were to fol- 
low: "My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes 
with the people of the United States about bank- 
ing — to talk with the comparatively few who un- 
derstand the mechanics of banking, but more par- 
ticularly with the overwhelming majority of you 
who use banks for the making of deposits and the 
drawing of checks. I want to tell you what has been 
done in the last few days, and why it was done, and 
what the next steps are going to be." 

The first thirteen of these radio talks (aired from 
March 1933 through July 1938) were devoted to do- 
mestic policy, explaining aspects of the New Deal 
and asking for political support for his various pro- 
grams. The final eighteen talks (aired from Septem- 



ber 1939 through January 1945) addressed the is- 
sues and dangers raised by the war in Europe and, 
once the United States entered, reported on the 
progress toward ultimate victory. Although Roose- 
velt occasionally shared bad news in the fireside 
chats, their prevailing tone was patriotic, inspira- 
tional, and upbeat — the president of the United 
States trying, in his neighborly way, to encourage 
optimism, pride in America, and confidence in the 
future. 

Most of the fireside chats were delivered by 
Roosevelt from the diplomatic reception room on 
the first floor of the White House, seated at a table 
loaded with microphones from the major radio net- 
works. About a third of the talks were given on 
Sunday evenings. Normally the president invited a 
small audience to be present — twenty or thirty 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



363 



F I S 



MILTON 



friends, civil servants, and houseguests, all seated 
on folding chairs. The president would be wheeled 
into the room about ten minutes before airtime, 
carrying his reading copy and smoking the usual 
cigarette. 

Roosevelt had the benefit of a team of talented 
speechwriters. Some of them were political opera- 
tives with other duties, advisers such as Samuel 
Rosenman, Harry Hopkins, Rexford Tugwell, 
Adolph Berle, and a half dozen others. The wartime 
fireside chats had the additional advantage of two 
legendary American writers, Robert Sherwood and 
Archibald MacLeish. But the accounts of all the par- 
ticipants agree that the president himself was an 
active participant in the speechwriting process. He 
would dictate initial versions of certain passages, 
review each draft meticulously, require changes 
and rearrangements, and practice speaking the 
sentences until he had the material just the way he 
wanted it. He also sometimes changed words here 
and there as he delivered the speech. 

The impact of these talks on the American peo- 
ple would be difficult to overestimate. The first fire- 
side chat was carried by around 150 radio stations 
and entered an estimated twenty million homes 
(reaching perhaps sixty million Americans). By the 
late 1930s, around five hundred of the nation's 
eight hundred radio stations were carrying the 
speeches, and estimates of the audience range as 
high as one hundred million. It was not unusual for 
the White House to receive forty thousand letters 
from around the country after a broadcast. The pic- 
ture of a family gathered around the kitchen table 
listening to the president on the radio, became one 
of the enduring images of the 1930s and early 
1940s. 

See Also: COMMUNICATIONS AND THE PRESS; 
RADIO; ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Braden, Waldo W., and Earnest Brandenburg, "Roose- 
velt's Fireside Chats." Speech Monographs 22, no. 5 
(November 1955): 290-302. 

Buhite, Russell D., and David W. Levy, eds. FDR's Fire- 
side Chats. 1992. 

Levine, Lawrence W., and Cornelia R. Levine. The People 
and the President. 2002. 



Michelson, Charles. The Ghost Talks. 1944. 

Perkins, Frances. The Roosevelt I Knew. 1946. 

Rosenman, Samuel. Working with Roosevelt. 1952. 

Sharon, lohn H. "The Fireside Chat." Franklin D. Roose- 
velt Collector 2 (November 1949): 3-20. 

David W. Levy 



FISH, HAMILTON 



Hamilton Fish (December 7, 1888-January 18, 
1991) served in the U.S. Congress as Republican 
representative from New York from 1925 to 1945. 
Fish was best known for his investigations into do- 
mestic communism. A Hudson Valley blueblood 
whose grandfather had been secretary of state, Fish 
graduated from Harvard University in 1910, sat in 
the New York state assembly from 1914 to 1916 as 
a member of the Progressive Party, served overseas 
as an infantry captain during World War I, and 
helped to organized the American Legion in 1919. 
Though he hailed from New York's Dutchess coun- 
ty, the home of Franklin Roosevelt, Fish voiced 
strong opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy. 

In May 1933 Fish claimed that the extraordinary 
powers that had been given to Roosevelt constitut- 
ed "an American dictatorship based on the consent 
of the governed." In 1933 Fish voted for the Econo- 
my Act, while opposing the Agricultural Adjust- 
ment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and in- 
flationary measures. In January 1934 Fish backed an 
increase in Civil Works Administration payments, 
but that March he found the New Deal dominated 
by "professors, radicals, and near-Socialists." In 
February 1935 Fish accused the National Recovery 
Administration of strangling small enterprises, and 
he fought pending banking legislation for giving 
the Federal Reserve Board too much power. He 
continually sought compromise on veterans' bonus 
legislation, opposing the bills of Congressman 
Wright Patman, a Democrat from Texas, while fa- 
voring installment payments to veterans. To solve 
the depression in agriculture, Fish endorsed the 
McNary-Haugen bill, which centered on dumping 
surpluses overseas. 



36*. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



F L 



N A 6 



L L I E 



As the 1936 campaign approached, Fish ex- 
pressed interest in the Republican presidential 
nomination, and was backed by Representative 
Harold Knutson from Minnesota. A man as far to 
the left as New York Representative Vito Marcan- 
tonio wanted Fish to serve as a delegate to the party 
convention, saying he stood "for social and eco- 
nomic justice and a square deal for labor and small 
business interests." Like Marcantonio, Fish en- 
dorsed the candidacy of William E. Borah, advanc- 
ing the argument that the Idaho senator, as the 
most liberal of the contenders, could best carry 
New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. 
Though he supported the Supreme Court's ruling 
against the Agricultural Adjustment Administra- 
tion, Fish was disturbed enough by the Tipaldo de- 
cision, which struck down a state minimum wage 
law, to offer a constitutional amendment giving 
each state the power to fix minimum wages for 
workers. In the wake of the Republican defeat in 
1936, he called for the resignation of conservative 
party chairman John Hamilton and maintained that 
his party must endorse old-age pensions and pro- 
tection for children. 

Though Fish found Roosevelt's court-packing 
scheme a "revolutionary, unlawful and a monstrous 
doctrine," he pledged to vote for mandatory retire- 
ment of aged Supreme Court justices and desired 
a constitutional amendment that would require a 
two -thirds vote to invalidate congressional legisla- 
tion. He welcomed the court's decisions backing 
the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), ar- 
guing that the court showed that liberal legislation 
would receive "a square deal." In October 1937 he 
blamed the president for the stock market decline, 
saying business lacked confidence in his rule. In 
1938 Fish accused the Works Progress Administra- 
tion of political corruption, supported the wages 
and hours bill, and wanted his state party organiza- 
tion to endorse Democrats Al Smith and Herbert 
Lehman for the Senate. That year the American 
Federation of Labor, pleased with Fish's pro-labor 
stance, endorsed his reelection. In 1944, Fish lost 
the House race by a decisive margin, partly as a re- 
sult of the gerrymandering of his district. As a pri- 
vate citizen, he increasingly espoused rightwing 
views until his death at age 102. 



See Also: ELECTION OF 1936; NATIONAL 
RESOURCES PLANNING BOARD (NRPB); 
REPUBLICAN PARTY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Current, Richard Nelson. "Hamilton Fish: Crusading 
Isolationist." In Public Men in and out of Office, edited 
by J. T. Salter. 1946. 

Fish, Hamilton. Hamilton Fish: Memoir of an American Pa- 
triot. 1991. 

Hanks, Richard Kay. "Hamilton Fish and American Iso- 
lationism, 1920-1944." Ph.D. diss., University of 
California at Riverside, 1971. 

Troncone, Anthony C. "Hamilton Fish, Sr., and the Poli- 
tics of American Nationalism, 1912-1945." Ph.D. 
diss., Rutgers University, 1993. 

Justus D. Doenecke 



FLANAGAN, HALLIE 



A theater director, educator, and playwright, Hallie 
Mae Ferguson Flanagan (August 27, 1890-July 23, 
1969) served as the administrator of the Federal 
Theatre Project from 1935 to 1939. Born in Redfield, 
South Dakota, Flanagan graduated in 1911 from 
Iowa's Grinnell College, where she was a classmate 
of Harry Hopkins. Flanagan taught high school be- 
fore marrying insurance salesman Murray Flanagan 
in 1912. The couple produced two sons, one of 
whom survived to adulthood. After her husband's 
1919 death, Flanagan returned to the classroom. 

A charismatic woman who loved to be at the 
center of attention, Flanagan ventured into the dra- 
matic arts in 1921. While an assistant director at 
Grinnell's Colonial Theatre, she penned several 
plays. The Curtain, about two likable liars, won the 
Iowa State Playwriting Contest in 1922 and pro- 
pelled Flanagan into Harvard professor George 
Pierce Baker's 47 Workshop for playwriting. In 
1924, after completing her master of arts degree at 
Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
Flanagan returned to Grinnell College to head the 
theater program. She left in 1925 to teach at Vassar 
College in Poughkeepsie, New York. 

Flanagan's Vassar duties were delayed when 
she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for study 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



365 



F L Y N N 



EDWARD 



abroad. During her year in Europe she saw not only 
new plays but also new methods of staging. Politi- 
cally to the left of center, Flanagan appreciated the 
Soviet Union's employment of drama as an instru- 
ment of social and political change. Once back in 
the United States, she developed a reputation as an 
authority on Soviet drama and contributed regular- 
ly to various theater publications. At the Vassar Ex- 
perimental Theatre, she became one of the first 
Americans to use agitprop plays to rouse public 
opinion against poverty and unemployment. 

In 1935 Harry Hopkins, head of the Works 
Progress Administration, asked his friend Flanagan 
to run the new Federal Theatre Project (FTP). Flan- 
agan saw the mission of the FTP as providing a so- 
cial and educational contribution to the country 
through the establishment of a federation of non- 
commercial theaters. She spent most of her tenure 
battling administrators who had no interest in cul- 
ture and wanted only an inconspicuous jobs pro- 
gram. To educate through drama without building 
expensive sets, Flanagan created Living Newspaper 
productions similar to works she had seen in Rus- 
sia. Innovative and controversial, these plays docu- 
mented current social and political issues. The FTP 
ended in 1939, amidst charges of Communist infil- 
tration. 

Flanagan returned to Vassar. She joined Smith 
College in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1942 as 
a dean and then resumed full-time theater teaching 
in 1946. She died in Old Tappan, New Jersey. 

See Also: CRADLE WILL ROCK, THE; FEDERAL 
THEATRE PROJECT (FTP). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bentley, Joanne. Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American 
Theatre. 1988. 

Swiss, Cheryl Diane. "Hallie Flanagan and the Federal 
Theatre Project: An Experiment in Form." Ph.D. 
diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1982. 

Caryn E. Neumann 



FLYNN, EDWARD J. 

Longtime boss of the Bronx, Edward (Ed) Joseph 
Flynn (September 22, 1891-August 18, 1953) 



helped Franklin D. Roosevelt rise to power and 
then served as his presidential campaign organizer 
and chief political advisor on urban machine poli- 
tics. 

Unlike most city bosses, Flynn came from a 
comfortable background. The son of a college - 
educated Irish immigrant father, Flynn was born in 
New York City in 1891. He earned a law degree 
from Fordham University in 1912 and quickly be- 
came a successful Bronx attorney. Flynn's name 
recognition brought him to the notice of the Tam- 
many Hall machine, a Democratic organization that 
had controlled New York City politics for decades. 
Tammany Hall pushed Flynn into running for the 
New York State Assembly in 1917. He served two 
terms and then in 1921 was elected sheriff of Bronx 
County. In 1925, Mayor James J. Walker named 
Flynn as New York City chamberlain. Already one 
of the mightiest men in New York City, Flynn 
showed more interest in politics than power. In 
1922 he became chairman of the Bronx County 
Democratic Executive Committee — in effect, the 
political chief of the county — a position that he re- 
tained until his death thirty years later. 

Quiet, reserved, and more comfortable with 
books than people, Flynn proved to have a flair for 
behind-the-scenes politics. As boss, he tightened 
up the Democratic organization in the Bronx by 
running an efficient borough, judiciously distribut- 
ing patronage, and avoiding the corruption scan- 
dals that had plagued earlier administrations. In 

1928, he campaigned hard for Roosevelt's success- 
ful New York gubernatorial campaign and earned 
the loyalty of the rising star. Upon taking office in 

1929, Roosevelt appointed Flynn to be secretary of 
New York state, a post that he held for ten years. 

After setting his sights on the White House, 
Roosevelt relied on Flynn to gather the support of 
Democrats in big-city machines throughout the na- 
tion. Flynn, a pragmatic liberal who appreciated 
creative solutions to vexing problems, emerged 
from the campaign as one of Roosevelt's closest ad- 
visors. Always a loyalist, Flynn supported the presi- 
dent even when the two disagreed over political 
matters, such as Roosevelt's support of New York 
City mayor Fiorello La Guardia. 

Roosevelt appointed Flynn to positions as re- 
gional administrator of the National Recovery Ad- 



366 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



F L K L R I S T S 



ministration public works program and as U.S. 
commissioner general to the New York World's 
Fair, but Flynn's political actions were more signifi- 
cant. In the mid-1930s, Flynn joined other politi- 
cians who advised Roosevelt of the potential im- 
portance of the African-American vote and of the 
need to take action to bring black voters into the 
party. Flynn also assisted James A. Farley with the 
second presidential campaign and then, as a propo- 
nent of Roosevelt's third presidential bid, replaced 
Farley in 1940 as chairman of the Democratic Na- 
tional Committee. After Congress rejected Flynn's 
1943 nomination as ambassador to Australia, he 
gradually withdrew from national politics, although 
he continued to serve as chairman of the Bronx 
County Democrats. Flynn succumbed to a heart at- 
tack while visiting Dublin. 

See Also: CITIES AND SUBURBS; DEMOCRATIC 
PARTY; ELECTION OF 1940; TAMMANY HALL. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dorsett, Lyle W. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the City Bosses. 
1977. 

Flynn, Edward J. You're the Boss. 1947. 

Caryn E. Neumann 



FMHA. See FARMERS HOME ADMINISTRATION. 



FMP. See FEDERAL MUSIC PROJECT. 



FNMA. See FEDERAL NATIONAL MORTGAGE 
ASSOCIATION. 



FOLKLORISTS 



The key figures in charting new directions in folk- 
lore studies in the 1930s were New Deal folklorists 
B. A. Botkin (national folklore editor, Federal Writ- 
ers' Project, 1938-39; chief editor, Writers' Unit, Li- 
brary of Congress Project, 1939-1941; head, Ar- 
chive of American Folksong, 1942-1945); Alan 



Lomax (head, Archive of American Folksong, 
1937-1942); and Charles Seeger (head, Resettle- 
ment Administration's Special Skills Division, 
1935-1937; assistant director, Federal Music Proj- 
ect, 1937-1939). These three men paid special at- 
tention to the culture of marginalized rural and 
urban communities. They saw themselves as con- 
tributing to a new liberal/Popular Front culture for 
an emerging, pluralistic, and industrial society. 

Botkin, Lomax, and Seeger rejected traditional 
folklore scholarship's privileged hierarchies regard- 
ing what constituted the object of study — the lore 
over the folk, the past over the present, the rural 
over the urban, the agrarian over the industrial, sur- 
vivals over revivals, older genres over newer emer- 
gent forms, oral transmission over technological 
media, homogeneous groups over heterogeneous 
ones. The New Deal provided an institutional base 
for an approach to folklore that would have been 
virtually impossible to pursue at that time in the 
university world. The New Deal folklorists argued 
for a rejection of evolutionary anthropology and for 
a functionalist approach to the role of lore in a cul- 
ture. They were also cultural nationalists, who 
sought to reconcile romantic nationalist assump- 
tions about the need for a homogenous folk tradi- 
tion on which to build a national culture with the 
reality of American diversity. They envisioned the 
study and use of American folklore as playing an 
important role in a democratic culture. 

Botkin most fully articulated the views of New 
Deal folklorists. He disagreed with those folklorists, 
and other students of American culture, who felt 
there were no folk in America and with those who 
felt threatened by American diversity. He declared 
that "there is not one folk [in America] but many 
folk groups — as many folk groups as there are re- 
gional cultures or occupational groups within a re- 
gion." He also insisted that it was time "to recog- 
nize that we have in America a variety of folk 
groups, representing different racial, regional, and 
even industrial cultures." Botkin argued that while 
once geography had been a key factor in creating 
folklore, in the modern world the social structure it- 
self produces the isolation and separation out of 
which comes a folklore of the educated, as well as 
the uneducated. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



367 



F L K L R I S T S 



Federal Writers' Project director Henry Alsberg 
was convinced that Botkin's appointment would 
help the project move into a new phase of cultural 
studies focusing on the contemporary life of the na- 
tion's ethnic minorities and working class. Al- 
though John Lomax, Alan's father and Botkin's pre- 
decessor as Federal Writers' Project folklore editor, 
was a great folksong collector who broadened the 
canon of American folksong, he also saw folklore as 
flourishing only when the folk who valued it were 
separated from the mainstream of modern life. In 
sharp contrast, Botkin pioneered in the study of 
urban and labor lore and created experimental Fed- 
eral Writers' Project Living Lore units consisting of 
creative writers. He believed folklore had an impor- 
tant role to play in a democratic culture: "The WPA 
looks upon folklore research not as a private but as 
a public function, and folklore as public, not private 
properly." 

In 1937 Alan Lomax succeeded John Lomax as 
head of the Archive of American Folksong. Like 
Botkin, but unlike his father, Alan Lomax thought 
the creation of folklore was a permanent and ongo- 
ing activity. He formed close ties with other New 
Deal folklorists and shared their left-of-center poli- 
tics, egalitarian values, and functionalist approach. 
In an unprecedented manner, Alan Lomax used 
commercial radio to share the materials folklorists 
collected and his view that although folklore re- 
flected specific traditions it could also help create 
intercultural understanding. 

New Deal folklorists strove to institutionalize 
the informal supportive network that existed 
among them. Like Botkin and Lomax, Charles See- 
ger also regarded American folklore as hybrid forms 
best understood by documenting their function in 
cultures in transition. After becoming national Fed- 
eral Writers' Project folklore editor, Botkin estab- 
lished a Joint WPA (Works Progress Administra- 
tion) Folklore Committee. Botkin and Seeger co- 
chaired the committee. When it became apparent 
that the days of the Federal Writers' Project and 
Federal Music Project were numbered, Botkin and 
Seeger used the contacts they had made through 
the Committee to try to find a permanent home in 
the Library of Congress for the projects they had 
begun and those they still wanted to undertake. 



As it turned out, New Deal folklorists were not 
able to establish a permanent federal agency to pro- 
mote such work. Nevertheless the episode was 
hardly without value. Botkin, Lomax, and Seeger 
would find ways to continue their work along lines 
they had established during the New Deal. Botkin 
published for general readers a collection of Federal 
Writers' Project ex-slave narratives, Lay My Burden 
Down: A Folk History of Slavery (1945). Although 
much of the Living Lore and other Federal Writers' 
Project folklore material remained unpublished, 
Botkin would draw on it in A Treasury of American 
Folklore (1944), and in his later regional and topical 
folklore treasuries. In the 1950s, he argued for ap- 
plied folklore, a new term that embodied the values 
of New Deal folklorists. The work that Alan Lomax 
began in the 1930s later earned him the title "god- 
father of the folksong revival." Charles Seeger be- 
came one of the founders of the discipline of ethno- 
musicology. 

In the 1950s, folklorist Richard Dorson, who as 
a young scholar in 1939 had sought Botkin's guid- 
ance, worked to secure a foothold in academe for 
folklore as a Ph.D. granting discipline. To achieve 
this he sought to enforce a narrow definition of 
what folklorists studied and to define the role of the 
folklorist strictly in terms of academic scholarship. 
He viewed the New Deal folklorists' ideas about 
folklore for the public as a threat to the academic 
identity of folklore, the authority of folklore as an 
academic discipline, and most importantly as a 
threat to the authority of academic folklorists. 

Even during the postwar years, when New Deal 
folklorists' opponents in folklore studies sought to 
marginalize their influence, some younger folklor- 
ists sought contact with them and received the en- 
couragement they sought in resisting narrow ap- 
proaches to the material of folklore studies and to 
the role of the folklorist in the larger culture. In 
time, a group of folklorists, including some who 
had participated in the folksong revival, and who 
had been brought up on Botkin and Lomax's folk- 
lore anthologies, supported (1) the establishment in 
1967 of the Smithsonian Institution's Annual Festi- 
val of American Folklife; (2) folklorist Archie 
Green's efforts to create an American Folklife Cen- 
ter, established in the Library of Congress in 1976; 



368 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FORD 



E N R Y 



and (3) the creation of a network of public sector 
folklorists funded by the National Endowment for 
the Arts' Folk Arts Program, which was established 
in 1974. Given that much of the theory and practice 
of New Deal folklorists needs further study and 
given the constant ferment of a multicultural and 
advanced technological society, there is reason to 
think that the New Deal folklorist have left future 
generations a living legacy. 

See Also: FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT (FWP); 

LITERATURE; LOMAX, ALAN; MUSIC; POETRY; 
SLAVE NARRATIVES. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

American Memory Project. Library of Congress, http:// 
memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/finder.html 

Baron, Robert, and Nicholas B. Spitzer, eds. Public Folk- 
lore. 1992. 

Bindas, Kenneth J. All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: 
The WPA's Federal Music Project and American Soci- 
ety. 1995. 

Botkin, B. A. "Introduction." In Folk-Say: A Regional Mis- 
cellany, 1930, edited by B. A. Botkin. 1930. 

Botkin, B. A. "The Folkness of the Folk." English Journal 
26 (1937): 465-469. 

Botkin, B. A. "The Folk and the Individual: Their Creative 
Reciprocity." English Journal 27 (1938): 121-135. 

Botkin, B. A. "The Folk in Literature: An Introduction to 
the New Regionalism." In Folk-Say: A Regional Mis- 
cellany, edited by B. A. Botkin. 1929. 

Botkin, B. A. "WPA and Folklore Research: 'Bread and 
Song.'" Southern Folklore Quarterly 3 (1939): 7-14. 

Botkin, B. A., ed. A Treasury of American Folklore: Stories, 
Ballads, and Traditions of the People. 1944. 

Bronner, Simon. Following Tradition: Folklore in the Dis- 
course of American Culture. 1998. 

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Eahoring of 
American Culture in the Twentieth Century. 1996. 

Dorson, Richard. "Folklore and Fake-Lore." American 
Mercury 70 (1950): 335-343. 

Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and 
American Roots Music. 2000. 

Hirsch, Jerrold. "Folkore in the Making: B. A. Botkin." 
Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 3-38. 

Hirsch, Jerrold. "Cultural Pluralism and Applied Folk- 
lore: The New Deal Precedent." In The Conservation 
of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector, edited by 
Burt Feintuch. 1988. 

Hirsch, Jerrold. "Modernity, Nostalgia, and Southern 
Folklore Studies: The Case of John Lomax." Journal 
of American Folklore 105 (1992): 183-207. 



Hirsch, Jerrold. "'A Yorker by Preference, a Folklorist by 
Persuasion': B. A. Botkin Public (Folklore) Intellec- 
tual." New York Folklore 21 (1995): 75-102. 

Hirsch, Jerrold. Portrait of America: A Cultural History of 
the Federal Writers' Project. 2003. 

Jerrold Hirsch 



FORD, HENRY 

Henry Ford (July 30, 1863-April 7, 1947), who 
gained international fame as an innovator and en- 
trepreneur in the automobile industry, was born 
into a farm family in present-day Dearborn, Michi- 
gan. Ford channeled an engineering background 
and a notable stint as a motorcar racer into a career 
as a pioneer in the development of mass production 
systems and the manufacture of low-priced vehi- 
cles, beginning with the Model T in 1908. The spec- 
tacular expansion of the Ford Motor Company be- 
tween 1910 and 1923 established it as the country's 
leading automobile producer, transformed the au- 
tomobile industry, and enabled Henry Ford to se- 
cure complete control of his business. The associat- 
ed publicity established Henry Ford's international 
reputation as the inventor of mass production and 
a symbol of successful entrepreneurship. Promi- 
nent aspects of this public persona included the in- 
troduction of the $5 per day wage, peace campaign- 
ing during World War I, and a virulent anti- 
Semitism that was propounded through Ford's own 
newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, between 
1920 and 1927. Henry Ford's anti-Semitic views re- 
flected a strand of midwestern populist thought 
that was also reflected in his distrust of financial in- 
terests and international agencies. It created con- 
siderable controversy that tarnished his public 
image considerably by 1927. 

Although Ford Motor Company was the indus- 
try leader and extended its multinational operations 
considerably from 1911 to 1926, General Motors 
and Chrysler were potent competitors after 1923. 
Ford's investment in associated enterprises, such as 
mines, steelworks, and shipping, and the firm's 
focus on a single model imposed higher fixed costs 
than the less integrated General Motors, which of- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 6 R E A F DEPRESSION 



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FORD 



HENRY 



fered a range of models. Moreover, Henry Ford's 
autocratic style alienated key managers and de- 
layed modernization of the Model T. Model T pro- 
duction ended in 1927, and the Ford Motor Compa- 
ny's vast River Rouge plant was shut down for re- 
tooling in preparation for the manufacture of the 
new Ford Model A. Thousands of auto workers 
were left idle. Public interest in the new Model A 
focused on the Ford Motor Company's reputation 
and status, and initial sales were promising, with 
Ford regaining its leading position in 1929 and 
1930. But industry sales slumped from more than 5 
million new cars in 1929 to 1.4 million in 1932, and 
sales recovered only slowly. For such a capital- 
intensive industry, the result was persistent overca- 
pacity, even after the failure of many small firms. 
The Ford Motor Company's own sales and profits 
fell steeply, and the firm followed the general pat- 
tern of dismissing workers and operating shorter 
hours. Although Henry Ford's financial control pre- 
cluded external threats from banks, the crisis di- 
minished his reputation for transcending economic 
trends. The virtues of mass production as a means 
of extending consumption and, thus, employment 
became associated with fear of technological unem- 
ployment during the 1930s. 

Although Ford remained a major public figure 
during the Depression years, his self-help ideals as- 
sociated him with aspects of a discredited form of 
conservatism. In addition, his company's competi- 
tive strength ebbed as the aging Ford's arbitrary 
and intermittent authority impeded technological 
changes and inhibited an effective succession to his 
only son, Edsel Ford. The Ford Motor Company's 
management systems were weak compared to 
those at General Motors. Above all, Henry Ford's 
opposition to labor unions created a sour atmo- 
sphere within the company. The company's pio- 
neering and paternalistic labor practices, including 
the $5 per day wage and the sociological de- 
partment, which administered the scheme, were at- 
tempts to support and stabilise the firm's expand- 
ing and diverse workforce. Sociological Depart- 
ment's inspectors used questionnaires and home 
visits to determine whether workers qualified for 
the highest hourly rates. Despite positive aspects, 
the system had an authoritarian edge that con- 
tained the seeds of later problems. By the late 1920s 



Ford's industrial relations were explicitly coercive, 
especially in the giant Rouge plant. Henry Ford 
placed control of labor policies in the hands of 
Harry Bennett and his Service Department. Bennett 
oversaw a network of spies, employed violence to 
intimidate workers, awarded catering contracts to 
underworld associates, and parlayed his control of 
personnel and his close relationship with Henry 
Ford into wider influence. The latter element com- 
pounded the disunity and turnover among execu- 
tives, but the consequences were more direct for 
the workers. Competitive pressures translated into 
wage reductions and "speed-up" of the assembly 
line, as well as an intense work regime, favoritism, 
and a repressive management culture. By the 1930s 
Ford was among the worst examples of industrial 
practices in American manufacturing. 

Always eager for complete control, Ford was 
hostile to New Deal initiatives and to the emer- 
gence of union organizing campaigns. This was 
demonstrated graphically on March 7, 1932, when 
three thousand people marched to the River Rouge 
demanding work-sharing, union representation, 
and reforms to labour practices. The Dearborn po- 
lice and members of Ford's service department 
acted violently to disburse the crowd, eventually fir- 
ing directly into them. Four people were killed and 
at least twenty seriously wounded. Antipathy to the 
New Deal, combined with distaste for trade associ- 
ations, was reflected in Ford's refusal to participate 
in the automobile industry code under the National 
Recovery Administration (NRA) between 1933 and 
1935. Since the industry monitored its trade prac- 
tices effectively, the NRA code centered on labor 
relations. Despite federal rhetoric, Ford's opposi- 
tion to the NRA had little adverse impact on the 
company. However, union organizing activities 
gained momentum with the creation of United Au- 
tomobile Workers (UAW) in 1935 and its transfer 
to the newly formed Committee for Industrial Or- 
ganization, later called the Congress of Industrial 
Organizations (CIO). Legal support for the union 
came from the National Labor Relations Act of 
1935. A series of sit-down strikes and organizing 
drives, plus the revival of business, persuaded Gen- 
eral Motors and Chrysler to recognize the UAW in 
1937. Yet Henry Ford ensured that his firm contin- 
ued to resist unionization through intimidation and 



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JOHN 



legal challenges. The most striking public images of 
this opposition came in May 1937 when photogra- 
phers captured the "Battle of the Overpass" at the 
Rouge plant as Bennett's men assaulted UAW or- 
ganizers. Similar tactics were used at Ford plants in 
Dallas and Kansas City. Finally, in 1941 Ford faced 
a more unified UAW after the U.S. Supreme Court 
ruled against the firm's labor practices. A strike and 
blockade of the Rouge plant in April convinced 
Ford to negotiate, and the UAW emerged from the 
resulting National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) 
election as the representative union. The first union 
contract was signed in June in spite of Henry Ford's 
opposition. 

During the 1930s Henry Ford's other interests 
included opening Greenfield Village, a museum 
that symbolized the rural childhood that had 
shaped his attitudes, including his preference for 
political isolationism and his suspicion of finan- 
ciers. Ford also promoted "village industries" by lo- 
cating plants in rural areas, and he promoted exper- 
iments in the cultivation of soybeans and their use 
in manufacturing. World War II revived Ford's paci- 
fist ideals: In 1940 he refused to manufacture Rolls 
Royce engines for Great Britain. Once the United 
States entered the war, Ford concentrated the com- 
pany's production on defense contracts, including 
trucks, jeeps, munitions, and aircraft. After a stroke 
in 1941, Ford became less active, though more ca- 
pricious, in management, and the death of his son 
Edsel in 1943 weakened the firm's leadership. 
Henry Ford became company president and his 
grandson, Henry Ford II, was released from the 
navy to join management. Bennett's ambitions for 
control were thwarted by Clara Ford and Eleanor 
Ford, the wives of Henry and Edsel respectively, 
who mobilized the family's financial power and 
Clara's influence over Henry to ensure a transition 
to Henry Ford II. In 1947, Ford died quietly at the 
Fair Lane estate. His lying "in state" in Greenfield 
Village attracted thousands and his funeral was a 
major civic occasion. 

See Also: ANTI-SEMITISM; ORGANIZED LABOR; SIT- 
DOWN STRIKES; STRIKES; UNITED AUTO 
WORKERS (UAW). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Fine, Sidney. The Automobile under the Blue Eagle: Labor, 
Management, and the Automobile Manufacturing Code. 
1963. 

Hounshell, David. From the American System to Mass Pro- 
duction, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufactur- 
ing Technology in the United States. 1984. 

Lewis, David L. The Public Image of Henry Ford: An Ameri- 
can Folk Hero and his Company. 1976. 

Nevins, Allan, and Frank Ernest Hill. Ford: Expansion and 
Challenge, 1915-1933. 1957. 

Nevins, Allan, and Frank Ernest Hill. Ford: Decline and 
Rebirth, 1933-1962. 1963. 

Rae, John B. The American Automobile Industry. 1984. 

Henry Ford Estate. University of Michigan-Dearborn. 
http://www.umd.umich.edu/fairlane 

Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. Dearborn, 
Michigan, http://www.hfmgv.org 

Wilkins, Mira, and Frank Ernest Hill. American Business 
Abroad: Ford on Six Continents. 1964. 

Wik, Reynold M. Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America. 
1972. 

Michael French 



FORD, JOHN 

John Ford (Febrary 1, 1894-August 31, 1973), mo- 
tion-picture director, was born John Martin Feeney 
in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, to first-generation Irish 
Catholic immigrants. He spent his childhood in 
Portland, Maine, and in July 1914 he followed his 
older brother Francis, a movie actor and director, to 
California. There he began working in silent films 
as a crew member, stuntman, actor, and, from 1917 
on, director. Until the start of the Depression, he 
was best known as a director of westerns, for Uni- 
versal through 1921 and for Fox thereafter. The Iron 
Horse (1924) was his most famous western during 
the silent era. Between 1930 and 1941, Ford direct- 
ed thirty-one films in a number of genres for a vari- 
ety of studios, often working with screenwriter 
Dudley Nichols. His reputation and confidence 
grew after he was awarded an Oscar for best direc- 
tion for The Informer (1935), an honor he also re- 
ceived for Grapes of Wrath in 1940 and for How 
Green Was My Valley in 1941. 

Although Ford's political views evolved 
throughout his life, the progressive and antifascist 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



371 



FORD 



JOHN 




Henry Fonda (center) as Tom Joad, with Jane Darwell and Russell Simpson as Ma and Pa Joad, in John Ford's 1940 film version 
of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Bettmann/CORBIS 



political climate in Hollywood in the late 1930s and 
the influence of liberal screenwriters with whom he 
worked (such as Nichols) helped move his political 
views further left during the Depression than at any 
other time of his life. During that period he joined 
several leftist organizations, including the Motion 
Picture Democratic Committee, the Motion Picture 
Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain, and 
the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. 

Two of Ford's films in particular bear the im- 
print of this political climate. In Ford's first western 
of the 1930s, Stagecoach (1939), the most sympa- 
thetically portrayed characters are the escaped con- 
vict Ringo, the prostitute Dallas, and the drunken 
Doc Boone, and the chief antagonist is the banker 



Gatewood. In line with Roosevelt's New Deal coali- 
tion, the common people are celebrated while 
greedy elites are scorned. Grapes of Wrath (1940), 
the adaptation of John Steinbeck's celebrated 1939 
novel about Oklahoma farmers displaced by the 
Dust Bowl and seeking a new life in California, like- 
wise drew a sympathetic portrait of the Joad family, 
who struggle to survive in a system stacked against 
them, even if Ford softened the novel's dark ending 
by concluding with Ma Joad's optimistic speech 
about the endurance of the common people. 

In 1939 Ford fed the growing American nation- 
alism on the eve of World War II with two historical 
films, Drums along the Mohawk and Young Mr. Lin- 
coln. His final film before the U. S. entered World 



372 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



FOREMAN 



CLARK 



War II, How Green Was My Valley (1941), nostalgi- 
cally portrayed a Welsh coal-mining family from 
the adult point of view of the family's youngest son. 
Together, these three films foreshadowed Ford's 
evolution from leftist politics to concerns of patrio- 
tism, national myths, and memory that would pre- 
occupy him in his films of the next decade. 

See Also: HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John 
Ford. 1999. 

Ford, Dan. Pappy: The Life of John Ford. 1979. 

Gallagher, Tag. John Ford: The Man and His Films. 1986. 

lohn Ford Papers. Lilly Library, Indiana University, 
Bloomington. 

McBride, Toseph. Searching for John Ford. 2001. 

Studlar, Gaylyn, and Matthew Bernstein, eds. John Ford 
Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era. 



2001. 



Charles J. Maland 



FOREMAN, CLARK 



Clark Howell Foreman (February 19, 1902-June 15, 
1977) served in the Franklin Roosevelt administra- 
tion from 1933 to 1941. As a New Deal administra- 
tor and a founding member of the Southern Con- 
ference for Human Welfare, Foreman was a leading 
advocate of racial integration and actively sup- 
ported the expansion of economic and political de- 
mocracy in the South. 

Foreman, the grandson of the founder of The 
Atlanta Constitution, had rejected the racial mores of 
his native Georgia by the time he joined the Roose- 
velt administration in 1933. He supported an activ- 
ist role for the federal government in advancing the 
economic and social welfare of all citizens. As spe- 
cial advisor on the economic status of Negroes from 
1933 to 1935 under Secretary of the Interior Harold 
Ickes, Foreman and his assistant Robert Weaver ac- 
tively promoted full and fair inclusion of African 
Americans in New Deal programs. In 1935, Weaver 
succeeded Foreman in that post and Foreman be- 



came director of the Public Works Administration's 
Division of Public Power, where he developed an 
expanded program of grants and loans to cities to 
establish municipally owned power plants. This 
ambitious effort withstood a major legal challenge 
from private power companies. 

In 1938, Roosevelt sought Foreman's advice re- 
garding the president's effort to defeat southern 
congressional opponents of the New Deal during 
the 1938 Democratic primary elections. Foreman 
recommended that the president sponsor a report 
documenting what the New Deal had done for the 
South, and the importance of federal assistance to 
the region's economic development. As a result, 
Foreman and other southerners compiled The Re- 
port on the Economic Conditions of the South, and 
Foreman went on to help organize the Southern 
Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in No- 
vember of 1938 as an expression of southern sup- 
port for the New Deal. 

Foreman became director of defense housing in 
1940. A year later a major controversy developed 
around a housing project built for black defense 
workers in Detroit in an area bordering a predomi- 
nantly white neighborhood. When Foreman re- 
fused to give in to demands that the Sojourner 
Truth housing project be changed to white occu- 
pancy, southern conservatives in Congress joined 
with Republicans and successfully pressured for 
Foreman's dismissal. After leaving the federal gov- 
ernment, Foreman became chairman of the SCHW, 
and devoted his efforts towards challenging segre- 
gation and voter restrictions in the South, and ex- 
panding the political participation of both blacks 
and whites. 

See Also: REPORT ON THE ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 
OF THE SOUTH; SOUTH, GREAT DEPRESSION IN 
THE; SOUTHERN CONFERENCE FOR HUMAN 
WELFARE (SCHW). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Foreman, Clark. The New Internationalism. 1934. 

Sullivan, Patricia. Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the 
New Deal Era. 1996. 

Patricia Sullivan 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



373 



FOSTER 



WILLIAM 



FOSTER, WILLIAM Z. 



William Zebulon Foster (February 25, 1881-Sep- 
tember 1, 1961), a leading member of the Commu- 
nist Party for four decades, was possibly the best- 
known radical activist of Depression-era America. 
Born in Taunton, Massachusetts, the son of immi- 
grants, Foster grew up in an impoverished commu- 
nity in Philadelphia. His formal education ended at 
the age of ten, and, after a brief stint as an appren- 
tice to a craftsman, he worked at a variety of un- 
skilled jobs. 

In 1901, at the age of nineteen, Foster joined 
the Socialist Party and for the next two decades 
crisscrossed the country as an itinerant worker. In 
1909 he became a member of the International 
Workers of the World (IWW) but left the organiza- 
tion in 1911 over the issue of dual unionism, advo- 
cating instead capturing and radicalizing main- 
stream unions. To that end he joined the American 
Federation of Labor (AFL) and became one of its 
most effective organizers. Foster gained a national 
reputation for his leading role in major organizing 
campaigns in the meat and steel industries. 

Foster joined the Communist Party in 1921 and 
assumed a prominent role in party work. As a high- 
ly respected labor organizer he directed trade union 
activities throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s. 
In 1924, he became party chairman (a position he 
held until 1957) and also headed the party's ticket 
for president, as he did in 1928 and 1932. By the end 
of the 1920s he had risen to the top of the Commu- 
nist Party hierarchy as a member of a three-man 
secretariat that included Earl Browder and William 
Weinstone. 

In 1930, Foster launched the party's unem- 
ployed campaign with a mass demonstration of an 
estimated 100,000 in New York City. While cam- 
paigning in 1932, he suffered a heart attack and for 
the next three years was unable to engage in active 
party work. Once recuperated, Foster found 
Browder firmly in control and his role limited pri- 
marily to "literary activities." A prolific writer, he 
made good use of this period. Between 1932 and 
1939, he penned three books, including two autobi- 
ographies, and numerous articles and tracts. 



Throughout the 1930s Foster wrangled with 
Browder over the direction of the party. Respected 
but isolated, he regained a dominant voice in party 
affairs after Browder's removal from leadership and 
expulsion from the party in 1945. In 1957, Foster's 
health again collapsed, and he died four years later 
in the Soviet Union, where he had gone to seek 
medical treatment. Foster's widow returned his 
ashes to the United States and deposited them near 
the graves of the Haymarket martyrs in Chicago. 

See Also: BROWDER, EARL; COMMUNIST PARTY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Barrett, lames R. William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of 
American Radicalism. 1999. 

Foster, William Z. From Bryan to Stalin. 1937. 

Foster, William Z. Pages from a Worker's Life. 1939. 

lohanningsmeier, Edward P. Forging American Commu- 
nism: The Life of William Z. Foster. 1994. 

Zipser, Arthur. Workingclass Giant: The Life of William Z. 



Foster. 1981. 



Gwen Moore 



FRANK, JEROME 



Born in New York City to parents of German- 
Jewish descent, Jerome Frank (September 10, 
1889-January 13, 1957) grew up there and in Chica- 
go, where his family moved in his youth. Excep- 
tionally bright, Frank graduated Phi Beta Kappa 
from the University of Chicago in 1909 and set a 
new academic standard at Chicago's law school 
three years later. A corporate lawyer in Chicago, he 
dabbled in Progressive politics and underwent 
Freudian analysis to confirm that the legal profes- 
sion was for him. It was. Joining a New York law 
firm in the late 1920s, he soon published the first of 
several books, Law and the Modern Mind, wherein 
Frank championed "Legal Realism," a Freudian- 
informed assault on the rigidity of law and jurispru- 
dence. Appointments at Yale and the New School 
in New York followed, as did his entree into nation- 
al public service in the New Deal, mediated by his 
friend, Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter. As 
general counsel of the new Agricultural Adjustment 



m 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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FELIX 



Administration (AAA) in 1933, Frank assembled a 
legendary cadre of brilliant lawyers, including fu- 
ture Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Ste- 
venson, future Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas, 
future trustbuster Thurman Arnold, and Alger Hiss, 
later convicted of perjury over passing secrets to the 
Soviet Union in the trial-of-the-century. 

While the AAA's huge Legal Division included 
communists or sympathizers, Frank remained a lib- 
eral pragmatist within the profit system, paralleling 
the New Deal itself. But clashes between the Legal 
Division and the conservative landlord and proces- 
sor establishment were inevitable. Led first by AAA 
administrator George N. Peek and then by Chester 
C. Davis, the conservatives wanted to raise com- 
modity prices and limit production but resisted up- 
setting landlord-tenant relationships or making the 
AAA an instrument of land reform. Tensions over 
policy and procedure flared frequently in 1933 and 
1934 but climaxed in early 1935 when the liberals 
tried to reinterpret a controversial paragraph in the 
cotton acreage reduction contract in favor of share- 
croppers against landlords. That led to the infa- 
mous "purge" wherein Davis ousted Frank along 
with others in the Legal Division and the AAA's 
Consumer's Counsel. The firings were confirmed 
by Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, while 
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with friends on 
both sides, pleaded ignorance and remained aloof. 
The purge ended any liberal hope of serious agri- 
cultural reform in the AAA. Professionally un- 
harmed by his ouster, Frank held other federal jobs 
before his 1941 appointment to the U.S. Court of 
Appeals for the influential Second Circuit, a posi- 
tion he held until his death in January 1957. 

See Also: AGRFCULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMFN- 
FSTRATFON (AAA); WALLACE, HENRY A. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Frank, Jerome. Columbia Oral History Collection, Butler 
Library, Columbia University, New York. 

Glennon, Robert. The Iconoclast as Reformer: Jerome 
Frank's Impact on American Law. 1985. 

Grubbs, Donald H. Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Ten- 
ant Farmers' Union and the New Deal. 1971. 

Irons, Peter. The New Deal Lawyers. 1982. 



Nelson, Lawrence. "The Art of the Possible: Another 
Look at the 'Purge' of the AAA Liberals in 1935." 
Agricultural History 57 (1983): 416-435. 

Nelson, Lawrence. King Cotton's Advocate in the New 
Deal: Oscar G. Johnston and the New Deal. 1999. 

Paul, Julius. The Legal Realism of Jerome N. Frank: A Study 
of Fact-Skepticism and the Judicial Process. 1959. 

Shamir, Ronen. Managing Legal Uncertainty: Elite Lawyers 
in the New Deal. 1995. 

Volkomer, Walter. The Passionate Liberal: The Political and 
Legal Ideas of Jerome Frank. 1970. 

Lawrence J. Nelson 



FRANKFURTER, FELIX 

Felix Frankfurter (November 15, 1882-February 21, 
1965) was associate justice of the U.S. Supreme 
Court from 1939 to 1962. He was born in Vienna, 
Austria, one of six children of Leopold and Emma 
(Winter) Frankfurter. In 1894, the family moved to 
New York. Financial fortune proved elusive to 
Frankfurter's father; selling linen door-to-door and 
from their apartment, the kindhearted tradesman 
managed only a meager living and often spent any 
extra money he acquired on fruit baskets for less 
fortunate neighbors. 



EARLY LIFE AND CAREER 

Felix's two older brothers had to work to sup- 
plement their father's income, but the future justice 
was largely spared that fate. Leopold's brother Sol- 
omon had become a successful scholar in Vienna, 
and Emma seemed determined to give Felix the 
same opportunity, allowing her precocious son to 
attend lectures and spend hours in the Cooper 
Union library. After graduating third in his class at 
the City College of New York, Felix attended Har- 
vard Law School, ranking first each of his three 
years there. One of his Harvard examinations was 
so impressive that a faculty member regularly read 
it aloud to classes over the years. 

In 1906, Frankfurter joined Hornblower, Byrne, 
Miller and Potter, becoming the first Jewish person 
ever hired by that New York firm. He quickly be- 
came bored with private practice, however, and 



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FELIX 



when an opening became available in the office of 
the U.S. attorney for New York's southern district, 
Frankfurter jumped at the opportunity. Despite 
marked differences in their backgrounds, Frank- 
furter and Henry Stimson, the patrician federal at- 
torney for the district, worked well together, pursu- 
ing corporate misconduct and more mundane law 
violators with equal zeal. When President William 
Howard Taft named Stimson secretary of war, 
Frankfurter also went to Washington, becoming 
counsel in the War Department's Bureau of Insular 
Affairs. 

A master at flattery, the diminutive and effusive 
Frankfurter, with his piercing bird-like eyes and 
keen intellect, cultivated many new and influential 
Washington friends, not least among them justices 
Oliver W. Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis. The 
Washington house he shared with several friends 
became a center for nightly gatherings and frank 
intellectual discussions — Holmes, apparently, 
dubbed it "The House of Truth." There Frankfurter 
met the love of his life, Marion Denman, the Con- 
gregational minister's daughter he would marry in 
1920, over his mother's intense opposition, after a 
six-year courtship. The couple would have no chil- 
dren, and Marion suffered periodic bouts of depres- 
sion, but Frankfurter remained totally devoted to 
her throughout their marriage. 

In 1914, Frankfurter took a position on the law 
faculty at Harvard. A natural teacher (to both will- 
ing and unwilling students), he enjoyed his new 
role immensely, particularly the opportunity his 
professorship offered him for continued involve- 
ment in contemporary political and policy issues. 
Like Brandeis before him, Frankfurter represented 
clients defending wage and hour legislation before 
the Supreme Court. On special assignments for the 
Wilson administration, he filed a report charging 
that the conviction and death sentence handed 
labor leader Tom Mooney for a San Francisco 
bombing was based on perjured evidence and he 
concluded that Arizona copper miners had been 
subject to gross brutality and injustice. He also 
spoke out vehemently against Wilson attorney gen- 
eral Mitchell Palmer's raids on suspected subver- 
sives, became a very vocal critic of the Sacco and 
Vanzetti convictions and executions, and urged 
U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union. 



ADVISER TO ROOSEVELT 

As the nation became preoccupied with the 
Depression, Frankfurter was again a figure of influ- 
ence in Washington. He and Franklin D. Roosevelt 
had first met when Frankfurter was working in the 
War Department and Roosevelt was assistant Navy 
secretary. Frankfurter became a close friend and ad- 
viser to the future president during Roosevelt's ten- 
ure as governor of New York. When Roosevelt went 
to the White House in 1933, he offered Frankfurter 
the post of solicitor general, chief representative of 
the United States before the Supreme Court. 
Frankfurter declined, explaining that he could make 
a more substantial contribution as a source of per- 
sonnel and ideas for the New Deal. 

The future justice quickly became a major 
Washington figure. He played a prominent role in 
drafting and pushing recovery legislation through 
Congress. Holding Wall Street and big business 
primarily responsible for the nation's economic 
woes, Frankfurter relished the opportunity to over- 
see drafting of the Securities Act, subjecting the 
stock market to extensive federal control. Although 
others were primarily responsible for writing that 
legislation, Frankfurter mounted a brilliant defense 
of its provisions in testimony before Congress. 

The future justice obviously had competition in 
his efforts to influence the direction of New Deal 
policies. James Farley and certain others in Roose- 
velt's inner circle were essentially political tacti- 
cians, largely unconcerned with substantive policy. 
But three Columbia University academics — 
Raymond Moley, Adolph Berle, and Rexford Tug- 
well — became Frankfurter's major intellectual ri- 
vals. The trio contended that continued domination 
of the economy by giant businesses was inevitable 
and favored the administration's use of centralized 
planning to channel that power toward service of 
the public interest. Frankfurter, on the other hand, 
was suspicious of concentrated economic power 
and the notion that national affairs could be man- 
aged best by Tugwell and other Washington ex- 
perts. Instead, he favored heavy spending for public 
works and substantial corporate taxation as major 
weapons of economic recovery. Roosevelt never 
became the complete captive of either side, but 
Frankfurter would gradually gain influence over his 
Columbia counterparts. 



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FELIX 



Frankfurter became what one administrative 
official termed "the most influential single individ- 
ual in the United States," largely through his re- 
cruitment of talented individuals — who were called 
Felix's "Happy Hot Dogs" — for the new adminis- 
tration. He brought Benjamin V. Cohen and James 
M. Landis, principal authors of the Securities Act, 
to the administration's attention. Tommy Corcoran, 
one of Frankfurter's Harvard students in the 1920s 
and a clerk to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes large- 
ly on Frankfurter's recommendation, was the future 
justice's most spectacular "hot dog," becoming one 
of the most influential players in Depression-era 
Washington. 

Frankfurter also assumed a key role in Roose- 
velt's growing attachment to the ideas of British 
economist John Maynard Keynes, who considered 
massive deficit government spending a major rem- 
edy for a stagnant economy. Long a supporter of 
balanced budgeting, Frankfurter came to know 
Keynes and admire his economic philosophy while 
teaching as a professor at Oxford in 1933 and 1934. 
Back in the United States, Frankfurter helped per- 
suade Roosevelt to partially embrace Keynesian 
economics, especially during the 1937 recession. In 
fact, as a result of his immense knowledge and con- 
tacts, not to mention his constant flattery of the 
president, Frankfurter became one of Roosevelt's 
closest advisers. He even lived in the White House 
during much of the summer of 1935. 

During Roosevelt's first term, Congress enacted 
much recovery legislation. But a laissez-faire Su- 
preme Court coalition rejected most of those stat- 
utes, including the National Industrial Recovery Act 
(NIRA) and Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). To 
a degree, such rulings played into Frankfurter's 
hands. Drawing on the thinking of Moley, Berle, 
and Tugwell, the early New Deal had emphasized 
the development of a planned economy through, 
among other things, business participation in the 
creation of industry codes. Suspicious of business 
leaders, Frankfurter favored legislation directly im- 
posing federal controls over the economy and cre- 
ating social programs. The Court's invalidation of 
the National Industrial Recovery Act in Schechter 
Poultry Corporation v. United States (1935) helped to 
convince Roosevelt that the administration should 
pursue Frankfurter's approach. 



Frankfurter privately opposed and refused to 
defend publicly, however, Roosevelt's 1937 plan to 
enlarge the judiciary in an effort to defeat conserva- 
tive domination of the bench. Ever optimistic, 
Frankfurter suggested patience, hopeful that the 
justices might alter the Court's course; if not, a con- 
stitutional amendment could be passed modifying 
the Court's composition and powers. When the 
president opted for Court-packing legislation rath- 
er than the more time-consuming amendment pro- 
cess, Frankfurter assured his friend and political 
benefactor that he would take no public stance on 
the controversial measure, then privately suggested 
ways Roosevelt might get it through Congress. But 
Frankfurter resented Roosevelt's failure to inform 
him of the plan until the eve of its submission to 
Congress. 



SUPREME COURT JUSTICE 

Although the Court-packing plan failed, Roo- 
sevelt was given the opportunity, beginning early in 
his second term, to fill all but one seat on the high 
bench. His first choice was Senator Hugo Black of 
Alabama, his second Stanley Reed of Kentucky, his 
solicitor general. With the untimely death of Frank- 
furter's esteemed friend Justice Benjamin N. Cardo- 
zo in 1938, the president had a chance to name a 
third justice. Whether out of a sincere concern for 
regional balance or simply because he wanted to 
keep the supremely confident Frankfurter dangling 
for a time, Roosevelt at first told his friend that since 
the current Court was composed entirely of east- 
erners, Cardozo's successor must come from the 
West. Roosevelt even asked Frankfurter to compile 
files on prospective candidates. But members of the 
president's inner circle were virtually unanimous 
that Roosevelt choose Frankfurter for the position. 
On the evening of January 4, 1939, the president 
telephoned Frankfurter's home to offer him the 
seat, but only after a lengthy, and for Frankfurter 
exasperating, conversation in which Roosevelt ap- 
peared determined not to appoint his adviser to the 
bench. 

In those days, Supreme Court nominees rarely 
attended Senate judiciary committee confirmation 
hearings, and none had done so since Harlan F. 
Stone's brief appearance in 1925. But after a parade 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 6 R E A F DEPRESSION 



377 



F R 



N K F 



R F E R 



FELIX 



of anti-Semitic witnesses appeared, viciously mis- 
representing Frankfurter's views, the committee 
decided to ask the nominee to appear as a witness. 
Only Senator Pat McCarran subjected Frankfurter, 
though, to extensive interrogation. Twelve days 
after the nomination was announced, the Senate, 
by voice vote, unanimously confirmed Roosevelt's 
choice. 

Once on the bench, Frankfurter readily joined 
in the dismantling of the Court's laissez-faire pre- 
cedents that a majority had begun in 1937. The new 
justice had long been firmly convinced that policy 
issues should be left to elected representatives and 
that judges should overturn statutes only when 
they lacked any rational basis. He thus had no diffi- 
culty affirming Roosevelt's New Deal program and 
comparable state recovery legislation. 

The Roosevelt Court not only rejected the pre- 
1937 Court's laissez-faire precedents, but in a foot- 
note to United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938), 
decided the year before Frankfurter's appointment, 
Justice Stone laid the foundation for a constitution- 
al double standard: The courts would defer to the 
political branches of government in economic 
cases, but would subject laws impinging on non- 
economic personal rights, such as the guarantees of 
the Bill of Rights, to close judicial scrutiny. 

Contrary to the expectations of his liberal 
friends, however, Justice Frankfurter was almost 
equally willing to defer to the political branches 
when non-economic civil liberties were at stake as 
he was in economic cases; he had little use for the 
notion that the Constitution contained clear consti- 
tutional commands invulnerable to countervailing 
societal interests. In Minersville School District v. Go- 
bitis (1940), he spoke for the Court in upholding 
compulsory school flag programs over the objec- 
tions of Jehovah's Witness parents who considered 
such exercises contrary to their religious beliefs. 
When the Court overturned Gobitis in West Virginia 
Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), Frankfurter 
dissented, emphasizing his sensitivity as a Jew to 
religious liberty claims, but also insisting that in 
wartime individual freedom must yield to society's 
overriding interest in promoting patriotism. 

Frankfurter assumed the same stance in cases 
involving free speech claims, repeatedly attacking 



the First Amendment absolutism of Justice Black, 
his principal jurisprudential antagonist on the 
bench. A staunch apostle of federalism, Justice 
Frankfurter accorded state laws and proceedings 
particularly broad latitude. Justice Black, convinced 
that the Fourteenth Amendment's first section was 
intended by its framers to apply the Bill of Rights 
to the states, first set forth his total incorporation 
thesis extensively in his dissent for Adamson v. Cali- 
fornia (1947). Frankfurter was equally certain that 
the states would never have ratified the Fourteenth 
Amendment had they thought it would bind their 
officials to the specifics of the Bill of Rights — that 
"eighteenth century straitjacket," as Frankfurter 
characterized those fundamental guarantees. 

Frankfurter was especially reluctant to interfere 
in state criminal proceedings. In Wolf v. Colorado 
(1949), he spoke for the Court in concluding that 
the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause 
included within its scope a right of privacy compa- 
rable to the Fourth Amendment's guarantee 
against unreasonable searches and seizures. But he 
refused to extend the exclusionary rule to the states, 
preferring instead that states adopt their own de- 
vices for deterring police misconduct. In Rochin v. 
California (1952), the Court, per Frankfurter, over- 
turned a conviction based on morphine extracted 
from the defendant with a stomach pump, but only 
because he found such conduct "shocking to the 
conscience" and thus in violation of the right of the 
accused to a fair trial. When the Court, in Mapp v. 
Ohio (1961), ultimately rejected Frankfurter's 
"shock-the-conscience" standard as, among other 
things, highly subjective, the justice dissented, em- 
phasizing once again his regard for state autonomy 
and rejection of the incorporation doctrine. 

But Frankfurter's deference to the states was 
not absolute. When a five-four majority, speaking 
through Justice Black, espoused a separatist inter- 
pretation of the religious establishment guarantee 
in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), yet upheld 
state reimbursement of bus fares for parochial 
school students, Frankfurter dissented. Although 
reluctant to have the federal judiciary interfere in 
local education, he ultimately joined Chief Justice 
Earl Warren's unanimous school desegregation de- 
cision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 



378 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E G R E A F DEPRESSION 



f l [ k K 5 



(1954). In an effort to underscore the Court's unity 
on the issue, all nine justices signed the opinion in 
Cooper v. Aaron (1958), rejecting further delay in the 
desegregation of Little Rock's high school and un- 
derscoring the final authority of the courts to deter- 
mine the Constitution's meaning. Characteristical- 
ly, however, Frankfurter insisted on filing a 
concurrence, outraging, among others, Black and 
William J. Brennan (Frankfurter's former law stu- 
dent), who prepared but ultimately withdrew an 
opinion indicating that Frankfurter's concurrence 
should in no way be viewed as a "dilution" of the 
Court's firm stance in the case. 

Frankfurter spoke for the Court in Gomillion v. 
Lightfoot (1960), striking down on Fifteenth 
Amendment grounds Alabama's racial gerryman- 
der of the city of Tuskegee, which excluded all but 
a few of the community's African-American voters 
from local elections. The justice was unwilling, 
however, to join the Court's reapportionment revo- 
lution of the sixties. Speaking for a plurality in Cole- 
grove v. Green (1946), he had rejected judicial inter- 
vention in that "political thicket." When the Court, 
in Baker v. Carr (1962), rejected such thinking, de- 
claring that malapportioned governmental bodies 
raised justiciable constitutional questions, Frank- 
furter filed one of his most caustic dissents, reiterat- 
ing his Colegrove stance and warning — forcefully, if 
not prophetically — that courts would be unable to 
force reapportionment on unwilling legislators. 

Frankfurter's Baker dissent would be his last 
opinion. Shortly after the decision was announced, 
he suffered a serious stroke. On August 28, he sent 
President John F. Kennedy his letter of retirement. 
Through much of his tenure, Frankfurter had often 
been able to muster majorities to defeat civil liber- 
ties claims, especially in national security cases. The 
1955 appointment of Justice John M. Harlan had 
given him another ally on the bench. Gradually, 
however, Frankfurter's principal judicial antago- 
nists — Black, Warren, and Brennan — had come to 
dominate the Court. With his 1962 retirement, and 
replacement with Arthur Goldberg, the Court was 
poised to embark upon the most ambitious expan- 
sion of civil liberties in its history, including sub- 
stantial incorporation of Bill of Rights safeguards 
into the Fourteenth Amendment. 



Even in retirement, however, Frankfurter 
sought to influence the Court's work. Concerned 
that, without his presence at the Court, Justice Har- 
lan might falter in his opposition to court-ordered 
reapportionment, he even attempted to enlist Har- 
lan's clerks in a campaign to strengthen his col- 
league's resolve, an effort neither Harlan nor his 
clerks appreciated. Frankfurter also encouraged 
Justice Black to file a dissent from rulings overturn- 
ing the trespass convictions of restaurant sit-ins. 
And when Black registered vigorous dissents in two 
1964 sit-in cases, arguing that even bigoted restau- 
rant proprietors had the right to choose their clien- 
tele, absent a valid statute to the contrary, Frank- 
furter wrote his old adversary an admiring letter. 
Less than a year later, Frankfurter died. Along with 
Black, he had been the most controversial justice of 
his era. 

See Also: BLACK, HUGO; DOUGLAS, WILLIAM O.; 
HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, JR.; HUGHES, 
CHARLES EVANS; SUPREME COURT. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Baker, Leonard. Brandeis and Frankfurter: A Dual Biogra- 
phy. 1986. 

Frankfurter, Felix, and J. E. Landis. The Business of the Su- 
preme Court. 1927. 

Hirsch, H. N. The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter. 1980. 

Lash, Joseph P. From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter. 1975. 

Murphy, Bruce A. The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: 
The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court 
Justices. 1982. 

Parrish, Michael E. Felix Frankfurter and His Times: The 
Reform Years. 1982. 

Silverstein, Mark. Constitutional Faiths: Felix Frankfurter, 
Hugo Black, and the Process of Judicial Decision Mak- 
ing. 1984. 

Simon, James F. The Antagonists: Hugo Black, Felix Frank- 
furter, and Civil Liberties in Modern America. 1989. 

TlNSLEY E. YARBROUGH 



FREAKS 



Even among the myriad of 1930s horror films, per- 
haps no movie of the Great Depression was as bi- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



379 



{ l £ k K 5 




Director Tod Browning (standing center) poses with cast members from his 1932 film Freaks. Archive Photos 



zarre or as disturbing as director Tod Browning's 
Freaks (1932). Browning built a noted film career 
during the 1920s on a series of collaborations with 
actor Lon Chaney, Sr., and he also ushered in the 
era of sound horror films with his highly successful 
Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi. At MGM in 
1932, Browning promised that he would direct the 
ultimate horror film: Freaks. 

Based on the short story "Spurs" by Tod Rob- 
bins, Freaks offers a tale of circus and carnival per- 
formers who, despite their various physical defor- 
mities, exist within a kind of mutually caring family. 
When the dwarf Hans decides to marry the physi- 
cally "normal" Cleopatra, the family accepts her as 
"one of us." But then they learn the truth: Cleopatra 
is plotting to poison Hans, inherit his money, and 
then marry the strong man Hercules. The film's ep- 
ilogue shows her as a physically deformed side- 
show act, the result of the "freaks'" vengeance. 



Browning's cast, which included a "half boy" 
and "Siamese twins," was largely made up of actual 
sideshow performers who possessed a range of 
physical deformities. The emphasis on actual 
"freaks," as the studio called them, rather than the 
use of actors with makeup, created concern even 
before the film was released. By the time of its pre- 
miere, publicity hype around Freaks emphasized 
both the "real life" qualities of the players, as well 
as the oddity of a love affair between a dwarf and 
a "normal" woman. 

The story of the film's release has become leg- 
endary, with historians generally claiming that 
MGM shelved Freaks due to audience outrage. The 
movie was even banned outright in England. While 
this is certainly true, what is often forgotten is that 
the film did receive some positive reviews and gar- 
nered strong box office receipts in some American 
cities, while being vilified in others. Many Depres- 



380 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



F W P 



sion-era audience members found the film to be lit- 
tle different from what they had actually seen at 
carnival sideshows. For those who were outraged, 
their alarm seems to have stemmed less from con- 
cerns over cast exploitation than from the shock of 
simply seeing them on screen. 

See Also: HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Clarens, Carlos. An Illustrated History of Horror and Sci- 
ence-Fiction Films: The Classic Era, 1895-1967. 1997. 

Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of 
Horror. 1993. 

Skal, David J, with Elias Savada. Dark Carnival: The Secret 
World of Tod Browning, Hollywood's Master of the Ma- 
cabre. 1995. 



FSA. See FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION. 



FSCC. See FEDERAL SURPLUS COMMODITIES 
CORPORATION. 



FSLIC. See FEDERAL SAVINGS AND LOAN 
INSURANCE CORPORATION. 



FTP. See FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT. 



Gary D. Rhodes FWP. See FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



381 




GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE 

Gabriel Over the White House, released in 1933 in the 
midst of the Great Depression and on the eve of 
Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration, is a political 
fable based on T. F. Tweed's novel, Rinehard. In the 
film, newly elected President Judson Hammond 
(played by Walter Huston) is transformed from a 
corrupt city politician to a benevolent dictator after 
a near-fatal car crash. He miraculously awakens 
from a coma, divinely inspired by the Archangel 
Gabriel, to rescue the nation from crime and eco- 
nomic disaster. Employing the radio to explain his 
aim to do "the greatest good for the greatest num- 
ber," Hammond creates a dole to feed the hungry, 
musters an "Army of Construction" for the unem- 
ployed, declares war on rum-running criminals, 
imposes martial law, and steamrolls Congress into 
giving him dictatorial powers. He then invites 
world leaders to the presidential yacht and de- 
mands that they disarm to save their treasuries 
from bankruptcy and the world from war. The 
heads of state watch in horror as an American 
bomber plane destroys a battleship while Ham- 
mond warns that in the future warplanes will 
"bomb cities, kill populations." Mobilizing the navy 
and threatening force, he bullies the statesmen into 
promising to repay their war debts and into signing 
a new disarmament proclamation (with the same 



quill pen used by Abraham Lincoln to sign the 
Emancipation Proclamation). His work on earth 
done, Hammond dies a martyr to strains of "The 
Battle Hymn of the Republic." 

To the modern eye, the film seems naive, 
heavy-handed, and dangerously fascistic, relying as 
it does on the not-so-subtle message that the Unit- 
ed States required a benevolent dictator in order to 
solve its problems, and the world required a well- 
armed United States to keep the peace. Yet at the 
time, it was among the top six releases in the spring 
of 1933. In the days before the rise of Nazi Germa- 
ny, the film reflected the belief in some quarters 
that the country — and the world — needed an iron 
fist to set things right. Certainly that was the feeling 
of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper mag- 
nate whose Cosmopolitan Pictures produced and 
released the movie in conjunction with Metro- 
Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Indeed, some historians 
have concluded that the film was a thinly veiled 
"blueprint" for the New Deal. Admittedly, it did 
foretell, albeit in extreme fashion, Roosevelt's use of 
broad executive power to combat the Depression, 
of radio to rally public support, and of air power to 
wage war. 

See Also: HEARST, WILLIAM RANDOLPH; 

HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY. 



383 



GAMBLING 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cripps, Thomas. Hollywood's High Noon: Moviemaking & 
Society before Television. 1997. 

McElvaine, Robert. The Great Depression: America, 
1929-1941. 1984. 

Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph 
Hearst. 2000. 

Roffman, Peter, and Jim Purdy. The Hollywood Social 
Problem Tilm: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the 
Depression to the Tifties. 1981. 

Michael B. Stoff 



GAMBLING. See CRIME. 



GANGSTER FILMS 



The gangster genre became codified and prominent 
during the early 1930s due to the success and the 
public outcry following the releases of such films as 
Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1930), William Well- 
man's Public Enemy (1931), and Howard Hawks's 
Scarf ace (1932). Celluloid gangsters did not have a 
literary source like the cowboy and the hard-boiled 
detective; gangsters were transferred onto the 
screen directly from the front-page headlines of 
contemporary newspapers. Gangster films there- 
fore had a strong topical impact on audiences, and 
they based their narratives on events derived from 
criminal activity that was taking place in America's 
shadowy metropolises during the prohibition and 
Depression years. 

Although the genre refined its conventions and 
reached its box-office popularity during the 1930s, 
there are important forerunners to the Depression 
gangster films that date back to the silent era. D. W. 
Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) was 
probably the first film to fully exploit urban-based 
crime for its plot. This prototype was followed by 
two other silent films that would lay the founda- 
tions for what was to become the gangster genre: 
Lewis Milestone's The Racket (1927) and Josef von 
Sternberg's Underworld(1928) . 

According to Thomas Schatz, the catalyst for 
the evolution of the gangster film is to be found in 



the confluence of technical innovation and the pe- 
culiar social context in which it took place. Warner 
Brothers' conversion to sound movies in the late 
1920s coincided with a desperate economic and so- 
cial climate. A year after the introduction of sound, 
the studio had already produced the first sound film 
in the gangster genre, Bryan Foy's Lights of New 
York (1928). Although it has not enjoyed the critical 
consideration of later gangster films, Lights of New 
York showed that sound could be effectively used 
in the genre to increase its impact on audiences. 
Sound gave to gangster films the screams, gun 
shots, and other audio effects they needed to devel- 
op incisive narratives. Warner Brothers was to lead 
the production of gangster films for years. 

Gangster films focus on the rise to power of 
cold-blooded criminals who were modelled after 
notorious men of the era, such as Al Capone and 
Hymie Weiss, although several critics have argued 
that the impact of the genre was so strong that 
these real-life models tended to modify their man- 
nerism and outlook so that they would resemble 
their celluloid counterparts. The conventions of the 
genre usually require a contrast between two men, 
either related through friendship or kinship, with 
one of them getting an honest job while the other 
resorts to crime. The contrast is usually set in an 
urban environment at night. The criminal is always 
the one gaining status, and this rise on the social 
ladder makes him, in Schatz's definition, "the per- 
verse alter-ego of the ambitious, profit-minded 
American male." The criminal's growing status is 
visually signalled by the expensive clothes, flashy 
cars, and attractive women he acquires. 

Because of their thematic and visual conven- 
tions, classic gangster films such as Little Caesar, 
The Public Enemy, and Scarface were accused of 
glamorizing violence and thus presenting the crimi- 
nal as an appealing hero. The enforcement of the 
Motion Picture Production Code posed several im- 
portant problems to the genre, so that studios tried 
to balance the social and economic career of the 
gangster with elements that could effectively de- 
glamorize it. The gangster usually dies, showing 
that crime does not pay after all, a concept that in 
some films, such as Scarface, is reinforced by added 
scenes (not shot by Hawks) where reformers and 



38 A 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GARNER 



JOHN 



NANCE 



officers speak out against gangland and its culture. 
The struggle with censors not only affected the 
films' content, but also their distribution and pro- 
motion strategies. The press books for Little Caesar 
and The Public Enemy clearly claimed to present an 
exciting narrative of crime. Yet this is said not to be 
the ultimate purpose of the movies, which is in- 
stead, it is asserted, to present a serious social prob- 
lem affecting urban America. Thus, the press book 
for The Public Enemy advised the managers of the 
cinemas where the film was being shown to send 
free tickets and a letter of invitation to "such orga- 
nizations as the Parent-Teacher Association, the 
Y.M.H.A, the Y.M.C.A., Big Brothers, Catholic Big 
Brothers, Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, School 
Teachers, [and] Sunday Schools." The invitation 
claimed that the film "is more vital and more im- 
portant to everybody interested in child welfare 
than any picture we have ever shown before" and 
assured that "the work of your organization ties in 
directly with the powerful message embodied in 
The Public Enemy." 

Strong censorship pressure ultimately brought 
to the genre significant modifications that were de- 
signed to redeem it, but that ultimately led to its de- 
mise. In such films as William Keighley's G-Men 
(1935) the cops become more prominent than the 
criminals and are played by actors, such as James 
Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, who are strongly 
associated with the genre's classic phase. The gang- 
ster also becomes less central in films that contrast 
him with a socially integrated and positive figure. 
Clear examples of this variation are William Wyler's 
Dead End (1938), based on a screenplay by Lillian 
Hellman, and Michael Curtiz's Angels with Dirty 
Faces (1938), both of which openly advise youth 
against taking a gangster as a role model. 

See Also: HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY; 
LITTLE CAESAR; ROBINSON, EDWARD G. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Mason, Fran. American Gangster Cinema: From Little Cae- 
sar to Pulp Fiction. 2003. 

Munby, Jonathan. Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening 
the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. 1999. 

Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. 2000. 

Ruth, David E. Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster 
in American Culture, 1918-1934. 1996. 



Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Tormulas, Tilm Mak- 
ing, and the Studio System. 1981. 

Shadoian, Jack. Dreams and Dead Ends: The American 
Gangster/Crime Tilm. 2003. 

Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell. Film History: An 
Introduction. 1994. 

Luca Prono 



GARNER, JOHN NANCE 

John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner (November 22, 
1868-November 7, 1967) served in Congress from 
his election in 1902 until 1933, holding the post of 
minority leader between 1929 and 1931 and speak- 
er of the House for the last two years. He was elect- 
ed vice president of the United States on the Demo- 
cratic ticket with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and 
1936. Garner was a hard-drinking, poker-playing, 
straight-talking politician, who believed that com- 
promise always superceded demagoguery. In his 
earliest days in the Texas state legislature, he advo- 
cated railroad and insurance company regulation. 
As he matured politically in the U.S. House, 
though, he became more pragmatic in his outlook, 
becoming close friends with Republicans as well as 
Democrats. 

Garner quickly advanced in the Democratic 
leadership, becoming the whip in 1911. His pre- 
Depression era agenda included legislation provid- 
ing construction projects for his district and tariff 
protection for agricultural producers. However, his 
greatest influence on national politics came from 
his behind-the-scenes leadership. He operated a 
hideaway office called the Board of Education dur- 
ing the Depression and New Deal years, in which 
he counseled members on the art of compromise. 
His years as speaker were less productive legisla- 
tively; he took an increasingly conservative and in- 
dependent view of major economic questions on is- 
sues such as a national sales tax, which he favored, 
thus making it difficult to unify the Democratic con- 
gressional opposition to Herbert Hoover and the 
Republicans. One historian has called the period an 
"interregnum of despair." 

Garner made an aborted run for the presidency 
in 1932, taking the vice presidential nomination 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



385 



GARNER, JOHN NANCE 




John Nance Garner (seated right) with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Woodring in Topeka, Kansas, in September 1932. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



when it became clear after three ballots that a con- 
tinued push for the presidency would likely dead- 
lock his party and spell defeat in the November 
election. During his first term in office, he master- 
minded the strategy necessary for passage of much 
of the New Deal legislation and he maintained a 
solid working relationship with Roosevelt, differing 
with the president on issues such as diplomatic rec- 
ognition of the Soviet Union and deficit spending. 
Garner's frustration with the vice presidency 
emerged after the 1936 election when Roosevelt 
pushed to expand membership on the Supreme 
Court in 1937 and attempted to purge conservative 
southern Democrats from Congress in 1938, moves 
that Garner opposed. Garner attempted a run for 



the presidency in 1940 but gave up after leading 
Texas Democrats refused to back him. His national 
political career ended unceremoniously, and Gar- 
ner returned to Uvalde, Texas, where his wife later 
burned his public papers. 

See Also: ELECTION OF 1932; ELECTION OF 1936; 
ELECTION OF 1940. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Garner, John Nance. Scrapbooks. Center for American 
History, University of Texas at Austin. 

Roosevelt, Franklin D. Papers. Franklin D. Roosevelt 
Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. 



386 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GAYS 



A N D 



L E S 



I A N S 



Schwarz, Jordan A. Interregnum of Despair: Hoover, Con- 
gress, and the Depression. 1970. 

Nancy Beck Young 



GASTONIA, NORTH CAROLINA 

The strike in the Loray Mill, in Gastonia, North 
Carolina, which began in April 1929, had lasting re- 
percussions for the community. Though not the 
most violent of that year's industrial outbreaks in 
the South's textile mills, it has passed into the my- 
thology of the American left, largely because its 
leaders were not from the country's homegrown 
textile unions. Rather, they were young activists 
from the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU), 
an adjunct of the Communist Party of the United 
States. 

The immediate cause of the strike was the 
steady deterioration of the Loray Mill's working 
conditions as management attempted to cut costs 
to deal with the industry's massive overproduction. 
Quickly the NTWU leadership pictured it as a sym- 
bol of capitalism in its death throes. Their propa- 
ganda bore little relationship to reality, and the 
strike was largely ineffective. Nevertheless the cli- 
mate of tension in the town soon led to violence 
against the NTWU leadership, who fought back. 
National guardsmen were deployed, vigilante 
groups patrolled the streets, and in June the town's 
chief of police, Orville Aderholt, was fatally shot 
during a fracas between deputies and strike leaders. 
For the rest of the year the repercussions of his 
death kept the town divided. The NTWU leaders 
were all charged with Aderholt's murder, and vigi- 
lantes took their revenge, murdering one of the 
local strike leaders, twenty-nine year old Ella May 
Wiggins, a mill worker, mother of nine young chil- 
dren, and the strikers' balladeer. Convicted after an 
emotive and highly politically charged trial, and 
freed on bail pending appeal, most of the strike 
leaders escaped into the vastness of the Soviet 
Union. No one was ever convicted of Wiggins's 
murder, though mill management was generally 
believed to have been behind it. 

The strike at the Loray Mill was celebrated by 
the American left as a serious challenge to capital- 



ism, and both Wiggins and the convicted strike 
leaders became its martyrs. In fact, the strike was a 
comprehensive failure. Never again did Commu- 
nist union organizers venture below the Mason- 
Dixon line. The territory was deemed too hostile. 
Moreover, the violence they had provoked made 
the task of organizing southern textile mills even 
more difficult for those who followed the NTWU. 
The events in Gastonia cast a very long shadow. 

See Also: COMMUNIST PARTY; ORGANIZED LABOR; 
SIT-DOWN STRIKES; STRIKES. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Draper, Theodore. "Gastonia Revisited." Social Research 
38, no. 1 (1971): 3-29. 

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd; James Leloudis; Robert Korstad; 
Mary Murphy; Lu Ann Jones; and Christopher B. 
Daly. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton 
Mill World. 1987. 

Salmond, John A. Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray 
Mill Strike. 1995. 



John A. Salmond 



GAYS AND LESBIANS, IMPACT OF 
THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON 

The 1930s marked a particularly important moment 
for the transformation of sexuality within the Unit- 
ed States. While the 1920s, with its economic and 
sexual exuberance, significantly rejected Victorian 
notions of sexuality, such changes were seen as 
much more threatening to the social order with the 
economic collapse that began in 1929. The prohibi- 
tion era ushered in an increased visibility of homo- 
sexuality that peaked in the early years of the De- 
pression. Indeed, on the theater and cabaret stages 
in large cities, in a number of Hollywood films, and 
in popular novels, implicit and explicit images of 
gay men and lesbians reached a wide audience. In 
speakeasies in New York City's Greenwich Village, 
nightclubs in Harlem, cabarets in Times Square, 
jazz clubs on Chicago's South Side, upper- and 
middle-class men and women enjoyed the specta- 
cle of drag performers and mingled with overtly gay 
men, lesbians, and transvestites. During prohibi- 



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GAYS 



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I A N S 



tion, these commercialized venues coupled sexual 
and legal transgressions that gave visibility and ac- 
ceptability to homosexuality as an exotic feature of 
urban nightlife. 

However, as the Depression deepened, homo- 
sexuality increasingly symbolized the prohibition 
era's excess and frivolity that undermined tradition- 
al values. Whereas homosexuality was seen as an 
entertaining diversion during the 1920s, by the late 
1930s it was viewed much more as a threat to social 
and economic stability. 

The repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 
1933 ushered in new state agencies that regulated 
the sale of alcohol and set laws regarding the activi- 
ties of bars, restaurants, and cabarets. Often these 
laws required owners to maintain an "orderly" en- 
vironment or risk the loss of their liquor licenses. 
While the definition of orderly was often left vague, 
these laws had a severe impact on gay and lesbian 
sociability because the presence of overtly homo- 
sexual patrons was taken as indicative of a disorder- 
ly establishment. Police, with the backing of city of- 
ficials and community leaders, raided such 
establishments and closed them down. Thus, these 
agencies became increasingly powerful in control- 
ling the nature of social life in the 1930s, and served 
as vehicles in the larger campaigns to police homo- 
sexuality in the city. 

In 1930, the Hayes Office, which was estab- 
lished as a self-monitoring agency set up by the film 
industry in 1922, instituted a strict Production Code 
that censored a range of behaviors on screen. Made 
even more stringent in 1934 under pressure from 
the Catholic organization the Legion of Decency, 
the Production Code censored any film that por- 
trayed, among other things, cohabitation, seduc- 
tion, violence, nudity, and, more specifically, any 
references to homosexuality. While homosexuality 
was expressed on screen through highly coded im- 
ages, overt references were impossible until the 
1960s. Lesbians were often coded as masculine 
through clothing, such as Greta Garbo's famous at- 
tire in Queen Christina (1933), in which the queen 
passionately kisses another woman on screen. 
More often, suggestions of lesbianism held tragic 
implications, where homosexuality was coupled 
with destructive and deadly power. Films such as 



Girls in Uniform (1931) and These Three (1936), 
based on the hugely successful 1934 Broadway play 
The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman, take place 
in all-girl boarding schools, and end with the tragic 
death of the lesbian character. 

Films suggested the gay nature of male charac- 
ters through effeminate behavior and the associa- 
tion of these characters with the seedy underworld 
of urban culture. Films such as The Warrior's Hus- 
band (1933), Sailor's Luck (1933), and Wonder Bar 
(1934), which showed two men dancing together, 
implied gay characters through feminine body lan- 
guage and gestures. Other films, such as Little Cea- 
sar (1931) and Blood Money (1933), portrayed sug- 
gestive relationships between mobsters and their 
sidekicks. In these coded portrayals, gay men and 
lesbians were increasingly depicted as tragic victims 
set within the margins of society. 

Unlike Hollywood producers, publishers were 
less constrained by censorship. Radcylff Hall's The 
Well of Loneliness was the most popular homosexual 
novel of the 1930s, a popularity promoted when its 
publisher was taken to court on obscenity charges 
in 1929 and ultimately won on appeal. Gertrude 
Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932) and 
Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936) explicitly portray 
relationships between lesbians in the expatriate 
community of Paris. These works have become 
central to the modernist canon of American litera- 
ture. Publishers of more popular literature pro- 
duced a number of novels with lesbian themes. 
While novels such as Hellcat (1934), Scorpion (1933), 
Love Like a Shadow (1935), Queer Patterns (1935), 
and Pity for Women (1937) preached a moral disap- 
proval of homosexuality, other works such as Gale 
Wilhelm's We Too Are Drifting (1935), Sheila Donis- 
thorpe's Loveliest of Friends (1931), and Elizabeth 
Craigin's Either Is Love (1937) presented less judg- 
mental portrayals of lesbian relationships, even as 
most of these novels ended with the tragic death or 
suicide of the main character. 

Publishers were also producing a number of 
gay male novels that promoted or proscribed ho- 
mosexuality. Popular works such as Blair Niles's 
Strange Brother (1931), Andrew Tellier's Twilight 
Men (1931), Robert Scully's The Scarlet Pansy 
(1932), Kennilworth Bruce's Goldie (1933), Richard 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



G E L L 



R N 



R T H A 



Meeker's Better Angel (1933), and Lew Levenson's 
Butterfly Man (1934) brought stories of gay male ex- 
perience to a large audience. While these works 
portrayed the complexities of homosexual experi- 
ence, they, like their lesbian counterparts, often 
concluded with the tragic demise of the protago- 
nist. However, since these works were circulated in 
stores and rental libraries in many large cities, they 
conveyed a homosexual sensibility that promoted a 
shared identity for the men who read them. Indeed, 
many of these novels, as well as films, promoted the 
formation of a gay and lesbian subculture where 
such individuals began to see themselves as part of 
a larger group. 

Research on sexuality grew significantly in the 
1930s as a number of institutions conducted and 
published studies investigating the nature of sexu- 
ality and homosexuality in particular. La Forest Pot- 
ter's Strange Loves: A Study of Sexual Abnormalities 
and James Segal's Sex Life in America, along with a 
number of other studies, represent the first wide- 
ranging, multi-institutional effort to study and ana- 
lyze sexuality in the United States. While some of 
these studies were sympathetic to homosexuality, 
such as the exhaustive study Sex Variants, directed 
by George Henry and begun in 1935, most were ef- 
forts to cure sexual abnormalities that the research- 
ers often explicitly interpreted as a social disease. 
Concerns for sexuality entered into many discus- 
sions about migrant labor and homelessness. For 
example, the writers of Twenty-Thousand Homeless 
Men: A Study of Unemployed Men in Chicago Shelters 
(1936) suggested that one cause for the men's un- 
employment was a lack of normal sexual experi- 
ences with women. These studies reflect the era's 
concern with gender and sexual abnormalities, 
which were increasingly viewed as a crucial social 
problem and a threat to the already fragile family 
and gender stability brought on by the Depression. 

Eventually these studies began to circulate 
within legal and legislative venues, effecting the 
creation of a whole new set of crimes focused on 
sexual deviancy. The term sex crime emerged in 
newspapers and court rooms alike, encompassing 
a range of behaviors, including rape, child molesta- 
tion, indecent exposure, and homosexuality. The 
sex crime laws set up the first extensive legislative 



efforts that criminalized homosexuality within a 
broader category of violent crimes. By the late 
1930s, homosexuals were increasingly the target of 
violence and scapegoats for social campaigns 
meant to "clean up" the moral standards of the 
community. 

See Also: CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS, IMPACT 
OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; FAMILY AND 
HOME, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 
ON; GENDER ROLES AND SEXUAL RELATIONS, 
IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Austen, Roger. Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel 
in America. 1977. 

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, 
and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. 
1994. 

D'Emilio, John, and Estelle Freedman. Intimate Matters: 
A History of Sexuality, 2nd edition. 1997. 

Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A Histo- 
ry of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America. 1991. 

Freedman, Estelle. "'Uncontrolled Desires': The Re- 
sponse to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960." Jour- 
nal of American History 74 (June 1987): 83-106. 

Henry, George W. Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual 
Patterns, 2nd edition. 1948. 

Kahn, Samuel. Mentality and Homosexuality. 1937. 

Potter, La Forest. Strange Loves: A Study of Sexual Abnor- 
malities. 1933. 

Ruso, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Mov- 
ies, rev. edition, 1987. 

Terry, Jennifer. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, 
and Homosexuality in Modern Society. 1999. 

James Polchin 



GELLHORN, MARTHA 

Martha Gellhorn (November 8, 1908-February 15, 
1998) was a relief investigator for the Federal Emer- 
gency Relief Administration (FERA) during the 
1930s. Gellhorn later provided vivid coverage of the 
Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) as a reporter for Col- 
lier's Weekly. In addition, she is known for fictional 
accounts of her experiences, including What Mad 
Pursuit (1934), The Trouble I've Seen (1936), and The 
Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967). 



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A N D 



S E 



U A L 



RELATIONS 



Gellhorn began her college studies at Bryn 
Mawr in 1924, but she left in 1927 before complet- 
ing her degree. She wrote briefly for the Albany 
Times Union, and then began sending pieces to The 
New Republic, which published her first signed 
piece, a review of a Rudy Vallee performance, in 
August 1929. Gellhorn then traveled to France in 
1930 and struggled to find permanent journalistic 
employment for several years. 

In October 1934, Gellhorn returned in New 
York and secured an interview with Harry L. Hop- 
kins, the director of FERA. Her new job required 
her to travel extensively and interview average 
Americans about their economic well-being, in- 
cluding their access to adequate food and medical 
care and their overall outlook for the future. She 
traveled to small textile towns in North Carolina, 
large urban areas such as Boston and Providence, 
Rhode Island, and desperate manufacturing towns 
like Camden, New Jersey. She wrote Hopkins me- 
ticulous reports, detailing malnutrition, rates of tu- 
berculosis, lack of running water, and people's in- 
ability to secure employment at a living wage. She 
severely criticized local relief officials, particularly 
for graft and corruption, but she noted that most 
people with whom she talked did not blame Presi- 
dent Roosevelt. Instead they held him in very high 
esteem. She met with Eleanor Roosevelt, and the 
two soon became good friends. Gellhorn worked as 
a FERA investigator for almost a year, and by the 
time she was done, she noted that the mood in the 
country was becoming more pessimistic and skepti- 
cal regarding the government's plans for reform. 
After leaving FERA, she wrote a fictionalized ac- 
count of her travels and experiences, published in 
1936 as The Trouble I've Seen. 

Gellhorn met Ernest Hemingway in 1936, and 
they struck up a companionship that later led to a 
brief marriage. In March 1937, she arrived in Spain 
and began to cover the war for Collier's Weekly. This 
launched her journalistic career, and she moved 
from the Spanish Civil War, to the tumult in Ger- 
many, and finally to World War II. 

Following World War II, Gellhorn continued 
her focus on wartime reporting, covering the Six- 
Day War in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, and 
conflicts in Central America. In addition to publish- 



ing regular articles in the Atlantic Monthly, Gellhorn 
tackled issues of social justice, including the Mc- 
Carthy trials, in her novel The Lowest Trees Have 
Tops. 

See Also: FEDERAL EMERGENCY RELIEF 

ADMINISTRATION (FERA); HOPKINS, HARRY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gellhorn, Martha. The Face of War. 1959. 

Rollyson, Carl. Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The 
Story of Martha Gellhorn. 1990. 

Williams, Edward A. Federal Aid for Relief. 1939. 

Laura J. Hilton 



GENDER ROLES AND SEXUAL 
RELATIONS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON 

Among the many momentous effects of the mas- 
sive unemployment and deprivation caused by the 
Great Depression, those on gender roles and sexual 
relations can easily be overlooked, but they are pro- 
foundly important. 

THREATENED MASCULINITY 

In most societies, that of the United States 
prominent among them, men have traditionally de- 
fined their principal roles as being providers and 
protectors. The gender definition of a "real man" is 
one who has authority, who is in charge. The char- 
acter Muley Graves speaks for this understanding 
of manhood when he proclaims in John Steinbeck's 
The Grapes of Wrath (1939): "Jesus Christ, a man 
can't [do something], when he's tol' to!" Men were 
seen as the ones who rightfully made decisions. 
"Ma looked to Tom to speak, because he was a 
man," Steinbeck wrote. "She let him have the 
chance that was his right." That "right," however, 
was linked to his fulfillment of the roles assigned to 
men. For millions of American men who lost their 
jobs during the Great Depression, the loss of the 
ability to provide for their families posed a direct 
threat to their sense of manhood. 

It was bad enough for a man's ego to be unable 
to provide; it was worse for him to become depen- 



390 



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GENDER ROLES 



A N D 



SEXUAL R E L A E I N S 



dent on a woman. And this circumstance was more 
common during the 1930s than one might expect. 
Women's employment increased during the De- 
pression, in part because the jobs from which they 
had been excluded, such as those in heavy industry, 
were most often in the areas of the economy hard- 
est hit by the collapse, while some of the jobs that 
had been defined as "women's work," such as 
teaching, clerical work, and domestic service, were 
less severely affected by the Depression. 

Many people saw the differential between fe- 
male and male employment as a major cause of 
male unemployment. "Simply fire all the women, 
who shouldn't be working anyway, and hire the 
[unemployed] men," Norman Cousins wrote in 
1939, summarizing this simplistic argument. "Pres- 
to! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No depres- 
sion." Such arguments ignored a fundamental fact 
about the power of gender roles in the era: No mat- 
ter how desperate they were for work, most men 
would not consider taking a job that was culturally 
defined as "women's work." 

It is highly significant in terms of just how pow- 
erful was men's desire to avoid threats to their self- 
perceived masculinity that many white men during 
the Depression were willing to take jobs that had 
previously been defined as "Negro work," but not 
those that had been classified as "women's work." 
While women's employment actually increased 
during the Depression, African Americans were 
displaced by whites to an extraordinary degree. It 
has been estimated that black unemployment 
across the United States reached 50 percent in 1932. 
But take a job that was "woman's work"? Most 
men, it seemed, would sooner starve. The reason 
for this rigidity is not hard to discern. If one of the 
worst aspects for a man of being unable to provide 
was the effect of this circumstance on his sense of 
masculinity, taking on a woman's role would be 
seen as a remedy worse than the problem. To have 
no job was a serious blow to a man's masculinity; 
to have a woman's job was to abandon the argu- 
ment that one was a "real man" at all. 

A fictional depiction of a man attempting to go 
against this perception occurs in The Grapes of 
Wrath when Preacher Jim Casy offers to perform a 
kitchen task and Ma is taken aback. "It's women's 



work," she says. "'It's all work,' the preacher re- 
plied. They's too much of it to split it up to men's 
or women's work.'" More often during the Depres- 
sion, though, the problem was that there was too 
little work to split it up into men's and women's 
work, but the line of division remained sharp none- 
theless. 



DECREASING DEPENDENCE OF WOMEN 

Men without work tended to lose their authori- 
ty within the family. "The eyes of the whole family 
shifted back to Ma," Steinbeck wrote. "She was the 
power. She had taken control." Nor was such a 
power shift in families merely a fictional creation. 
In his 1940 book Citizens without Work, sociologist 
E. Wight Bakke found instances of men who lost 
their jobs and within a year or two the center of au- 
thority in the family had shifted to the wife. 

Steinbeck uses the image of a stick as an appro- 
priate metaphor for this transfer of authority from 
men to women. "Time was when a man said what 
we'd do," Pa Joad complains. "Seems like women 
is tellin' now." He threatens to get out his stick to 
put women in their place. "Times when they's food 
an' a place to set," Ma responds, "then maybe you 
can use your stick an' keep your skin whole. But 
you ain't a-doin' your job, either a thinkin' or a- 
workin'. If you was, why, you could use your stick, 
an' women folks'd sniffle their nose an' creep- 
mouse aroun'. But you jus' get you a stick now and 
you ain't lickin' no woman; you're a-fightin', cause 
I got a stick all laid out, too." 

Men whose self-perceived masculinity was a 
casualty of unemployment yearned for a return to 
what they believed to be the natural order of gen- 
der. This vision was perhaps best captured in the 
words of the 1933 song, "Remember My Forgotten 
Man": "Ever since the world began, a woman's got 
to have a man." 

During the Depression that male profession of 
faith in female dependence no longer seemed cer- 
tain. We not only see increasing images of women 
who don't fit either of the categories in the tradi- 
tional dichotomy, we see whores who are "virgins," 
such as Dallas in the 1939 John Ford film Stage- 
coach, and women with "sticks," such as Mae West 
in She Done Him Wrong and her other films and 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE 6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



391 



6 E N D E R ROLES 



A N D 



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RELATIONS 



Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. And even if 
women didn't have sticks, they still had the female 
powers that had for so long been the source of feel- 
ings of inferiority in many men, as Steinbeck so 
memorably indicated with the novel's ending: a 
helpless, starving man being breast-fed by the 
Joads' daughter Rose of Sharon. The female is 
plainly the provider and the male the dependent 
one in that scene. 



MARRIAGE AND SEXUALITY IN THE 
DEPRESSION 

"It's no wonder these young girls refuse to 
marry, refuse to rear children," Meridel LeSueur 
wrote in her 1932 article, "Women on Breadlines." 
She asserted that they were like the women in 
some parts of the world "who, when they have 
been conquered, refuse to breed." 

Such an analysis seemed plausible and, with so 
many men unable to fulfill the role of provider, 
marriage rates did drop sharply early in the Depres- 
sion, reaching a low of 7.9 marriages per 1000 pop- 
ulation in 1932, down from 10.1 in 1929. Yet the 
rate of marriage rebounded in 1934 and remained 
at levels similar to those of the relatively prosperous 
1920s for the remainder of the Depression. Birth 
rates, which had already been trending downward 
in the 1920s as women gained more independence, 
declined sharply under the impact of the Depres- 
sion. The birth rate in the United States bottomed 
out at 126 per 10,000 23-year-old women in the 
United States in 1935 (compared with 181 in 1921 
and 152 in 1928). 

In her 1940 book The Unemployed Man and His 
Family, sociologist Mirra Komarovsky found that 
sexual activity virtually ceased in some families after 
the man lost his job. Another sociologist, Eli Gins- 
burg, reported that some women had "supposed it 
was [the husband's] right to have sexual relations" 
as long as he "was working and supporting her," 
but that changed when he was no longer earning 
the pleasure he derived from her acquiescence. 

Even for those young people who postponed 
marriage, however, sexual desires were not easily 
switched off. Nor did the fact that married couples 
could not afford to have children mean that most 
of them would simply refrain from having sex. Ac- 



cordingly, there was a boom in the number and 
business of birth-control clinics during the Depres- 
sion and, following favorable court rulings in 1930 
and 1936, physicians were allowed to provide birth 
control devices in most states. Being able to pur- 
chase birth control legally was of scant help, 
though, to people on relief who had no money. And 
it was in such destitute families that it often seemed 
more necessary to have sex because the men were 
so psychologically devastated and in need of having 
their self-respect boosted. 

A man shorn of the sources of masculine iden- 
tification usually found in the roles of provider and 
protector is left with one other means of asserting 
his masculinity — the most basic role of his sex. 
"You don't know what it's like when your hus- 
band's out of work," a woman in California's San 
Joaquin Valley told federal relief investigator 
Lorena Hickok in 1934. Of course they did not want 
to have additional mouths to feed, the woman ex- 
plained, "but you don't have any money to buy 
anything at the drug store." Abstinence was not a 
realistic option, she maintained. "He's gloomy and 
unhappy all the time. Life is terrible. You must try 
all the time to keep him from going crazy. And 
many times — that's the only way," she said, allud- 
ing to sexual intercourse. 



SNOW WHITE AND THE VISION OF A 
RETURN TO GENDER "NORMALCY" 

Men in search of their lost masculinity could 
turn to Hollywood for the prescription they sought 
to cure their ailment. Most notably, Walt Disney's 
1938 animated feature, Snow White and the Seven 
Dwarfs, reflected the male fears and longings of the 
Depression years. The film portrays the "two kinds 
of women" view of the world with a vengeance. 
The Wicked Queen is a woman with power, like all 
too many women seemed, in the view of many 
men, to have in the 1930s. The heroine, on the 
other hand, is domestic, naive, and finally com- 
pletely helpless. Snow White must be restored to 
life by a man's kiss, reversing the reality of the De- 
pression years for many men, who were in their 
own form of sleeping death, from which they could 
be brought back to life, however briefly, only by a 
woman's "kiss" (i.e., intercourse). 



39Z 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GERSHWIN 



GEORGE AND IRA 



Thus Disney's fairy tale world of 1938 served as 
an architect's sketch for a reconstructed post- 
Depression (and, as it happened, postwar) world of 
gender relations. 

See Also: FAMILY AND HOME, IMPACT OF THE 

GREAT DEPRESSION ON; GAYS AND LESBIANS, 
IMPACT OF THE DEPRESSION ON; GRAPES OF 
WRATH, THE; MEN, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON; PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT OF 
THE GREAT DEPRESSION; "REMEMBER MY 
FORGOTTEN MAN"; SNOW WHITE AND THE 
SEVEN DWARFS; WOMEN, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Hapke, Laura. Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, 
Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s. 1995. 

Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage- 
Earning Women in the United States. 1982. 

Komarovsky, Mirra. The Unemployed Man and His Family. 
1940. 

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 
1929-1941. 1984, 1993. 

McElvaine, Robert S. Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the 
Course of History. 2001. 

Melosh, Barbara. Engendering Culture: Manhood and 
Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater. 1991. 

Mettler, Suzanne. Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federal- 
ism in New Deal Public Policy. 1998. 

Scharf, Lois. To Work and to Wed: Female Employment, 
Feminism, and the Great Depression. 1980. 

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939. 

Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience, 3rd 
edition. 2000. 

Robert S. McElvaine 



GERSHWIN, GEORGE AND IRA 

George Gershwin (September 26, 1898-July 11, 
1937) and his brother Ira Gershwin (December 6, 
1896-August 17, 1983) were children of Russian 
Jewish parents who emigrated to the United States 
in the late nineteenth century. Their surname was 
changed from Gershovitz to Gershvin and finally to 
Gershwin. George studied classical piano at an 



early age with Charles Hambitzer and music theory 
with Edward Kilenyi. He began writing songs after 
working as an accompanist on New York City's Tin 
Pan Alley in the early part of the twentieth century. 
George Gershwin wrote many popular songs, in- 
cluding "Swanee," memorably sung by Al Jolson in 
1920, and he soon began writing musicals, which 
included Lady Be Good! (1924), Funny Face (1927), 
and Girl Crazy (1930). His musical Of Thee I Sing 
(1931), a socio-political satire concerning ineffectu- 
al government policies, was the first Broadway mu- 
sical to win a Pulitzer Prize. 

George Gershwin was ebullient, friendly, and 
outgoing, whereas his older brother Ira was quiet 
and introspective. Nevertheless, they began what 
became a long and successful collaboration, com- 
bining George's music with lyrics by Ira, who was 
a masterful wordsmith. This partnership resulted in 
songs that have stood the test of time, including 
"The Man I Love" (1924), "Fascinating Rhythm" 
(1926), "Someone to Watch over Me" (1926), and 
"Embraceable You" (1930). Although written in 
1926, Gershwin's "Someone to Watch over Me" 
took on special significance for many Americans 
during the Depression years. Gershwin sought to 
span the chasm between popular and classic musi- 
cal styles by writing such works as the piano con- 
certo Rhapsody in Blue (1924), An American in Paris 
(1928), and a group of preludes for piano. These 
compositions contain elements of jazz and blues 
couched in traditional romantic orchestration, as 
does George Gershwin's folk opera, Porgy and Bess, 
produced in 1935. Before writing this opera, which 
was based on DuBose Heyward's book Porgy and 
set on South Carolina's coastal islands, Gershwin 
traveled to South Carolina and lived among the 
people portrayed in the book, absorbing their 
rhythms, dialect, and culture. He then incorporated 
what he had learned into his music for the opera, 
with lyrics by Ira. Porgy and Bess was not an imme- 
diate success because audiences were confused by 
its tone, which was too heavy for Broadway and too 
light for serious opera. Though it appeared in 1935 
to mixed reviews, it eventually, though not in 
George Gershwin's lifetime, became a great success 
around the world, possibly the first American opera 
to do so. 



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393 



GLASS 



CARTER 



George Gershwin continued to compose and 
remained productive until his untimely death in 
July 1937. Ira Gershwin later wrote lyrics for other 
composers, including Kurt Weill, Aaron Copland, 
and Jerome Kern, but he is best known for his col- 
laborations with his brother. 

See Also: MUSIC. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Conte, Bob. Portrait of American Music. 1989. 
Lloyd, Norman. The Golden Encyclopedia of Music. 1968. 
Gershwin, George. Music by Gershwin. Forward. 1975. 
Green, Stanley. "The Thirties" in Songs of the Thirties: The 
Decade Series. 1989. 

Natoma N. Noble 



pointed Glass to the U.S. Senate. The efficiency of 
the Virginia Democratic Party machine, along with 
its tightly restricted electorate, ensured Glass's re- 
peated reelection to the Senate. This enabled Glass 
to become an early and outspoken critic of the New 
Deal. As one of the architects of the national finan- 
cial system, he decried currency devaluation and 
the abandonment of the gold standard. He believed 
such federal programs as the Agricultural Adjust- 
ment Administration and Social Security under- 
mined states' rights. Illness prevented Glass from 
being an active senator after 1942, but he remained 
in office until his death in 1946. 

See Also: BYRD, HARRY; CONSERVATIVE COALI- 
TION; GLASS-STEAGALL ACT OF 1932; GLASS- 
STEAGALL ACT OF 1933. 



GLASS, CARTER 



Carter Glass (January 4, 1858-May 28,1946) was a 
U.S. senator from Virginia. Along with his col- 
league Senator Harry Byrd, Glass was a leading 
member of the Republican-Democratic congressio- 
nal coalition that emerged to oppose the New Deal 
by 1938. In 1934 Glass declared that the New Deal 
"is not only a mistake; it is a disgrace to the Na- 
tion." According to historian James T. Patterson, 
Glass voted against the Roosevelt administration 81 
percent of the time, more than any other Democrat. 

Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, Carter Glass 
began his career in 1880 as city editor of the Lynch- 
burg News; he soon rose to the position of editor 
and purchased the newspaper in 1888. As an out- 
spoken editor, Glass grew more involved in politics. 
He was elected to the Virginia State Senate in 1899, 
and in 1901 he served as a delegate to the Virginia 
state constitutional convention, where he helped to 
devise voting restrictions that disfranchised African 
Americans. In 1902, Glass was elected to the U.S. 
House of Representatives from the sixth district of 
Virginia. As a member of the House Banking and 
Currency Committee, Glass was responsible for 
drafting the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. A close 
ally of President Woodrow Wilson, Glass became 
his secretary of the treasury in 1919. 

In 1920, upon the death of Senator Thomas 
Martin, Virginia Governor Westmoreland Davis ap- 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Palmer, James E., Jr. Carter Glass: Unreconstructed Rebel. 
1938. 

Patterson, James T. Congressional Conservatism and the 
New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in 
Congress, 1933-1939. 1967. 

Smith, Rrxley, and Norman Beasley. Carter Glass: A Biog- 
raphy. 1939. 

Larissa M. Smith 



GLASS-STEAGALL ACT OF 1932 

Waves of commercial bank failures and a progres- 
sive contraction of credit to businesses and individ- 
uals were central features of the economic collapse 
beginning in 1930. Both were exacerbated by the 
Federal Reserve's policy of reducing the money 
supply and by its decision to raise interest rates in 
the fall of 1931 with the aim of protecting the value 
of the dollar after Great Britain quit the gold stan- 
dard. President Herbert Hoover's administration 
supported such orthodoxy, but recognized the need 
to buttress the banking system and the supply of 
credit. The administration's preferred strategy of 
bank cooperation and "self-help" via the National 
Credit Corporation failed in 1931, in part because 
of the unwillingness of leading bankers to lend to 
weaker institutions. Hoover was compelled to pro- 



39*. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



6 L A S S - S T E A G A L L ACT OF 1933 



vide federal loans to banks and other businesses 
through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. 

As the credit crisis worsened both Hoover and 
Congress supported more liberal credit policies. By 
early 1932 a group of governors from the Federal 
Reserve temporarily sought a more expansionary 
policy based on buying government securities from 
banks so as to increase the banks' reserves. The Re- 
serve banks could lend only on gold, government 
securities, or short-term commercial loans (known 
as eligible paper), in line with the conventions of 
commercial loan banking theories. However the 
banking system's gold reserves appeared inade- 
quate; many banks lacked sufficient government 
securities or eligible paper to support further bor- 
rowing. Banks might also use extra funds to reduce 
their overall borrowings, leaving the Federal Re- 
serve more reliant on its own gold reserves. 

The Glass- Steagall Act of February 1932 was an 
emergency measure designed to support the ex- 
pansion of bank credit through lending by district 
or regional Federal Reserve banks to banks that 
were members of the Federal Reserve System. 
Sponsored by Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and 
Representative Henry Steagall of Alabama, the Act 
widened the range of assets against which com- 
mercial banks could borrow to include promissory 
notes or government bonds if they had no other eli- 
gible assets. Senator Glass, who disliked such liber- 
alization, ensured that these loans attracted higher 
interest rates. The measure eased the immediate 
availability of credit between February and August 
1932, but the Act did not signal a full commitment 
to expansion by the Federal Reserve Board; its pro- 
visions were marginal amid the atmosphere of di- 
minishing confidence among the public, business- 
es, and the banking community. More active use of 
the Reconstruction Finance Corporation's powers 
and more interventionist banking legislation had to 
await the New Deal. 

See Also: FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM; GLASS, 
CARTER; GLASS-STEAGALL ACT OF 1933. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burns, Helen M. The American Banking Community and 
New Deal Banking Reforms, 1933-1935. 1974. 

Chandler, Lester V. America's Greatest Depression, 
1929-1941. 1970. 



Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwarz. A Mone- 
tary History of the United States: 1867-1960. 1963. 

Michael French 



GLASS-STEAGALL ACT OF 1933 

Severe problems in the money markets were readily 
visible in the 1920s, but the prevailing economic 
prosperity blinded most Americans to the looming 
catastrophe. More than 5,600 banks failed during 
the 1920s, primarily because of undercapitalization, 
over competition, real-estate speculation, and cor- 
porate venality, and the stock market rocketed to 
new heights based more on mindless euphoria than 
on sound company profits. In the process, the line 
between commercial banking and investment 
banking grew perilously thin, with the money of 
millions of depositors leaking into stock and bond 
accounts of Wall Street securities affiliates. The 
stock market crash of October 1929 created a li- 
quidity crisis of unprecedented proportions, leading 
to the meltdown of 1932 to 1933, when the nation's 
banking system finally collapsed. Senator Carter 
Glass of Virginia and Representative Henry Steagall 
of Alabama proposed reform legislation, but the 
outgoing Herbert Hoover administration refused to 
act. In 1931, Congressman Ferdinand Pecora had 
launched an investigation of the banking system, 
setting the stage for reform legislation. 

In March 1933, with President Franklin D. Roo- 
sevelt recently inaugurated, Glass and Steagall 
found more support in the White House. By then, 
of course, the crisis demanded action. The president 
had declared a nationwide banking holiday, shut- 
ting down every bank in the country and assuring 
Americans that only sound banks would reopen. 
He also promised reforms in the banking system 
that would prevent future systemic catastrophes in 
the money markets. During the famous first "One 
Hundred Days" of the Roosevelt administration, 
Glass and Steagall resubmitted the legislation. Both 
houses of Congress passed the measure in mid- 
June, and on June 16, 1933, President Roosevelt 
signed it into law. 

The Glass-Steagall Act, also known as the 
Banking Act of 1933, formally separated investment 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



395 



6 I 



I 6 6 [ H S 



Of 19 3 3 



banking and commercial banking and prohibited 
individual banks from engaging in both. Each insti- 
tution had to declare itself either a commercial bank 
or an investment bank, and commercial banks had 
one year to divest themselves of securities affiliates. 
To prevent panic-stricken depositors from making 
runs on banks and forcing them into bankruptcy, 
the law established the Federal Deposit Insurance 
Corporation (FDIC) to guarantee individual bank 
accounts. To limit the possibilities of external ma- 
nipulation of domestic money markets, the legisla- 
tion also handed over control of the foreign opera- 
tions of all Federal Reserve member banks to the 
Federal Reserve Board. Commercial banks were al- 
lowed to underwrite the securities only of state and 
local governments. Finally, the measure tightened 
Federal Reserve control over bank credit and pro- 
vided more careful coordination of Federal Reserve 
open market operations. The Banking Act of 1933 
helped restore confidence and liquidity to the 
money markets. 

See Also: BANKING PANICS (1930-1933); FEDERAL 
RESERVE SYSTEM; FEDERAL DEPOSIT 
INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC); GLASS, 
CARTER; GLASS -STEAGALL ACT OF 1932. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Burns, Helen M. The American Banking Community and 
New Deal Banking Reforms: 1933-1935. 1974. 

Kennedy, Susan E. The Banking Crisis of 1933. 1973. 

Olson, James S. Herbert Hoover and the Reconstruction Fi- 
nance Corporation, 1931-1933. 1977. 

Olson, James S. Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Fi- 
nance Corporation and the New Deal, 1933-1940. 
1988. 

James S. Olson 



GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 

In the 1930s, Warner Bros., a studio most often as- 
sociated with gangster and social problem films, 
also pioneered in the musical genre. Drawing on 
the talents of choreographer Busby Berkeley and a 
stable of former vaudeville and Broadway perform- 
ers, the studio produced three hugely popular back- 



stage musicals in 1933: Gold Diggers of 1933, Foot- 
light Parade, and 42nd Street. Budgeted at only 
$433,000, but ranking second at the box office for 
the year, Gold Diggers of 1933 infused its predictable 
rags-to-riches romance and show-stopping musi- 
cal numbers with a working-class elan and escapist 
glamour that appealed to Depression-era audi- 
ences. 

When Broadway producer Barney Hopkins 
(Ned Sparks) can't pay the bills, the cops close 
down his show, and plucky chorus girls Polly (the 
ubiquitous Ruby Keeler), Carol (Joan Blondell), 
Trixie (Aline MacMahon), and Fay (Ginger Rogers) 
find themselves out of work and flat broke. Luckily, 
Polly's songwriter boyfriend Brad Roberts (Dick 
Powell) is really Robert Bradford, the scion of a 
wealthy Boston family that is opposed to his career 
in show business. Brad puts up the money for 
Barney's new show, and Barney hires Brad to write 
all the songs. When the male lead gets lumbago on 
opening night, the girls and Barney convince the 
reluctant Brad that he must step in to save the 
show. However, his secret is out and his older 
brother J. Lawrence Bradford (Warren William) and 
Faneul H. Peabody (Guy Kibbee), the family bank- 
er, soon arrive to put a stop to Brad's stage career 
and to his marriage to Polly. Offering her a bribe to 
leave Brad, J. Lawrence mistakes Carol for Polly. 
Thus begins a madcap charade as Carol and Trixie 
pretend to be "gold diggers" to teach the blue 
bloods a lesson in manners and class. In the end, 
of course, the mistaken identity farce is resolved, 
true love triumphs over class differences, and each 
chorus girl gets her man. 

Though Mervyn LeRoy directed the narrative 
sections of Gold Diggers, Busby Berkeley both cho- 
reographed and directed the wildly extravagant 
musical numbers. The ironic opening number, 
"We're in the Money," is classic Berkeley: frag- 
mented, interchangeable female bodies scantily 
costumed in huge gold coins, the precision chore- 
ography and elaborate geometric patterns high- 
lighted by dizzying close-ups and innovative cam- 
era shots. In contrast to the glitzy spectacle and 
tongue-in-cheek frivolity of much of the film, Gold 
Diggers closes with "Remember My Forgotten 
Man," which invokes breadlines, homelessness, 



396 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GOLDEN 



GATE 



INTERNATIONAL 



EXPOSITION 



( I 9 3 9 - I 9 A ) 




An elaborate dance number from Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933. Archive Photos 



and the Bonus Marchers, World War I veterans who 
had marched on Washington in 1932 demanding 
payment for their war service. 

See Also: BERKELEY, BUSBY; HOLLYWOOD AND THE 
FILM INDUSTRY; "REMEMBER MY FORGOTTEN 
MAN." 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bergman, Andrew. We're in the Money: Depression Ameri- 
ca and Its Films. 1971. 

Cohan, Steven, ed. Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader. 
2002. 



Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw 



GOLDEN GATE INTERNATIONAL 
EXPOSITION (1939-1940) 

San Francisco's rebirth after its 1906 earthquake 
and fire culminated in 1939 with the Golden Gate 
International Exposition. The fair celebrated the re- 
cent completion of two landmark bridges — the San 
Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which spans San 
Francisco Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge, which 
crosses the strait at the entrance to the Bay. Still in- 
tent on capitalizing on boosterism, San Francisco 
started planning its third exposition in fifty years in 
1934. The Bureau of International Exhibitions, how- 
ever, refused to recognize the Golden Gate Interna- 
tional Exposition, although it did endorse the 1939 
New York World's Fair. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA Of THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



397 



GOLD 



S T 



N D A R D 



The setting for the fair was Treasure Island, an 
artificial 400-acre island built on the shoals near 
Yerba Buena Island between San Francisco and 
Oakland. The Works Progress Administration 
chipped in with 300,000 tons of boulders for a sea- 
wall that was filled with sand and silt dredged from 
the Bay. Treasure Island became accessible by auto- 
mobile when the Bay Bridge was completed in 
1936. The city was planning to use the island for an 
airport once the fair closed. 

The fair opened on February 17, 1939, with the 
theme "A Pageant of the Pacific." Architect Arthur 
Brown, Jr., a beaux arts classicist who designed San 
Francisco's City Hall, designed the island's land- 
scape and some of the buildings. Brown headed a 
panel of architects who decided on a blend of orien- 
tal and occidental styles that would symbolize the 
city's role linking East and West. Two massive Ele- 
phant Towers designed by Donald Macky flanked 
the entrance to the island. Ralph Stackpole's 
eighty-foot sculpture of the allegorical goddess Pa- 
cified was the central emblem of peaceful Oriental 
trade. Lewis P. Hobart melded styles in his coral- 
colored, quasi- oriental, ninety-foot-tall Arch of Tri- 
umph in the Court of Flowers, with included a 
fountain called Rainbow Girl by O. C. Malmquist. 
George W. Kelham designed the Court of the 
Moon and Stars, which was topped by sculptor Et- 
tore Cadorin's allegoric Evening Star. Timothy L. 
Pflueger's Federal Building featured forty-eight col- 
umns for the number of states. The fair also fea- 
tured exhibitions of over $40 million worth of "edu- 
cational" art, largely from Europe. 

Attractions included the Pan-American or 
"China" Clipper, promising continuing trade with 
Asia. "The Cavalcade of the Golden West" and 
"America! Cavalcade of a Nation" provided historic 
pageantry. Site themes varied from South Sea Is- 
lands to Chinatown to the Old West. There was a 
scale model of San Francisco as it was predicted to 
appear in 1999 and dioramas of futuristic college 
campuses, vacation resorts, and industries. 

The entertainment zone featured mechanical 
rides and numerous shows by such performers as 
Count Basie, Bing Crosby, Eddie Duchin, Benny 
Goodman, and the Folies Bergere from Paris. Es- 
ther Williams swam in Billy Rose's Aquacade. Sally 



Rand, the fan dancer, performed in her Nude 
Ranch. Military bands and roaming Mexican folk 
musicians played amid camels and rickshaws giving 
tourists rides. 

Despite predictions of "California's greatest 
tourist season," the fair was a financial disaster, los- 
ing $4,166,000 in 1939. A court order forestalled 
bankruptcy, awarding creditors eighty-two cents on 
the dollar and permitting a second season. The fair 
closed in the red in September 1940, despite seven- 
teen million visitors, most from the West. Stack- 
pole's Pacifica fell to planned destruction six weeks 
after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Decem- 
ber 1941. The U.S. Navy began using Treasure Is- 
land as a base during World War II and continued 
to occupy the site until 1997, when the Navy began 
the process of turning the island over to the control 
of the city of San Francisco. 

See Also: NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR (1939-1940). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Reinhardt, Richard. Treasure Island: San Trancisco's Expo- 
sition Years. 1973. 

"San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition, 
1939-40." Donald G Larson Collection on Interna- 
tional Expositions and Fairs, 1851-1940. Henry 
Madden Library, California State University, Fresno. 
Available at: lib.csufresno.edu/subjectresources/ 
specialcollections/worldfairs/1939sanfrancisco.html 

Schnoebelen, Anne. Treasures: Splendid Survivors of the 
Golden Gate International Exposition. 2003. Available 
at: www.treasureislandmuseum.org/treasures 

Blanche M. G Linden 



GOLD STANDARD 

The end of World War I triggered a heartfelt desire 
across much of the world to make a new world. But 
when it came to economics, it was a different story. 
The spectacular growth of the international econo- 
my before 1914 persuaded almost everyone that the 
main objective was to recreate the international 
gold standard system, a stable currency exchange 
mechanism that facilitated the movement of money 
and goods around by globe by stabilizing currency 
values at a fixed rate. 



398 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



6 H £ WITH THE 



W I H 



The war had caused most countries to abandon 
"gold," the shorthand term for the mechanism; 
however, by 1919 the need to recreate the gold 
standard seemed imperative thanks to the currency 
instability and inflation that were sweeping Europe. 
The lead was taken by the United States and Great 
Britain, which, sometimes with the assistance of the 
League of Nations, organized stabilization loans 
and technical support to help countries back onto 
gold, but the lion's share of the work was un- 
dertaken by national governments and their central 
banks. To be a member of the gold standard, coun- 
tries had to follow the three central rules of what 
has become known as "orthodox economic policy." 
The first two rules applied to governments, which 
had to sustain a positive balance of payments 
(spending could not exceed income levels) and a 
positive balance of trade (exports should exceed im- 
ports). The third rule affected central banks, which 
were expected to shadow the interest rates of all the 
other members of the system and use all their re- 
sources to stay on gold when the national currency 
was under speculative pressure. 

By 1928 forty-four countries had returned to 
the gold standard. Cracks in the system quickly 
began to appear, however, as countries struggled to 
follow the rules of economic orthodoxy, particularly 
after 1930. The effective end of the gold standard 
order came when its chief supporter, the United 
States, left the system on April 19, 1933. A tempo- 
rary shortage of gold within the U.S. banking sys- 
tem had prompted Franklin Roosevelt to call an ex- 
tended bank holiday, but the real reason for the 
U.S. break with gold was to free Roosevelt to make 
economic policy as he saw fit. Subsequently, inter- 
est rates were allowed to fall (bank loans now cost 
less) and the dollar fell on the international ex- 
change by almost 40 percent, helping prices to rise 
and making U.S. exports cheaper and imports from 
gold countries more expensive. Equally important- 
ly, Roosevelt was now able to increase government 
spending. 

This U.S. shift in policy greatly increased the 
pressures on countries such as France and Poland, 
which were still committed to the system. In con- 
trast to the 1920s, there were now competing views 
on monetary policy, making international co- 



operation all the more difficult to achieve given the 
increasingly nationalist climate of the 1930s. 

See Also: MONETARY POLICY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Drummond, Ian M. The Gold Standard and the Interna- 
tional Monetary System, 1900-1939. 1987. 

Eichengreen, Barry. Golden Tetters. The Gold Standard and 
the Great Depression, 1919-1939. 1992. 

Feinstein, Charles and Katherine Watson, eds. Banking, 
Currency and Tinance in Turope between the Wars. 
1995. 

Patricia Clavin 



GONE WITH THE WIND 

Margaret Mitchell's bestselling novel of the Civil 
War and Reconstruction revolves around the tem- 
pestuous love triangle of fiery southern belle Scar- 
lett O'Hara, the noble but weak Ashley Wilkes, and 
the dashing scoundrel Rhett Butler. At the story's 
opening in the halcyon days of a romanticized Old 
South, the willful and spoiled Scarlett schemes to 
win Ashley's love, despite his impending marriage 
to his cousin Melanie. Over the course of this 
thousand-page novel, Scarlett survives the burning 
of Atlanta and the devastation of Tara, the O'Hara 
family plantation, by the Union army; picks cotton 
side-by-side with her former slaves to keep her 
family from starving; marries her sister's beau in 
order to pay the taxes on Tara; makes a fortune sell- 
ing lumber during Atlanta's postwar boom; pro- 
vokes a Ku Klux Klan raid on the local shantytown; 
and marries Rhett for his money only to find, after 
he no longer gives "a damn," that it is Rhett, not 
Ashley, whom she truly loves. 

Outraged black and liberal critics condemned 
Gone with the Wind as an apologia for American rac- 
ism, arguing that Mitchell's unabashedly pro- 
Confederate depiction glossed over the realities of 
slavery and condoned the atrocities of the Klan. 
Nonetheless, Scarlett's indomitable will to survive 
war, poverty, and heartbreak resonated powerfully 
for many readers in the midst of the trials of the 
Great Depression and with the prospect of a second 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



399 



GOODMAN 



E N N Y 



world war on the horizon. Published by Macmillan 
in the summer of 1936, Gone with the Wind sold 
over a million copies in the first six months. 

Independent producer David O. Selznick pur- 
chased the film rights for $50,000, a hefty sum at the 
time for the first work of an unknown novelist. The 
making of Gone with the Wind, which took three 
years and cost over $4 million, became an obsession 
for Selznick. His unwillingness to compromise his 
grand vision for the film ultimately cost him control 
of his studio, Selznick International Pictures. Selz- 
nick spent $100,000 on the now-legendary "search 
for Scarlett," a brilliant publicity campaign that in- 
volved screen tests for dozens of major Hollywood 
actresses, including Bette Davis, Paulette Goddard, 
and Katherine Hepburn, as well as beauty queens 
from around the country. Ultimately the part went 
to Vivien Leigh, a relatively unknown British ac- 
tress. Fan mail convinced Selznick that only Clark 
Gable could play Rhett, and he paid MGM an exor- 
bitant sum for Gable's services. Olivia de Havilland 
was cast as Melanie, Leslie Howard as Ashley, and 
Hattie McDaniel as Mammy. 

Capturing the historical sweep and political 
themes of Mitchell's epic novel without offending 
the sensibilities of either African-American or white 
Southern audiences required eleven screenwriters, 
including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ben Hecht, though 
playwright Sidney Howard received a sole writing 
credit. Similarly, four directors worked on the film, 
though only Victor Fleming received screen credit. 
Filmed in Technicolor, Gone with the Wind is a visu- 
ally opulent extravaganza, thanks to set designer 
Lyle Wheeler and production designer William 
Cameron MacKenzie, who also directed key scenes, 
including the burning of Atlanta. 

Gone with the Wind was a blockbuster hit with 
mainstream audiences and critics. At the film's pre- 
mier in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, over one 
million spectators crowded the streets to catch a 
glimpse of the motorcade of Hollywood stars. The 
film grossed over $1 million on opening weekend 
and eventually won eight Academy Awards, in- 
cluding Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, 
and Best Supporting Actress for Hattie McDaniel, 
the first African-American to win an Oscar. Though 
picketers protested in several major cities, for the 



most part black leaders and critics chose to overlook 
the film's questionable racial politics and stereo- 
typical "darky" performances (particularly Butterfly 
McQueen as Prissy), emphasizing instead the more 
rounded character of Mammy and the break- 
through of McDaniel's Oscar. Ranked as the top- 
grossing film for nearly thirty years, Gone with the 
Wind is still considered one of the best films ever 
made. 

See Also: HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood 
Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights 
Era. 1993. 

Dirks, Tim. One Hundred Greatest Films. "Gone with the 
Wind (1939)." Available at: www.filmsite.org 

Harmetz, Aljean. On the Road to Tara: The Making of Gone 
with the Wind. 1996. 

Taylor, Helen. Scarlett's Women: Gone with the Wind and 
Its Female Fans. 1989. 



Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw 



GOODMAN, BENNY 



Jazz clarinetist and bandleader Benjamin David 
Goodman (May 30, 1909-June 13, 1986) was born 
in Chicago, the ninth of twelve children of poor im- 
migrant parents. The children worked at early ages 
but also studied music. Benny showed talent on the 
clarinet, and he soon acquired a professional com- 
petence. While in Chicago Benny was exposed to 
"hot" African-American jazz, which deeply influ- 
enced his tastes. 

At sixteen Goodman joined Ben Pollack's rising 
orchestra and began touring and recording. In 1929 
he began freelancing in New York City to help sup- 
port his family. He hoped to form his own band, but 
prospects during the Depression were dim. In 1933, 
though, the important young jazz promoter John 
Hammond (Goodman's future brother-in-law) 
hired the clarinetist to lead a recording ensemble. 
The two soon created a "hot" orchestra that chal- 
lenged the dominance of "sweet" band music. 
Skilled white musicians, such as the trumpeter 



too 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GOOD 



N E I 6 



OR POLICY 



Bunny Berigan, drummer Gene Krupa, and Good- 
man's brother Harry, a bassist, were hired, as was 
the African-American arranger and ex-bandleader 
Fletcher Henderson. In 1935, appearances on the 
NBC Radio program Let's Dance inspired a cross- 
country tour. The final engagement at Los Ange- 
les's Palomar Ballroom was a wild success. The 
band's youthful hot "swing" — performed by white 
musicians — arrived just as economic optimism 
stirred and young listeners were spending more on 
leisure. Extended bookings and recording contracts 
resulted; Goodman was dubbed "the King of 
Swing," and the big-band era had begun. 

Hammond, a civil rights activist, encouraged 
the hiring of the pianist Teddy Wilson and the vi- 
braphonist Lionel Hampton for recordings also fea- 
turing Goodman and Krupa. When the quartet ap- 
peared in public with the band, Goodman was 
credited by many with breaking jazz's color line. 
The combo's brilliant improvisations enhanced 
swing artistically and inspired other bandleaders to 
integrate. Goodman later hired such fine white and 
black players as the trumpeters Harry James and 
Cootie Williams and the guitarist Charlie Christian. 
The 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, instigated by 
Hammond, was a highlight of this period. 

In the late 1930s Goodman confronted frequent 
personnel changes and competition from other 
bands. His popularity fluctuated, but his almost fa- 
natical work ethic kept the band (and his own play- 
ing) at artistically high levels. After 1940 he would 
commission clarinet works from Bela Bartok and 
Aaron Copland and increasingly perform classical 
music. Jazz's most important white bandleader and 
clarinetist, Goodman established his reputation in 
his twenties and maintained it for the rest of his 
long career. 

See Also: BIG BAND MUSIC; ELLINGTON, DUKE; 
JAZZ; MUSIC. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Collier, James Lincoln. Benny Goodman and the Swing Era. 

1989. 
Firestone, Ross. Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times 

of Benny Goodman. 1993. 
Goodman, Benny, and Irving Kolodin. The Kingdom of 

Swing. 1939. 

Burton W. Peretti 



GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY 

The term "Good Neighbor Policy" is used to de- 
scribe the Latin American policy of the United 
States from 1933 to 1945. But the policy did not ac- 
tually begin in 1933. During the 1920s there had 
been increasing criticism in Latin America that the 
United States was an aggressive and overbearing 
power. President Herbert Hoover, who was elected 
president in 1928, sought an improvement in inter- 
American relations and visited a number of Latin 
American countries prior to his inauguration. This 
conciliatory policy was continued by Hoover's suc- 
cessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In fact it acquired a 
name as a result of part of Roosevelt's inaugural ad- 
dress of March 4, 1933, in which he stated that 
American foreign policy would in future be dedicat- 
ed to "the policy of the good neighbor." The con- 
cept of acting as a good neighbor implied equality 
and mutual respect among adjacent nations and 
was specifically applied by Roosevelt to the coun- 
tries of the Western Hemisphere. Thus, it was Roo- 
sevelt and not Hoover who became popularly re- 
garded as the originator of the Good Neighbor 
Policy. 

Roosevelt's speech in 1933 affirmed American 
good intentions but was vague on detail. Indeed, 
the resulting Good Neighbor Policy was neither 
planned nor systematically implemented. Behind 
the uplifting rhetoric, however, was a desire to pro- 
mote commercial relations to help the American 
economy recover from the Great Depression. In 
practical terms, closer economic contact was se- 
cured by the negotiation of a series of reciprocal 
trade agreements. Starting with Cuba in 1934, reci- 
procity arrangements were concluded with eleven 
Latin American countries by 1939. Trade was also 
expanded by the creation in 1934 of the Export- 
Import Bank to provide foreign countries with cred- 
it for the purchase of imports from the United 
States. Further inter-American contact and cooper- 
ation was achieved by cultural and educational ex- 
change programs that facilitated the movement of 
scholars and scientists. 

For Latin Americans the sincerity of U.S. pre- 
tensions to be a good neighbor was contingent on 
U.S. disavowal of the policy of military intervention 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



401 



GOVERNMENT 



N I T E D 



S T 



T E S F E D E R 



in Latin American domestic affairs. Hoover had al- 
ready ordered the withdrawal of U.S. marines from 
Nicaragua. Roosevelt accelerated a similar plan for 
withdrawal from Haiti. The right of the United 
States to interfere in Cuba ended in 1934 with the 
abrogation of the Piatt Amendment, which had 
been incorporated into the 1901 Cuban Constitu- 
tion and gave the U.S. the legal right of military in- 
tervention in Cuban affairs. Similar evidence of 
good neighborliness was illustrated by the U.S. re- 
fusal to give military support to American oil com- 
panies in their disputes with the governments of 
Bolivia and Mexico. These actions contributed to a 
distinct improvement in inter- American relations, 
so that most Latin American countries joined the 
United States in organizing resistance against the 
fascist threat posed by Germany and Italy during 
World War II. The Good Neighbor Policy was, 
therefore, successful in improving the image of the 
United States in Latin America. At the same time, 
however, the policy also served to increase U.S. 
economic and military influence. The Latin Ameri- 
can nations were nominal equals of the United 
States, but they remained vulnerable to the great 
power of their northern neighbor. 

See Also: INTERNATIONAL IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION; LATIN AMERICA, GREAT 
DEPRESSION IN. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gardner, Lloyd C. Economic Aspects of New Deal Diploma- 
cy. 1964. 

Gellman, Irwin F. Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States 
Policies in Latin America, 1933-1945. 1979. 

Wood, Bryce. The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy. 
1961. 

Joseph Smith 



GOVERNMENT, UNITED STATES 
FEDERAL, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON 

Prior to 1930, the economic role of the federal gov- 
ernment was relatively small. Federal civilian em- 
ployment barely exceeded 1 percent of total em- 



ployment, and the government's share of the gross 
national product (GNP) was a mere 1.6 percent. 
Aside from veterans' pensions, the federal govern- 
ment did not provide a social safety net of transfer 
payments to the aged, the unemployed, or the 
merely poor. Larger banks were federally regulated, 
but there was no federal deposit insurance, and fail- 
ures among smaller banks were common in the 
1920s. The stock market boom of the 1920s pro- 
ceeded without significant federal oversight. Only 
2.5 million families paid any federal income tax in 
1929. 

After 1929, the federal government's economic 
role increased substantially. By 1940 its civilian pay- 
roll exceeded one million workers, and federal pur- 
chases of goods and services accounted for over 6 
percent of the GNP. From the New Deal period be- 
ginning in 1933 came many programs that have re- 
mained important into the twenty-first century, 
including Social Security, unemployment compen- 
sation, the minimum wage, agricultural price sup- 
ports, deposit insurance, and protection for labor 
unions. 

The decrease in aggregate demand that under- 
lay the Depression caused production to fall. By 
1933, about one-fourth of the labor force was un- 
employed. Falling prices increased the burden of 
debt on farmers, business firms, and home owners, 
and bankruptcies and foreclosures increased. 

The federal government under President Her- 
bert Hoover moved promptly to try to deal with the 
Depression. Hoover pressed employers not to re- 
duce wages, and he increased federal funding for 
public works projects. He also persuaded Congress 
to reduce income tax rates in December 1929. De- 
spite misgivings, he accepted a bill to pay about $1 
billion as a bonus to war veterans in 1931. Beyond 
this, Hoover opposed giving federal money to the 
unemployed. In June 1930, he signed the Hawley- 
Smoot Tariff bill, which greatly increased the taxes 
imposed on imports. The tariff reduced U.S. im- 
ports and helped spread the Depression to other 
countries. 

Worsening business led to a rising tide of bank 
failures, beginning in late 1930. This in turn pro- 
voked depositors to withdraw currency and gold 
coin. Hoover refused to suspend convertibility of 



A02 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GOVERNMENT 



N I T E D 



STATES F E D E R A L 



dollars into gold, and gold outflows exerted a 
strong deflationary force. At Hoover's urging, Con- 
gress created the Reconstruction Finance Corpora- 
tion (RFC) in January 1932. It provided funds to dis- 
tressed banks. 

The federal government entered the Depres- 
sion with a substantial surplus of revenues over ex- 
penditures. Hoover was willing to see federal 
spending increase as long as it did not lead to deficit 
spending. However, as declining incomes led to de- 
clining tax revenues and a deficit of $2 billion in 
1931, Hoover reduced federal spending and per- 
suaded Congress to enact the largest peace-time 
tax increase in American history. 



ROOSEVELT AND THE NEW DEAL 

During the presidential campaign of 1932, 
Franklin Roosevelt criticized the deficits under 
Hoover, and on taking office in March 1933 he 
moved to cut federal spending, including veterans' 
benefits. He also suspended the convertibility of 
dollars into gold; private individuals were required 
to turn in all their gold coins. Roosevelt ordered all 
the banks to close and be examined, so the sound 
ones could be reopened. When they reopened, de- 
positors stopped drawing out funds, and the tide of 
bank failures ceased. In June 1933, Congress creat- 
ed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation 
(FDIC), which successfully prevented a recurrence 
of the massive deposit withdrawals. 

Roosevelt then undertook an extensive eco- 
nomic program that sought relief, recovery, and re- 
form. Unlike Hoover, Roosevelt was willing to use 
federal money to make direct assistance payments 
to the unemployed. The Federal Emergency Relief 
Act of May 1933 authorized $500 million for such 
purposes. In June 1933 the government created the 
Public Works Administration (PWA), which was 
empowered to undertake government construction 
projects that would provide employment and pro- 
duce useful infrastructure. Among its many activi- 
ties were slum clearance and the development of 
public housing projects. These activities were ex- 
tended by the U.S. Housing Act of September 1937. 
Greater stress on job creation was provided by the 
Civil Works Administration (CWA), begun in De- 
cember 1933. Lasting for only four months, the 



CWA employed approximately five million people 
and spent nearly $1 billion. By early 1934, about 
one-fifth of American families were receiving direct 
benefits from one or more of these programs. The 
Works Progress Administration (WPA), established 
in August 1935, gave primary emphasis to provid- 
ing jobs for the unemployed, with secondary atten- 
tion to the quality of the projects undertaken. WPA 
employment through the rest of the 1930s averaged 
slightly over two million persons. Much more pop- 
ular was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 
established in April 1933. It recruited young men 
for outdoor work, such as tree planting and improv- 
ing national parks. 

In May 1933 Congress created the Tennessee 
Valley Authority (TV A). Initiated out of the debate 
over the disposition of the government power dam 
and nitrate plants built at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 
during World War I, the TVA was designed as a 
comprehensive economic development plan for the 
region. Multipurpose dams provided cheap elec- 
tricity and created recreational facilities on the re- 
sulting lakes. 

In the area of international trade, the high-tariff 
policy adopted in 1930 with the Hawley-Smoot 
Tariff was modified by the Trade Agreements Act 
of May 1934. This authorized the government to 
negotiate reciprocal trade agreements with other 
countries, providing for mutual reduction of trade 
barriers. It helped expand the value of U.S. mer- 
chandise exports from $1.6 billion in 1932 to $5 bil- 
lion in 1941. 



"RECOVERY" MEASURES: THE NATIONAL 
INDUSTRIAL RECOVERY ACT AND THE 
AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT 

The National Industrial Recovery Act of June 
1933 authorized — even pressured — business firms 
in each industry to adopt codes of "fair competi- 
tion." Such codes, when approved by the National 
Recovery Administration (NRA), were binding on 
all firms in the industry that joined the NRA and 
were exempt from antitrust laws. Each code was re- 
quired to contain pro-labor provisions, such as 
minimum wages, maximum hours, and protection 
for collective bargaining. Many of the codes con- 
tained provisions to reduce competition. Since the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA T THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



403 



GOVERNMENT 



N I T E D 



S T 



T E S F E D E R 



program did nothing to increase the demand for 
goods and services, it also did little to improve em- 
ployment and was generally condemned by econo- 
mists. The Supreme Court held it to be unconstitu- 
tional in 1935. However, measures to limit 
competition in individual industries, such as air- 
lines, motor transport, petroleum, and coal, were 
subsequently adopted. 

The New Deal recovery program also involved 
agriculture. On average, farm prices in 1932 were 56 
percent below their 1929 levels. Raising farm prices 
and farm incomes was the major goal of the Agri- 
cultural Adjustment Act of May 1933. This legisla- 
tion provided for cash benefits to farmers who 
agreed to reduce their output. To finance the bene- 
fits, the government levied a "processing tax" on 
firms that processed farm products. In addition, the 
government created the Federal Surplus Relief Cor- 
poration, which purchased farm products and dis- 
tributed them to needy persons. 

In response to these programs and to the inter- 
national depreciation of the dollar, farm prices rose 
more than 50 percent from 1933 to 1935. The price 
increases benefited the wealthiest farmers and 
tended to burden consumers in proportion to their 
food consumption, falling most heavily on low- 
income families. 

Like the National Industrial Recovery Act, the 
first Agricultural Adjustment Act was declared un- 
constitutional, in January 1936. Congress respond- 
ed by adopting the Soil Conservation and Domestic 
Allotment Act in February 1936. This paid farmers 
to reduce output of soil-depleting crops. The sec- 
ond Agricultural Adjustment Act of February 1938 
sought to implement the principle of the ever- 
normal granary — buying up surplus products in 
times of abundant production to be carried over for 
periods of less abundance. Emphasis tended to shift 
from reducing farm output to buying surplus prod- 
ucts, but all with the goal of raising farm incomes. 

The New Deal "reform" campaign extended 
into numerous industries and activities. Notable 
were the regulations imposed on corporate finance 
by the Securities Act of May 1933 and the Securities 
Exchange Act of June 1934. The latter created the 
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Any 
firm wishing to issue new securities (stocks and 



bonds) was required to publish information about 
the company and how it would use the money. 
Companies whose securities were traded on orga- 
nized exchanges were also required to file periodic 
reports of their condition and activities. Various un- 
fair methods of securities trading, such as insider 
trading, were outlawed. 



THE LABOR MARKET 

The Depression fell heavily on workers through 
loss of jobs, shorter hours, and reduced wages. 
Labor unions pressed for measures to improve their 
bargaining position. In 1932 the Norris-LaGuardia 
Act restricted the use of injunctions as an anti- 
union practice. As noted, the National Industrial 
Recovery Act of 1933 had contained provisions re- 
lating to minimum wages and collective bargaining. 
In May 1935 Congress enacted the National Labor 
Relations Act (Wagner Act), which gave workers 
the right to organize unions and to bargain collec- 
tively with employers. It also outlawed a number of 
anti-union practices and created the National 
Labor Relations Board, which had the authority to 
conduct elections among workers to determine if 
they wanted to be represented by a union. When a 
union was certified by the National Labor Relations 
Board, the employer was required to bargain with 
it in good faith. 

In June 1938 Congress approved the Fair Labor 
Standards Act, which instituted a minimum wage 
law. Employers in interstate commerce were re- 
quired to pay workers at least twenty-five cents per 
hour and to pay extra for overtime in excess of (ini- 
tially) forty-four hours per week, and ultimately 
forty hours per week. The minimum wage was 
steadily increased over time, as was the proportion 
of workers covered by the law. 

SOCIAL SECURITY 

One of the most far-reaching of New Deal eco- 
nomic measures was the Social Security Act of Au- 
gust 1935. It created three types of programs: (1) 
old-age pensions to be financed by a tax on 
wages — benefits were paid as a matter of right, not 
according to need; (2) unemployment insurance to 
be administered by states, financed by another 
wage tax — both of these programs developed into 



<,(H 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GOVERNMENT 



N I T E D 



STATES F E D E R A L 



large elements of the federal fiscal system over the 
rest of the twentieth century; and (3) federally 
funded, state-administered programs to aid low- 
income families — benefits were based on need and 
financed from general revenue. The most contro- 
versial was the program of aid to families with de- 
pendent children — "welfare." 

From fiscal year 1932 to fiscal year 1940, federal 
cash payments to the public roughly doubled, from 
$4.8 billion to $9.6 billion. Higher tax rates raised 
the government's cash receipts from the public by 
almost the same dollar amount, from $2 billion to 
$7 billion. Most economists now believe this high- 
tax policy held down the potential stimulating effect 
of federal expenditures. 

The New Deal economic program did not suc- 
ceed in producing rapid recovery of production and 
employment, but recovery was rapid after the Unit- 
ed States went to war in 1941. Most of the relief and 
recovery measures lapsed. However, the scale and 
scope of the federal government were vastly en- 
larged in response to the Depression. Notable areas 
that persisted through the twentieth century in- 
cluded: 

1. Agricultural price supports and production 
controls. 

2. The social "safety net" associated with Social 
Security, which transfers payments to the el- 
derly, the unemployed, and the unfortunate. 

3. Measures to protect workers through the mini- 
mum wage law and support for labor unions. 

4. A vast array of regulatory programs directed at 
individual industries, including railroads, high- 
way transport, airlines, electric power, and nat- 
ural gas. 

5. Regulation of banking and finance, particularly 
through the Securities and Exchange Commis- 
sion and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corpo- 
ration and through direct loan and loan guar- 
antee programs, particularly involving housing. 

Influenced to an extent by the macroeconomic 
ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the government be- 
came committed to "demand management" to pro- 
mote full employment, stable prices, and economic 
growth. Abolition of the gold standard enabled the 
money supply to be controlled by the government 
through the Federal Reserve System. Commitment 



to the balanced budget was replaced by a willing- 
ness to use deficit finance to combat depression. As 
a result, no serious economic depression occurred 
in the remaining years of the twentieth century. 

One of the most significant legacies of the 
Great Depression was the dramatically altered rela- 
tionship between the people and the federal gov- 
ernment. The role of the federal government would 
continue to grow in later years, but it is clear that 
the decisive shift occurred during the Depression. 

See Also: CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS (CCC); 
CIVIL WORKS ADMINISTRATION (CWA); 
GOVERNMENTS, STATE, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON; NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL 
RECOVERY ACT (NIRA); NEW DEAL; SOCIAL 
SECURITY ACT. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ball, Robert M. Social Security, Today and Tomorrow. 1978. 

Benedict, Murray R. Farm Policies in the United States, 
1790-1950: A Study of their Origins and Development. 
1953. 

Bernstein, Irving. The Turbulent Years: A History of the 
American Worker, 1933-1941. 1970. 

Bernstein, Irving. A Caring Society: The New Deal, the 
Worker, and the Great Depression. 1985. 

Bodie, Zvi, and Alicia Munnell, eds. Pensions and the 
Economy: Sources, Uses, and Limitations of Data. 1992. 

Chandler, Lester V. America's Greatest Depression, 
1929-1941. 1970. 

Daugherty, Carroll R. Labor Problems in American Indus- 
try, rev. edition. 1941. 

Gagliardo, Domenico. American Social Insurance, rev. edi- 
tion. 1955. 

Hawley, Ellis W. The New Deal and the Problem of Monop- 
oly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence. 1966. 

Howard, Donald S. The WPA and Federal Relief Policy. 
1943. 

Lyon, Leverett S. The National Recovery Administration: 
An Analysis and Appraisal. 1935. 

Mitchell, Broadus. Depression Decade: From New Era 
Through New Deal, 1929-1941. 1947. 

Myers, Robert J. Social Security, 4th edition. 1993. 

Ohl, John Kennedy. Hugh S. Johnson and the New Deal. 
1985. 

Peterson, John M. Minimum Wages: Measures and Indus- 
try Effects. 1981. 

Rapp, David. How the U.S. Got into Agriculture, and Why 
It Can't Get Out. 1988. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



405 



6 V £ R N M £ N T S 



STATE 



Rau, Allan. Agricultural Policy and Trade Liberalization in 
the United States, 1934-1956: A Study of Conflicting 
Policies. 1957. 

Rejda, George E. Social Insurance and Economic Security, 
6th edition. 1999. 

Salmond, John A. The Civilian Conservation Corps, 
1933-1942: A New Deal Case Study. 1967. 

Temin, Peter. Lessons from the Great Depression. 1991. 

"Symposium: The Great Depression." Journal of Economic 
Perspectives 7, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 19-102. 

Wilcox, Clair, et al., eds. America's Recovery Program. 
1934. 

Paul B. Trescott 



GOVERNMENTS, STATE, IMPACT 
OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON 

The New Deal policies enacted by the Franklin D. 
Roosevelt administration during the 1930s in re- 
sponse to the Great Depression are traditionally in- 
terpreted in terms of how they affected the nation 
as a whole. However, New Deal policies also had 
a dramatic impact at the state and local level. Be- 
cause many officials of state and local governments 
were unwilling to work in cooperation with the fed- 
eral government, their response to New Deal poli- 
cies often did not help the nation to recover as 
quickly and fully as it could have. 

During the 1920s the states, rather than the 
federal government, led social reform efforts by im- 
proving schools and highways, establishing mini- 
mum labor standards, and regulating corporations. 
During this decade, state and local governments ac- 
counted for about three-fourths of public spending, 
while the federal government discouraged most re- 
form efforts, concentrating only on such major re- 
forms as prohibition, immigration restriction, and 
tariff revision. 

State reform efforts, however, could not accu- 
rately be called progressive. Most state officials 
were only willing to spend money on necessities, 
such as hospitals and bridges, and rarely were eager 
to fund such non-essentials as factory inspections 
and public housing. More importantly, whatever 
legislation was enacted by the states was usually 



poorly financed, incompetently administered, and 
indifferently enforced. Still, the readiness of most 
states to go into debt for these social programs 
meant that they were poorly prepared for the Great 
Depression. 

WHY STATE GOVERNMENTS FAILED 

Historians offer several explanations for the 
failure of state governments to deal with the mag- 
nitude of the Depression: (1) diminishing tax reve- 
nues, (2) constitutional/statutory debt restrictions, 
such as a balanced budget requirement, (3) local- 
ism, (4) outdated administrative organizations, and 
(5) inefficient and weak political leadership. The 
latter three reasons are most relevant to the De- 
pression. 

The southern states were especially immersed 
in localism. The South persisted in clinging to its 
traditional "southern way of life" throughout the 
Depression. Their region having been forced to suf- 
fer defeat and humiliation from the federal govern- 
ment during the Civil War and Reconstruction, 
southern politicians fought to preserve what they 
considered a superior way of life, which they saw 
embodied in racial segregation, fundamentalist re- 
ligion, and one-party politics. Because political 
groups in each southern state were based primarily 
in localities, coordinated state action at the federal 
level was difficult even under normal conditions. 
Similarly, in the fiercely independent West, the re- 
curring comment from county officials was similar 
to this statement from a Colorado report: "We will 
not need nor ask for any help outside our county as 
we have a great deal of local pride and will not ask 
for outside help as long as we can help ourselves." 

Archaic administrative structures were rampant 
in state legislatures where inexperienced men, who 
were poorly prepared and paid, operated under 
outdated constitutions. For example, Pennsylva- 
nia's relief agencies broke down completely as 425 
state boards under the control of 920 directors han- 
dled all public relief. 

States benefited significantly from liberal New 
Deal programs, yet state politicians often blocked 
specific federal initiatives that did not parallel their 
conservative views. These defenders of states' 
rights did not appreciate the federal government 



i.06 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GOVERNMENTS 



S T 



T E 



delving into state matters, but during the Depres- 
sion relief funds, employment, and construction 
overrode most concerns. Although most politicians 
continued to support Roosevelt's general policies, 
they increasingly disagreed with his New Deal poli- 
cies. Because of this, state politicians often used 
corrupt or anti-federal methods against New Deal 
programs. In fact, historian Lyle W. Dorsett stated 
that politicians could be dishonest and incompe- 
tent, but little was said about their behavior as long 
as they remained loyal to the president. Mayor Ed 
Crump of Memphis, Tennessee, for example, sup- 
ported nearly all of Roosevelt's New Deal measures 
because they brought thousands of jobs to Mem- 
phis. But all federal money first had to pass through 
Crump's organization, which was empowered to 
appoint local dispensing agents, who distributed to 
constituents. Crump's political organization was 
the frequently object of federal investigation into 
such practices as using federal jobs and relief to co- 
erce voters. Even though newspapers such as the 
Memphis Press- Scimitar regularly published articles 
on the chicanery of the Crump machine, little ac- 
tion was taken against Crump because he was a 
strong Roosevelt supporter. 



FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO THE RESCUE 

From the end of 1929 to 1933, most state gov- 
ernments clearly demonstrated that they were inca- 
pable of dealing with the economic conditions that 
left millions of Americans destitute. Social pro- 
grams were often studied rather then implemented, 
and most governors were unwilling to call special 
sessions to handle the problems. Many governors 
and state legislators simply made reassuring, but 
hollow, public statements about self-sufficiency. 
Unfortunately, many states were deep in debt from 
deficit spending during the 1920s, and during the 
Depression they strained under rising welfare costs 
and falling tax revenues. 

State governments eventually called on the 
federal government for help, albeit reluctantly. 
Roosevelt decisively called for broad executive 
power in 1933 and Congress responded quickly. 
Such a positive response was primarily due to the 
growing realization that national problems, such as 
the Great Depression, required national remedies. 



After 1933, federal government programs were 
much more successful than state efforts in provid- 
ing relief and promoting recovery. However, the 
New Deal programs were often hampered by the 
partnership between federal, state, and local gov- 
ernments. For the most part, conflict occurred more 
frequently than cooperation between the federal 
government and state governments. That conflict 
occurred primarily within three areas: (1) the re- 
quirement of state matching funds for many New 
Deal programs, (2) the federal requirement to cen- 
tralize and professionally manage welfare adminis- 
tration, and (3) the efforts by state and local politi- 
cians to exploit federal money and programs for 
their own political advantage. 

Various improvements to state governments 
helped support the impression that federal match- 
ing funds strengthened the states. Eleven states 
passed reorganization statutes during the decade, 
while others removed administrative control and fi- 
nancial responsibility from archaic local units. Most 
matching funds came from the newly created (in 
1933) Federal Emergency Relief Administration 
(FERA), which initially distributed a total of about 
$500 million, of which $250 million was targeted for 
matching grants, with states contributing $3 for 
every $1 of federal funds, and the remaining $250 
million earmarked for states facing immediate 
emergencies. Over the next two years a total of 
about $3 billion was distributed. 

In 1933 the FERA offered relief funds, for exam- 
ple, to Louisiana. Louisiana officials had requested 
additional money, pleading that state funds were 
insufficient, while, at the same time, local parishes 
exploited the FERA money by inappropriately using 
portions of it for unemployable people (FERA's fed- 
eral money was reserved solely for employable peo- 
ple who were out of work, while state money was 
meant for people who were unemployable). By 
mid-1939, Louisiana had received about $750 mil- 
lion in federal grants and loans, but as the flow of 
funds increased, so did state political corruption. 
The federal government initiated investigations 
into the use of federal relief funds, and numerous 
indictments were levied against Louisiana officials. 
A number of politicians in other states, including 
Governor William Langer of North Dakota, were 
convicted of misusing funds and served time in jail. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



1.07 



GRAND 



COULEE PROJECT 



A variety of relief and recovery measures were 
introduced into Colorado, including approximately 
$330 million dollars each month from FERA as long 
as state and local funds contributed their share. 
However, the Colorado legislature did not approve 
any such funds. Because of Colorado's failure to 
contribute, the federal government threatened to 
remove all federal aid, and pressure from citizens 
forced the state to divert highway funds and tax 
gasoline sales in order to match federal funds. 

Before the Great Depression, politicians all too 
often were elected on the basis of their ability to 
control the state and demolish opposition. Such 
political machines included those of Huey Long of 
Louisiana, James Michael Curley of Massachusetts, 
and C. Ben Ross of Idaho. Because of New Deal 
programs, the 1930s saw noticeable expansion of 
performance-based merit systems within the states. 
Five states passed workable statutes in 1937 and 6 
others applied the merit system to various depart- 
ments. After nearly two decades of ignoring perfor- 
mance-based policies, the trend toward improving 
state merit systems continued throughout the for- 
ties, fifties, and sixties. The insistence of FERA ad- 
ministrators on merit in order to professionally 
manage state governments and later requirements 
in 1939 with regard to civil service procedures 
helped to increase state administrative efficiency. 
Most governors, however, resented federal stipula- 
tions calling for merit appointments. 



FEDERAL-STATE PARTNERSHIP 

Roosevelt's New Deal relief efforts rested large- 
ly on the development of a strong federal-state 
partnership. A state's support of federal expendi- 
tures had little to do with the acceptance or rejec- 
tion of the New Deal or any reinterpretation of fed- 
eralism. When a state desperately needed 
immediate help for relief and recovery, it usually re- 
ceived it. In the short-term, the New Deal helped 
the states survive the Depression. In the long-term, 
the states lost authority to a more powerful federal 
government. With a stronger federal government 
now in charge, state and local officials had to ac- 
count to powerful federal entities for their actions, 
and corrupt or inefficient officials were consequent- 
ly more likely to lose office. 



See Also: GOVERNMENT, UNITED STATES FEDERAL, 
IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; 
SOUTH, GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Biles, Roger. The South and the New Deal. 1994. 

Fabricant, Solomon. The Growth of Governmental Activity 
in the United States since 1900. 1952. 

Lowitt, Richard. The New Deal and the West. 1984. 

Miller, Zane, L. The Urbanization of Modern America: A 
Brief History. 1973. 

Patterson, lames T. The New Deal and the States: Tederal- 
ism in Transition. 1969. 

William Arthur Atkins 



GRAND COULEE PROJECT 

Construction of Grand Coulee Dam, built from 
1934 to 1942, began as a New Deal works project. 
The dam is located on the Columbia River in east- 
ern Washington state north of the semi-arid Co- 
lumbia Basin. It remains among the world's most 
productive sites for generating hydroelectric power, 
irrigates more than one-half million acres (the larg- 
est reclamation project in the United States), and 
creates the 151 -mile long Lake Roosevelt. Touted 
as "the Mightiest thing ever built by a man" by folk- 
singer Woody Guthrie when he was employed in 
May 1941 by the Bonneville Power Administration 
to compose songs about the project, Grand Coulee 
was smaller, in fact, than the earth-fill Fort Peck 
dam built at the same time in Montana. Still, at the 
time of its completion Grand Coulee Dam was the 
largest concrete structure in the world. The size and 
scope of the project, combined with its rural isola- 
tion, resulted in achievements in technology, inno- 
vations in employer-provided health care, and the 
nation's first completely electric city. 

The project was originally proposed in the 
1890s as one of two ambitious schemes for irrigat- 
ing the Big Bend region; the other proposal would 
have resulted in a canal flowing into the region 
from the east from near Albeni Falls, Idaho, on the 
Pend Orielle River. In the battles between advo- 
cates of these contrasting visions for agricultural 



1.08 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GRAND C L E E PROJECT 




\ 'W&-* r ft 



T/je massive Grand Coulee Dam, under construction in 1936 on the Columbia River in Washington. Library of Congress, Prints 
& Photographs Division. FSA/OWI Collection 



development, and within Congress after the project 
began, hyperbolic rhetoric characterized the dis- 
pute as between socialism on the one hand, and 
undemocratic control of the government and the 
economy by under-regulated power companies on 
the other. The New Deal promoted federal 
government-funded economic development of the 
Columbia River and other Western waters in the 
name of jobs and reclamation. Grand Coulee's 
power production and irrigation established a 
strong foundation for economic growth in the Pa- 
cific Northwest, but the loss of the salmon fishery 
devastated tribal economies. 



When construction began the Roosevelt ad- 
ministration approved only a low dam, funded 
through the Public Works Administration — the low 
dam would provide power, but not irrigation. The 
MWAK Company began construction in July 1934, 
contracted to build a dam 350 feet high above bed- 
rock with the proviso that the contract might 
change prior to completion. In August 1935 plans 
for a higher dam (550 feet above bedrock) were ap- 
proved by Congress. After MWAK concluded its 
work by completing the foundation in February 
1938, Consolidated Builders Incorporated built the 
rest of the structure. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



409 



6 l k P [ 5 OF W H A I H 



I U E 



Over 12,000 workers were employed over the 
course of construction, with as many as 7,400 em- 
ployed at one time. Wages were good while there 
was work, but most workers endured frequent lay- 
offs as the project moved through several stages of 
construction, and as cold winters forced slow- 
downs. Although a disproportionate number of the 
workers were white, American Indians from the 
Colville Reservation (which occupies the north 
shore of the Columbia where the dam is located) 
were also hired, as were some African Americans. 
Clearing the land that would be flooded became the 
largest single Works Progress Administration proj- 
ect, employing two thousand men by the end of 
1939. 

See Also: BOULDER DAM; PUBLIC POWER; WEST, 

GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE AMERICAN; WORKS 
PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dietrich, William. Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia 
River. 1995. 

Guthrie, Woody. Columbia River Collection (sound re- 
cording). 1987. 

Pitzer, Paul C. Grand Coulee: Harnessing a Dream. 1994. 

White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the 
Columbia River. 1995. 

Woods, Rufus. The 23 Year Battle for Grand Coulee Dam. 
1944. 

James Stripes 



GRAPES OF WRATH, THE 

For several years before 1939, John Steinbeck had 
been familiarizing himself with the plight of the 
Okies, the Depression-era Oklahoma migrants to 
Steinbeck's native California. He had written about 
oppressed agricultural workers in his 1936 novel In 
Dubious Battle and that same year in a series of re- 
ports on "the Harvest Gypsies" in the San Francisco 
News. Steinbeck had also visited migrant camps 
around his hometown of Salinas and at Bakersfield. 
In the fall of 1937, he retraced the migrants' west- 
ward journey along Route 66. He began his master- 
piece in May 1938, and finished the final draft in 



late October. The Grapes of Wrath was released by 
Viking on April 14, 1939. 

The novel tells the story of the Joads, a poverty- 
stricken, uneducated, and "dusted out" family of 
Oklahoma farmers. The first fifth of the book de- 
scribes the desolate and dreary landscape of Dust 
Bowl Oklahoma, the Joads' hopeless situation, and 
the excruciating decision to load their meager pos- 
sessions on an ancient jalopy and head for the 
promised land of California. Another fifth of the 
novel depicts the arduous cross-country trek and 
the hardships endured by the steadily dwindling 
Joad family. The rest of the story traces the disap- 
pointments of California, disappointments in the 
midst of plenty, caused by the selfishness, heartless 
dishonesty, and paranoia of the landowners and 
their law-enforcement lackeys. The only relief the 
Joads know comes during their stay at a "govern- 
ment camp," where they temporarily find demo- 
cratic self-government, communal good-fellow- 
ship, and dignity. 

The raw oppression of the migrants leads Tom 
Joad and Jim Casy, a former preacher traveling with 
the family, to become labor organizers. Casy, a kind 
of secularized Christ figure, is killed, and Tom is 
forced to leave the family and continue his work in 
the shadows. The novel ends with a controversial 
scene: The remaining Joads find a starving man in 
a barn, and Rose of Sharon, her own baby stillborn 
because of the horrid conditions the family faces, 
feeds the stranger with her breast milk. Alternating 
with the chapters about the family, Steinbeck bril- 
liantly inserts brief "interchapters." These comprise 
about a sixth of the novel and attempt by dramatic 
episodes, eloquent exposition, and sometimes out- 
right preaching to generalize and make universal 
the experience of the Joads. 

The Grapes of Wrath was an instantaneous sen- 
sation. Despite angry responses from some who 
objected to the novel's "vulgarity," and from some 
proud Californians and Oklahomans (one Oklaho- 
ma congressman branded the work "a lie, a black, 
infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind"), the 
book sold 430,000 copies its first year. It has never 
been out of print. It was also adapted into an ac- 
claimed film with the same title, produced by Darryl 
Zanuck and directed by John Ford and rushed into 
release on January 24, 1940. 



UO 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY 



The novel's high reputation springs in part 
from Steinbeck's ability to deftly combine two pur- 
poses within the same work. First, he presents a 
graphic, realistic, heartrending account of a terrible 
social problem of the Great Depression era. In this 
way the book resembles other sociological novels, 
such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin 
(1851-1852) and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906); 
like those works, The Grapes of Wrath raised the 
awareness and aroused the sympathies of Ameri- 
cans. Second, The Grapes of Wrath is a literary tri- 
umph, beautifully and movingly written, artistically 
interweaving great themes of westward movement, 
Biblical sacrifice, human courage and endurance, 
the centrality of the family and of women within 
the family, the importance of community and 
human brotherhood, and the evils of selfish indi- 
vidualism. In the end, Steinbeck's skill in employ- 
ing magnificent writing to explicate a shocking so- 
cial injustice of the 1930s will insure the 
continuance of the book's reputation as a national 
epic and a classic expression of the courage and vi- 
tality of the American spirit in the face of adversity. 

See Also: FORD, JOHN; GENDER ROLES AND 

SEXUAL RELATIONS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON; OKIES; STEINBECK, JOHN. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Davis, Robert Con, ed. The Grapes of Wrath: A Collection 

of Critical Essays. 1982. 
Ditsky, John, ed. Critical Essays on Steinbeck's The Grapes 

of Wrath. 1989. 
French, Warren, ed. A Companion to The Grapes of 

Wrath. 1963. 
Heavilin, Barbara A. Critical Response to John Steinbeck's 

The Grapes of Wrath. 2000. 
Heavilin, Barbara A. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of 

Wrath: A Reference Guide. 2002. 
Steinbeck, John. Working Days: The Journals of The 

Grapes of Wrath, 1938-1941, edited by Robert De- 

Mott. 1988. 

David W. Levy 



GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY 

Born of desperation and political impotence, grass- 
roots democratic action in the 1930s sought to force 



government and business leaders to assist in pro- 
viding direct assistance to individuals while at the 
same time improving overall economic conditions. 
As the effects of the Great Depression spread across 
the United States, most Americans had few options 
for seeking relief. Private charities were quickly 
overwhelmed, while state and local governments 
did not have the financial resources to combat the 
economic crisis. On the federal level, a mechanism 
did not exist to provide support for these belea- 
guered institutions. 

Spontaneous demonstrations erupted across 
the nation as more Americans found themselves 
entangled in poverty. Starving farmers rioted for 
food in the South while their brethren in the Mid- 
west violently opposed property foreclosures and 
destroyed crops in the hope of increasing farm 
prices. In the cities, industrial workers struck for in- 
creased wages, apartment dwellers refused to pay 
high rent and ignored eviction notices, and proper- 
ty owners refused to pay taxes. 

Hunger marches held simultaneously in several 
cities on March 6, 1930, brought 500,000 people 
into the streets demanding government assistance 
for the unemployed. Sixteen thousand World War 
I veterans marched on Washington, D.C., in June 
1932 demanding early payment of their promised 
bonus for military service. This grassroots organiz- 
ing influenced both of the major political parties 
and began to subtly alter the relationship between 
citizen and government. 

The first major shift came in July 1932 when 
Congress passed the Emergency Relief and Con- 
struction Act, which authorized the Reconstruction 
Finance Corporation to provide $300 million in 
loans to states for relief payments and $1.5 million 
for public works projects. The relationship between 
the federal government and the people evolved 
dramatically after the inauguration of President 
Franklin Roosevelt in March 1933. The New Deal 
programs and government agencies adopted by 
Roosevelt and the Congress were not only designed 
to provide assistance to the thousands suffering 
from economic disaster, but were also a response to 
the grassroots activism of the American people. 

Several New Deal agencies adopted measures 
demanded by citizens. In 1933 the Department of 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



411 



GREEN 



WILLIAM 



Agriculture, under the aegis of the Agricultural Ad- 
justment Act, ordered the destruction of crops in an 
attempt to raise farm prices, just as Midwestern 
farmers had advocated. Responding to the discon- 
tent over property foreclosures, the Federal Hous- 
ing Administration regulated and underwrote 
home mortgages. Agitation by Francis Townsend 
and his millions of followers for federally guaran- 
teed old-age retirement pensions helped lead to the 
adoption of the Social Security Act in 1935. 

Politics was also influenced by this marriage 
between grassroots democracy and government 
bureaucracy. Much of the discontent evidenced be- 
fore 1933 was absorbed by the New Deal and redi- 
rected into the traditional two-party system. Farm- 
ers, industrial workers, African Americans, and 
progressive liberals recast the Democratic Party, al- 
tering the American political landscape. The re- 
forms introduced by the Roosevelt administration 
transformed the economic and social life of the na- 
tion, but they were largely adopted because of 
grassroots democracy practiced by the American 
people. 

See Also: EMERGENCY RELLEF AND CONSTRUCTLON 
ACT OF 1932; HUNGER MARCHES. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father 
Coughlin and the Great Depression. 1982. 

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American Peo- 
ple in Depression and War, 1929-1945. 1999. 

Levine, Lawrence W., and Cornelia R. Levine, eds. The 
People and the President: America's Conversation with 
FDR. 2002. 

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 
1929-1941. 1984. 

G. Wayne Dowdy 



GREEN, WILLIAM 

William Green (March 3, 1870-November 21, 1952) 
was a labor leader and president of the American 
Federation of Labor (AFL). Green was born in 
Coshocton, Ohio, the son of Hugh Green, a coal 
miner, and Jane Oram. He completed the eighth 



grade and aspired to the Baptist ministry, but at 
fourteen he began work as a water boy for the rail- 
road. Two years later he became his father's helper 
in the mines, and within a few years he was a 
skilled pick miner. In 1892 he married Jennie Mob- 
ley, daughter of a local miner. In time he fathered 
six children, and he remained in the mines for nine- 
teen years. 

In 1891 Green was elected secretary of his Unit- 
ed Mine Workers (UMW) local, and the union 
movement became the calling he had once sought 
in the ministry. He was elected president of the 
Ohio district in 1906. In 1913 miners elected Green 
UMW national secretary-treasurer, a post he would 
hold until 1924. Also in 1913, Green was appointed 
to the powerful AFL executive committee. When 
AFL president Samuel Gompers died in December 
1924, executive council members chose Green to 
succeed him. Green served as AFL president for the 
next twenty-eight years. 

Although Green was a moralistic man who 
pursued a policy of peaceful cooperation with em- 
ployers in the 1920s, the Great Depression clearly 
proved that his strategy had failed. By 1932, Green's 
speeches were replete with militant rhetoric about 
the need for "forceful methods" to bring about full 
employment. But militancy never suited Green. 
With rising rank-and-file pressure to seek legisla- 
tive redress, Green happily assumed his chores as 
leading lobbyist for labor. His efforts helped to 
shape and pass many New Deal reforms, including 
the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), the 
National Labor Relations Act (1935), the Social Se- 
curity Act (1935), and the Fair Labor Standards Act 
(1938). 

When many AFL organizing campaigns during 
the Depression failed, a rupture developed between 
conservative craft union leaders, who dominated 
the AFL executive council, and more militant in- 
dustrial union advocates. The second group, led by 
John L. Lewis of the UMW, pushed for aggressive 
campaigns to organize mass-production workers 
on an industry wide basis. The defeat of Lewis's 
resolutions at the 1935 AFL convention and the 
subsequent rise of the Committee for Industrial Or- 
ganization (in 1938 to become the Congress of In- 
dustrial Organizations, CIO) shaped the remainder 



U2 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



6 R E E N 



E L T TOWNS 



of Green's career as a labor official. Green voted 
with the executive council majority in 1936 to sus- 
pend the CIO unions and in 1938 to expel them. For 
the rest of his life his energies would be consumed 
by a crusade against the rebel movement. Although 
he attended peace conferences with the CIO, the 
two labor federations remained divided until after 
his death. 

By 1939, however, Green's power and influence 
within the AFL began to decline with the rise of an 
ambitious George Meany in the post of secretary- 
treasurer. Green did spearhead a vigorous but un- 
successful campaign to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act 
of 1947, but by the time of his death in 1952 he had 
become a largely forgotten figure. 

See Also: AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); 
CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS 
(CIO); LEWIS, JOHN L.; ORGANIZED LABOR; 
UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA (UMWA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bernstein, Irving. Turbulent Years: A History of the Ameri- 
can Worker, 1933-1941. 1969. 

Madison, Charles A. "William Green: In Gompers' Foot- 
steps." In American Labor Leaders: Personalities and 
Forces in the Labor Movement. 1950. 

Phelan, Craig. "William Green and the Ideal of Christian 
Cooperation." In Labor Leaders in America, edited by 
Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine. 1987. 

Phelan, Craig. William Green: Biography of a Labor Leader. 
1989. 

Craig Phelan 



GREENBELT TOWNS 

The Greenbelt town program originated as part of 
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, aiding the poor by 
hiring the unemployed to build the towns and then 
by providing housing for low-income families. 
Placed within the Resettlement Administration 
headed by Rexford Tugwell, the Suburban Division, 
administered by John Lansill, constructed three 
towns: Greenbelt, Maryland, outside of Washing- 
ton, D.C.; Greendale, Wisconsin, outside of Mil- 
waukee; and Greenhills, Ohio, outside of Cincin- 



nati. A fourth, Greenbrook, New Jersey, was 
initiated but not completed. Economist Tugwell 
yearned for a collectivized society and incorporated 
his desires into the town plans, placing an emphasis 
on economic and social cooperatives to serve town 
residents. Tugwell hoped to have 3,000 such com- 
munities built. 

Tugwell left the design of the towns to planners 
who relied heavily on Clarence Perry's concept of 
the neighborhood unit, in which neighborhood 
boundaries consisted of major streets, but interior 
neighborhood roads carried only local traffic. In 
Perry's design, a central area containing shops, a 
park, and an elementary school that also served as 
a community center provided focus for the neigh- 
borhood and were within walking distance of resi- 
dents. The planners for Greenbelt and Greenhills 
were also influenced heavily by Clarence Stein's 
design of Radburn, New Jersey, which utilized su- 
perblocks with central greens, separation of auto- 
mobile and pedestrian traffic, cul-de-sacs, and 
homes facing their gardens with backs facing the 
street. In addition, a surrounding greenbelt provid- 
ed land for parks or farming. 

Frederick Bigger functioned as the chief plan- 
ner for all three towns, and Hale Walker was the 
town planner for Greenbelt. Tenants first occupied 
Greenbelt's 885 rowhouses and apartment units in 
September 1937. Justin Hartzog and William 
Strong were the town planners for the 676 units of 
Greenhills, which looked much like Greenbelt, with 
rowhouses and apartments built in contemporary 
or "international" style. Residents first moved into 
Greenhills in April 1938 and into Greendale in May 
1938. Jacob Crane and Elbert Peets, town planners 
for Greendale, used recently restored Colonial Wil- 
liamsburg, Virginia, as a model for their work, 
copying the style of restored Williamsburg for its 
public buildings, as well as placing homes only a 
few feet from the street. The town consisted of 572 
units, of which 274 were single-family detached 
homes and the remainder rowhouses. 

The greenbelt town program in general and 
Tugwell in particular received much negative press 
coverage. Congressional critics of the New Deal fo- 
cused on the expense of the towns, and business- 
men clamored against the perceived communistic 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U3 



G U F F E Y - S N V D E R ACE OF 1935 



and socialistic aspects. As a result, Tugwell resigned 
and Roosevelt dismantled the Resettlement Ad- 
ministration at the end of 1936, and the Farm Se- 
curity Administration oversaw the completion of 
the towns. After World War II, the government re- 
solved to sell the towns; in response, town residents 
who wanted to maintain their communities as 
planned cooperatives formed groups to purchase 
the government housing. In both Greenbelt and 
Greenhills, residents formed cooperatives to buy 
their homes, and Greenhills managed to retain 
most of its greenbelt. In 2000, each of the three 
towns had a population of about 20,000. The ideas 
and plans used in the Greenbelt towns reappeared 
briefly in the 1960s with the development of cities 
such as Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland, 
and appeared again in the 1990s in the guise of the 
New Urbanism or Neotraditional development. 

See Also: CFTIES AND SUBURBS; HOUSING; 
TUGWELL, REXFORD G. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alanen, Arnold R., and Joseph A. Eden. Main Street 
Readymade: The New Deal Community of Greendale, 
Wisconsin. 1987. 

Arnold, Joseph L. The New Deal in the Suburbs, A History 
of the Greenbelt Town Program, 1935-1954. 1971. 

Knepper, Cathy D. Greenbelt, Maryland: A Living Legacy 
of the New Deal. 2001. 

Mayer, Albert. Greenbelt Towns Revisited. 1968. 

Stein, Clarence S. Toward New Towns for America. 1966. 

Cathy D. Knepper 



GUFFEY-SNYDER ACT OF 1935 

Under Title I of the National Industrial Recovery 
Act, the bituminous coal industry in late 1933 draft- 
ed a code governing business and labor practices in 
an effort to stabilize an industry long plagued by 
cutthroat competition and labor conflict. The code 
brought higher profits and wages, an increase in 
union membership, and a reduction in strikes. But 
the industry's peace and prosperity were fleeting, 
for within months the code began to collapse in the 
face of widespread violations. Thereupon, the Unit- 



ed Mine Workers (UMW), with the support of 
many operators in the northern coalfields, fash- 
ioned a bill to bring stricter controls to the industry 
than the National Recovery Administration (NRA) 
had provided. 

Introduced in Congress in January 1935 by 
Senator Joseph F. Guffey and Representative J. 
Buell Snyder, both Democrats from Pennsylvania, 
the bill initially made little headway. Large con- 
sumers of coal contended it would unreasonably 
increase prices; southern and western operators 
said it would discriminate against low-wage and 
nonunion mines; and political conservatives, fear- 
ing it would set a precedent for regulatory measures 
affecting other industries, questioned its constitu- 
tionality. 

After the U.S. Supreme Court declared Title I of 
the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitu- 
tional in May 1935, proponents of coal stabilization 
urged Congress to pass the Guffey-Snyder bill or 
see the industry degenerate into chaos, a warning 
given added weight when John L. Lewis, head of 
the UMW, threatened a strike if Congress did not 
act. Nevertheless, the bill remained stalled until 
President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked legislators to 
leave constitutional questions to the courts, 
prompting the House of Representatives to approve 
it on August 20 by a vote of 194 to 168 and the Sen- 
ate on August 23, 45 to 37. 

The Guffey-Snyder Act established a National 
Bituminous Coal Commission to determine prices 
and approve and enforce trade practices and mar- 
keting agreements. It also guaranteed workers the 
right to collective bargaining and uniform wages 
and hours. To enforce compliance, it prescribed a 
penalty tax on the selling price of coal, most of 
which would be rebated to those who adhered to 
the law. 

Sometimes called "a little NRA," the Guffey- 
Snyder Act was designed to favor those who had 
benefited from the coal code. From the outset, 
however, it was ineffective. Operators feuded over 
prices, and restraining orders crippled the commis- 
sion's authority. Finally, on May 18, 1936, the U.S. 
Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional in 
Carter v. Carter Coal Company. In the majority's 
opinion, the labor provisions were a federal intru- 



4,K 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF E H E G R E A I DEPRESSION 



GUFFEY-VINSON A C F OF 19 3 7 



sion on states rights and therefore made the price 
provisions invalid since the two were inextricably 
intertwined. 

See Also: COLLECTIVE BARGAINING; GUFFEY - 
VINSON ACT OF 1937; LEWIS, JOHN L.; 
ORGANIZED LABOR; UNITED MINE WORKERS 
OF AMERICA (UMWA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Halt, Charles Eugene. "Joseph P. Guffey: New Deal Poli- 
tician from Pennsylvania." D.S.S. diss., Syracuse 
University. 1965. 

Hawley, Ellis W. The New Deal and the Problem of Monop- 
oly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence. 1966. 

Johnson, James P. The Politics of Soft Coal: The Bituminous 
Industry from World War I through the New Deal. 
1979. 

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. 3: The 
Politics of Upheaval. 1960. 

John Kennedy Ohl 



GUFFEY-VINSON ACT OF 1937 

In May 1936 the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated 
the Guffey- Snyder Act, a measure enacted in 1935 
to curb the destructive effects of cutthroat competi- 
tion in the bituminous coal industry through agree- 
ments on business practices and prices and the im- 
provement of wages and labor conditions. Anxious 
to preserve the essentials of the act, proponents of 
federal legislation to stabilize the industry, primari- 
ly operators in the northern coalfields and the Unit- 
ed Mine Workers (UMW), pressed Congress to ap- 
prove a revised measure, minus the labor 
provisions the court had found objectionable. 
Sponsored by Senator Joseph F. Guffey, Democrat 
of Pennsylvania, and Representative Fred Vinson, 
Democrat of Kentucky, it passed the House of Rep- 
resentatives in June 1936, but was killed in the Sen- 
ate by a filibuster. 

Aided by the decisive Democratic victory in the 
1936 election and the growing political power of 
John L. Lewis, head of the UMW, the bill's propo- 
nents in 1937 overcame the opposition of southern 
operators, who had argued that it would negate the 



competitive advantage they enjoyed from the use of 
low-wage nonunion labor. The House approved 
the bill without a record vote on March 11, while 
the Senate passed it on April 5 by a vote of 58 to 18. 

The Guffey-Vinson Act, which was to run for 
four years, provided for a National Bituminous Coal 
Commission (NBCC) with authority to determine 
minimum prices for coal and enforce marketing and 
fair practices agreements. Almost immediately im- 
plementation floundered. Patronage squabbles in- 
volving the filling of the hundreds of posts within 
the NBCC divided the commissioners, and the pro- 
cess of getting operators to establish coal classifica- 
tions and fix prices dragged on for years, running 
afoul of the regional splits that had long bedeviled 
the industry. Complaints about increased prices 
from such large consumers of coal as railroads and 
public utilities and disputes over the lack of public 
hearings added fuel to the commission's difficulties. 
Tiring of the turmoil, President Franklin D. Roose- 
velt in the summer of 1939 transferred the NBCC's 
functions to the Department of the Interior. 

Despite Roosevelt's action, the wrangling over 
prices continued, and not until October 1940 did 
the coal authorities promulgate the minimum 
prices sought by northern operators and the UMW. 
By this time prices were already climbing because 
of the emerging war economy, eliminating the need 
for minimum prices. Nevertheless, Congress in 
1941extended the Guffey-Vinson Act for two more 
years, but in 1943, no longer seeing any need for 
legislation to protect operators and miners from 
competitive pressures, Congress let the act die 
when it reached its legal limit. 

See Also: GUFFEY-SNYDER ACT OF 1935; LEWIS, 
JOHN L.; ORGANIZED LABOR; UNITED MINE 
WORKERS OF AMERICA (UMWA). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Halt, Charles Eugene. "Joseph P. Guffey, New Deal Poli- 
tician from Pennsylvania." D.S.S. diss., Syracuse 
University. 1965. 

Hawley, Ellis W. The New Deal and the Problem of Monop- 
oly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence. 1966. 

Johnson, James P. The Politics of Soft Coal: The Bituminous 
Industry from World War I through the New Deal. 
1979. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U5 



G U T 



R I E 



WOODY 




Woody Guthrie, 1943. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division, New York World -Telegram and the Sun 
Newspaper Photograph Collection 



St. Clair, James E., and Linda C. Gugin. Chief Justice Fred 
M. Vinson of Kentucky: A Political Biography. 2002. 



John Kennedy Ohl 



GUTHRIE, WOODY 



Woodrow Wilson Guthrie Quly 14, 1912-October 3, 
1967) was arguably the most influential songwriter 
and performer in twentieth-century American folk 
music. As the first major artist to combine tradition- 
al American folk melodies with lyrics about con- 
temporary political, social, and personal concerns, 
Guthrie left behind an unparalleled collection of 
ballads and populist anthems. Both his music and 
performing style have continued to influence artists 
long after his death. 



Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. As a 
youth, he saw his family disintegrate in a series of 
personal and financial tragedies. During his adoles- 
cent years, he worked odd jobs and learned the gui- 
tar in his spare time. When the dust storms of 1935 
hit the area, Guthrie took his guitar and drifted, 
hitchhiked, and hopped freight trains, eventually 
joining other "Okie" refugees in California. Already 
a keen observer of the world, Guthrie became radi- 
cally politicized by what he saw and experienced 
there. Empathizing with the migrant orchard work- 
ers, union organizers, and other victims of greed 
and social injustice, Guthrie channeled his populist 
patriotism and moral outrage into songwriting. 
Singing his plainspoken lyrics in high nasally vocals 
to the tune of simple chords and melodies derived 
from traditional Appalachian folk songs, Guthrie 
established a mythic voice for beaten-down Ameri- 
cans. Radio performances from Los Angeles won 
Guthrie wide renown, especially with intellectuals 
and activists associated with the Popular Front and 
the Communist Party. 

In 1939 Guthrie moved to New York City, 
where he became more active in left-wing politics, 
writing articles for Communist newspapers and 
penning some of his best-known songs, including 
"God Blessed America" (usually known as "This 
Land Is Your Land"). A passionate antifascist and 
champion of the Popular Front, Guthrie felt dis- 
mayed and conflicted by the Nazi- Soviet nonag- 
gression pact of 1939. But the 1941 German inva- 
sion of the Soviet Union removed any doubts that 
he had about the need for America to enter World 
War II. Guthrie emblazoned his guitar with the slo- 
gan, "This Machine Kills Fascists," and he contrib- 
uted to the war effort not only with patriotic ballads 
like "Reuben James," but by serving for two years 
in the American merchant marine. Upon returning, 
he resumed his songwriting and toured in the late 
1940s with his protege Pete Seeger and the Alma- 
nac Singers. Cold War blacklists and a debilitating 
affliction with Huntington's chorea limited Guth- 
rie's activities in his later years, but in the 1960s a 
new generation of songwriters and performers re- 
vived both his songs and his spirit with their own 
contemporary folk music. 

A prolific songwriter with far more versatility 
than his common image suggests, Guthrie's sub- 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



GUTHRIE 



WOODY 



jects ranged from political corruption and hunger to 
romantic love and children's songs. But he has al- 
ways been best known for his Dust Bowl ballads 
and common-man anthems written in the late 
1930s and first recorded in 1940 by folklorist Alan 
Lomax. These included songs about poverty and 
deprivation ("Dust Bowl Blues" and "I Ain't Got No 
Home"), greed and intolerance ("Do Re Mi" and 
"Vigilante Man"), and odes to mythical heroes and 
outlaws ("Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Tom Joad"). The 
first few verses of his most famous composition, 
commonly known as "This Land Is Your Land," 
rank among America's most recognizable anthems. 
Less well known are the rest of the original lyrics, 
which include reference to the traveling narrator 
being obstructed by a sign reading "Private Proper- 
ty" and witnessing hungry people waiting outside 
a relief office. 

A figure of towering importance in the history 
of both folk and popular music, Woody Guthrie 
helped to revolutionize what songs could mean in 



American culture. His 1988 induction into the Rock 
and Roll Hall of Fame speaks to a legacy that tran- 
scends the boundaries of Depression-era topical 
songs. The moral authority and personal integrity 
at the heart of Guthrie's music truly make him a 
hero for all artists who have aspired to move the 
conscience and soul of an audience with a song. 

See Also: "BALLAD OF PRETTY BOY FLOYD;" MUSIC. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Guthrie, Woody. Bound for Glory. 1943. 

Guthrie, Woody. Dust Bowl Ballads (sound recording). 
1995. 

Klein, Joe. Woody Guthrie: A Life. 1980. 

Lomax, Alan, comp., and Pete Seeger, ed. Hard Hitting 
Songs for Hard Hit People. 1967. 

Santelli, Robert, and Emily Davidson, eds. Hard Travelin': 
The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie. 1999. 

Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives. Available at: 
http://www.woodyguthrie.org 

Bradford W. Wright 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



417 




HAGUE, FRANK 



Of all the bosses who ruled their machines during 
the 1930s, none exerted greater power or held it 
longer than Mayor Frank Hague (January 17, 
1876-January 1, 1956) of Jersey City, New Jersey. 
Hague's influence not only made him the most 
powerful Democrat in his state, it helped nominate 
Franklin D. Roosevelt and delivered New Jersey's 
electoral vote to Roosevelt in all four presidential 
elections in which Roosevelt ran. Critics con- 
demned Hague as the "Hitler of Hudson County," 
where he was also accurately called "the law." 

Hague's career began in a Jersey City slum 
known as the Horseshoe, where he was born to 
Catholic parents. Juvenile delinquency, tempered 
by an occasional appearance at Sunday Mass, char- 
acterized his childhood. A sixth-grade dropout, 
Hague learned the political game from local Demo- 
cratic bosses and became mayor in 1917. Thirty 
years would pass before he relinquished power. 

During the Depression, Hague's machine cared 
for the poor, built social clubs for the middle class, 
and gave tax breaks to the rich and money to all re- 
ligions, especially the Catholic Church. People 
loved and feared the dapper mayor. In 1932 he 
dropped his support for Al Smith and delivered 
New Jersey to Franklin D. Roosevelt for the first of 
four consecutive presidential elections. 



In turn, the New Deal funneled massive 
amounts of patronage and money, as well as nu- 
merous projects, through Hague's organization. 
Choosing to ignore the machine's scandals, Roose- 
velt allowed the Jersey boss to add hundreds of 
thousands of federal jobs and millions of dollars to 
the power that the machine already wielded 
throughout the state. The Public Works Adminis- 
tration (PWA), the Civil Works Administration 
(CWA), and the Works Progress Administration 
(WPA) enabled the mayor to exert national influ- 
ence and near total control over New Jersey. The 
machine coerced 115,000 CWA and WPA employ- 
ees to support its candidates. As a result, Hague 
manipulated governors, senators, and congressmen 
because he could (sometimes illegally) produce 
huge election-day majorities. 

Roosevelt wanted to prosecute the machine's 
criminals, but he also wanted to provide Depres- 
sion relief and New Jersey's electoral vote, both of 
which the mayor controlled. This reality proved 
crucial to Roosevelt's election to an unprecedented 
third term in 1940. Thanks to 173,000 ballots pro- 
duced by the mayor in Hudson County, Roosevelt 
overcame Wendell Willkie's lead of 101,500 and 
won the state's electoral vote by a plurality of 
71,500. Although most of the ballots were legal, 
critics complained of extensive fraud. 



U9 



A M M E T T 



D A S 



I E L L 



The New Deal's Department of Justice did not 
investigate Republican complaints because Roose- 
velt appreciated the electoral and legislative sup- 
port rendered by the machine and its senators and 
representatives. For these and other reasons, Roo- 
sevelt never got around to ousting the totalitarian 
mayor who outlasted him by two years before vol- 
untarily retiring in 1947. When Frank Hague died 
on New Year's Day, 1956, obituary writers noted 
that his rule constituted perhaps the most excep- 
tional exhibition of power wielded by any city lead- 
er in American history. 

See Also: ELECTION OF 1932. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Childs, Marquis. "Dictator — American Style." Readers 
Digest 33 (1938). 

Conners, R. J. "The Local Political Career of Mayor Frank 
Hague." Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1966. 

Dorsett, Lyle W. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the City Bosses. 
1977. 

McKean, Dayton D. The Boss: The Hague Machine in Ac- 
tion. 1940. 



Steinberg, Alfred. The Bosses. 1972. 



J. Christopher Schnell 



HAMMETT, DASHIELL 



Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894-January 10, 1961) 
was born on a tobacco farm in St. Mary's County, 
Maryland, and raised in Baltimore, where he at- 
tended school until the age of 14. He worked for 
several years in low-paying jobs before joining the 
Pinkerton National Detectives, where he gathered 
the detective lore that would be crucial to his later 
writing. During World War I, he served in the Army 
(though without leaving the United States) and 
contracted a case of tuberculosis that would com- 
promise his health for the remainder of his life. In 
the mid-twenties, Hammett began publishing sto- 
ries in the pulp magazine Black Mask, where the 
verisimilitude of his detective fiction soon made 
him the magazine's marquee writer. Leaping to the 
prestigious publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf, 
Hammett published four novels in quick succes- 



sion: Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (1929), The 
Maltese Falcon (1930), and The Glass Key (1931). 
Widely praised for their streamlined construction 
and their coolly dispassionate tone, the novels 
made Hammett an instant literary celebrity, suc- 
cessful with popular readers and prominent intel- 
lectuals alike. 

Yet, though he achieved fame during the early 
thirties and though he influenced writers who 
would become successful later in the decade, Ham- 
mett was not truly a writer shaped by the Depres- 
sion. His most significant work was done during 
the late twenties and reflected the attraction to in- 
tellectual sophistication prevalent among intellec- 
tuals at the time. Emphasizing the professional skill 
of his detective heroes, Hammett's fiction placed 
great stress on the values of discipline and expertise 
and showed consistent doubtfulness about the in- 
telligence of ordinary people. By 1931, his burst of 
creative energy was drawing to a close. After The 
Glass Key, Hammett published one additional 
novel, The Thin Man (1934), whose renowned wit 
barely conceals the fears of the novel's playboy de- 
tective that he is slipping toward decadence. 

For the remainder of the thirties, the bulk of 
Hammett's energies were devoted to left-wing po- 
litical activity, to which he and his lover, the play- 
wright Lillian Hellman, were fiercely committed. 
During World War II, he served as an enlisted man 
on an Alaskan military base. In 1951, he served six 
months in federal prison for contempt of court after 
he refused to disclose the names of contributors to 
the bail bond fund of the Civil Rights Congress, an 
organization associated with the Communist Party, 
of which he was a trustee. Hammett died in 1961. 

See Also: HARD-BOILED DETECTIVES; LITERATURE. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Hammett, Dashiell. The Dain Curse. 1929. 

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. 1930. 
Hammett, Dashiell. The Glass Key. 1931. 
Hammett, Dashiell. The Thin Man. 1934. 
Johnson, Diane. Dashiell Hammett: A Life. 1985. 
Layman, Richard. Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Ham- 



mett. 1981. 



Sean McCann 



WO 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A P P V DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN 



HANSEN, ALVIN 



Alvin Harvey Hansen (August 23, 1887-June 6, 
1975) transformed American economics from 1933 
to 1945. Born into a Danish family in Viborg, North 
Dakota, Hansen studied economics at Yankton 
College and the University of Wisconsin. He taught 
at Wisconsin and Brown University before joining 
the University of Minnesota, where he worked from 
1919 to 1937. Known for his Business Cycle Theory 
(1927), Hansen advised Social Science Research 
Council commissions and Secretary of State Cordell 
Hull on international trade policy. Hansen came to 
Keynesian economics via orthodox ideas in the 
work of Knut Wicksell, Arthur Spiethoff, Joseph 
Schumpeter, Gustav Cassel, and E. H. Robertson. 
Combining these with his interest in business cy- 
cles, Hansen evolved into an advocate of govern- 
ment compensatory spending policy. 

In September 1937, Hansen moved to Harvard 
University to teach the Fiscal Policy Seminar with 
Dean John H. Williams. Participants included John 
Kenneth Galbraith, Walter S. Salant, Paul A. Sam- 
uelson, and James Tobin. In December 1938 in the 
presidential address to the American Economic As- 
sociation, Hansen presented his "secular stagna- 
tion thesis." Lagging private investment, consumer 
credit, and decreased federal spending led to long- 
term stagnation. As population, land, natural re- 
sources, and technological innovation slowed, the 
economy went through a structural shift with few 
private investment opportunities. Only more con- 
sumer and government spending could spark in- 
creased production, consumption, and employ- 
ment. On May 16, 1939, Hansen testified about his 
policy ideas before the Temporary National Eco- 
nomic Committee in Congress. 

Between 1935 and 1943, Hansen advised the 
Social Security Board, the National Industrial Con- 
ference Board, the Federal Reserve Board, and the 
National Resources Planning Board (NRPB). When 
he promoted Keynesian spending policy in NRPB 
pamphlets during the war, outraged conservatives 
in Congress demanded abolition of the board. In 
1958, he retired from Harvard. Known as the 
"American Keynes," Hansen helped to educate an 
entire postwar generation of Keynesians who 



changed professional economics into a policy disci- 
pline. 

See Also: ECONOMISTS. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Barber, William J. "The Career of Alvin H. Hansen in the 
1920's and 1930's: A Study in Intellectual Transi- 
tion." History of Political Economy 19 (1987): 191-205. 

Barber, William J. Designs within Disorder: Franklin D. 
Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American 
Economic Policy, 1933-1945. 1996. 

Brazelton, W. Robert. "Alvin Harvey Hansen: Economic 
Growth and a More Perfect Society: The Econo- 
mist's Role in Defining the Stagnation Thesis and in 
Popularizing Keynesianism." American Journal of 
Economics and Sociology 48 (1989): 427-440. 

Galbraith, lohn Kenneth. "How Keynes Came to Ameri- 
ca." New York Times Book Review (May 16, 1965). Re- 
printed in A Contemporary Guide to Economics, Peace, 
and Laughter. 1972. 

lones, Byrd L. "The Role of Keynesians in Wartime Policy 
and Postwar Planning, 1940-1946." American Eco- 
nomic Review 62 (May 1972): 125-133. 

Lekachman, Robert. The Age of Keynes. 1966. 

Miller, lohn E. "From South Dakota Farm to Harvard 
Seminar: Alvin H. Hansen: America's Prophet of 
Keynesianism." The Historian 64 (2002): 603-622. 

Rosenof, Theodore. Economics in the Long Run: New Deal 
Theorists and Their Legacies, 1933-1993. 1997. 

Sweezy, Alan. "The Keynesians and Government Policy, 
1933-1939." American Economic Review 62 (May 
1972): 116-124. 

Patrick D. Reagan 



"HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN" 

This popular song was written by lyricist Jack Yellen 
and composer Milton Ager in 1929 for a joyous 
scene in the MGM motion picture Chasing Rain- 
bows, in which American soldiers celebrate the ar- 
mistice that concluded World War I. When the 
composer asked the lyricist to suggest a title for a 
song to fit the celebratory scene, Yellen uttered the 
first phrase that popped into his head, "Happy 
Days Are Here Again." 

Although the motion picture was not released 
until 1930, "Happy Days Are Here Again" was pub- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



1.21 



A R D 



OILED 



DETECTIVES 



lished in sheet music. George Olsen's society or- 
chestra performed it at New York's Hotel Pennsyl- 
vania on October 24, 1929, which was Black 
Thursday, the day of the stock market crash. Noting 
the discrepancy between his despondent audience 
and the ebullient sentiments of the song, Olsen 
passed out the music to his musicians and told his 
soloist to "sing it for the corpses." The audience 
roared with laughter, rose, and danced, shouting 
the title phrase sardonically with the singer. 

The song became an ironic anthem for the 
Great Depression, a risible counterpart to the grim 
"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" "Perhaps the 
success of 'Happy Days Are Here Again,'" Michael 
Lasser observes in American Song Lyricists, 
1920-1960 (2002), "derives from its directness and 
naivete. The brief lyric has only two words of more 
than one syllable. Its sentiments are as simple as its 
words ... Its narrow melodic range, its insistent 
repetition of the title, and triple rhymes ('here 
again/ clear again/ cheer again') zip us through the 
chorus." 

In 1932, then-Governor Franklin Delano Roo- 
sevelt took "Happy Days Are Here Again" as the 
theme song for his presidential campaign because 
its optimistic sentiments and rousing melody reso- 
nated with his hopes that the New Deal would 
bring back prosperity. The party used it again for 
the campaigns of John F. Kennedy, Hubert Hum- 
phrey, and other nominees. 

The song has become an enduring expression 
of optimism in the face of dire events, and it has 
transcended its era to become a familiar standard. 
In 1963, the American Society of Authors, Compos- 
ers, and Publishers, the licensing organization that 
controls performing rights for the songs of the 
twentieth-century's greatest songwriters, named 
"Happy Days Are Here Again" as one of sixteen 
songs on its All-Time Hit Parade, alongside classic 
songs by such songwriters as George and Ira 
Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter. 

See Also: MUSIC. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Craig, Warren. Sweet and Lowdown: America's Popular 
Songwriters. 1978. 

Ewen, David. American Songwriters: An H. W. Wilson Bio- 
graphical Dictionary. 1987. 



Lasser, Michael. "Jack Yellen," in American Song Lyricists, 
1920-1960, edited by Philip Furia. 2002. 

Philip Furia 



HARD-BOILED DETECTIVES 

The hard-boiled detective story is a genre of popu- 
lar fiction that reached the height of its creative ex- 
pression and popular acclaim during the middle 
decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the 
exploits of tough, often cynical detectives who rely 
on their fists, wits, and the skills of their trade as 
much as on their intellects, the hard-boiled crime 
story created a workingman hero especially suited 
to the industrial city. Pitching him against intracta- 
ble sources of corruption, the genre tended to con- 
vey a populist anger at the abuses of the wealthy 
and powerful that made it particularly appealing 
during the Depression. 

Hard-boiled detective stories first appeared in 
pulp magazines of the mid-1920s, especially the re- 
nowned Black Mask, in which they drew directly on 
pre-existing conventions of the western and of 
nineteenth-century urban melodrama. Adapting 
those conventions to the modern city, such innova- 
tive writers as Dashiell Hammett and Carroll John 
Daly used the genre to explore the anxieties created 
by the crime wave that accompanied Prohibition. 
Like the closely related gangster fiction of the peri- 
od, such as W. R. Burnett's Little Caesar (1929), 
hard-boiled crime fiction portrayed a disordered 
city in which traditional legal institutions were too 
corrupt or impotent to secure justice. In novels such 
as Daly's The Hidden Hand (1928) or Hammett's Red 
Harvest (1929), hard-boiled writers depicted their 
hero's often extra-legal efforts to search out the 
roots of corruption and to impose order on a law- 
less environment. 

While the genre grew steadily in popularity in 
the pulps through the 1920s, it came to new promi- 
nence during the 1930s as Hammett and later Ray- 
mond Chandler brought sophistication and intel- 
lectual prestige to the fiction. Chandler, who began 
his literary career during the mid-1930s, was partic- 
ularly important in adapting the genre to concerns 



422 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A R L A N 



COUNTY 



raised by the Depression. Abandoning the cool 
skepticism of Hammett's fiction, Chandler imag- 
ined his detective hero as a knight-errant crusading 
for justice in a corrupt world and driven by senti- 
mental affection for the victims of an unjust society. 

In subsequent years, many other writers would 
follow Chandler and use the genre as a potent vehi- 
cle for exploring corruption and social injustice, 
making the hard-boiled detective story an ever- 
vital vein of popular mythology. Beginning with 
John Huston's film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon 
(1940) and Howard Hawks's version of The Big 
Sleep (1946), the hard-boiled story also became a 
staple of the movies and, from there, of radio and 
TV. 

See Also: CHANDLER, RAYMOND; HAMMETT, 
DASHIELL; HEROES; HOLLYWOOD AND THE 
FILM INDUSTRY; LITERATURE; LITTLE CAESAR. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. 1939. 

Chandler, Raymond. Farewell, My Lovely. 1940. 

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Talcon. 1930. 

Hammett, Dashiell. The Glass Key. 1932. 

Nolan, William F. The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the 
Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction. 1985. 

Sean McCann 



HARLAN COUNTY 

Harlan County, Kentucky, is a rural county located 
in a major coal-mining region in the Appalachian 
Mountains. The county became nationally famous 
in 1931 and 1932 when it was the site of one of the 
earliest and bloodiest labor battles of the decade. 
The desperation and the courage of the miners of 
Harlan County, and the violent repression visited 
upon them by the coal operators of the region when 
they attempted to organize a union, attracted na- 
tional attention. 

Most of the miners in Harlan County were local 
people, with deep roots in the Appalachian coun- 
tryside. By contrast, the coal operators were primar- 
ily absentee owners. There was virtually no other 



industry in the region. The result was that the coal 
operators tightly controlled the Appalachian com- 
munities. They owned the houses in which the 
miners lived, the stores from which they bought 
food, and even the funeral homes that would bury 
them when they died. The miners, however, shared 
an intense local culture, giving them a measure of 
political independence from the coal operators. 

When the Great Depression hit the coal fields, 
the paternalism that had characterized coal town 
life vanished. Coal operators slashed wages and 
fired thousands of miners. Workers contacted the 
United Mine Workers (UMW), which was at that 
time a fragile organization with low membership, 
and started to organize. The first mass meetings 
were held in February and March of 1931. The com- 
panies responded harshly, immediately evicting 
thousands of miners from their homes. In April, 
2,800 men, women, and children from Harlan 
County marched into town and demanded money 
and food from the company. Strikes spread through 
the coal fields. On May 5, one hundred armed min- 
ers engaged in open warfare with company depu- 
ties in a skirmish that left one miner and three com- 
pany men dead. Hundreds of state troopers arrived 
to quell the conflict, and the UMW, overwhelmed, 
declared that the miners were on their own. Even 
though over 11,000 miners joined the union in the 
spring organizing drive, the UMW did not have the 
institutional resources to provide strike relief. 

Still seeking to organize, the miners turned to 
the National Miners' Union, a group that was sup- 
ported by the Communist Party. The National Min- 
ers' Union attempted to organize a strike beginning 
in the first days of January 1932. On the eve of the 
strike, two miners were shot and killed, and in the 
days that followed, organizers were arrested and 
more people were killed. One 19-year-old organiz- 
er who had come from New York was murdered; 
his body was sent back to New York and thousands 
of people marched in a funeral procession from 
Penn Station to Union Square. But under the re- 
pression of the coal operators and their deputies, 
the strike fell apart. 

Unionism finally came to Harlan County in 
May 1933, when section 7(a) of the National Indus- 
trial Recovery Act recognized the legal right of 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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A R L E M 



RIOT (1935) 



workers to organize unions. The UMW organized 
the coal mines in a matter of months. By autumn 
of 1933, the workers signed their first collective bar- 
gaining agreement with the coal operators. 

One of the most important things about Harlan 
County is that it attracted national attention to the 
plight of the coal miners, much as the civil rights 
demonstrations of the early 1960s brought the in- 
justice of segregation to the awareness of the na- 
tion. In late 1931, novelist Theodore Dreiser and a 
team of writers came down to report on (as Dreiser 
put it) "terrorism in the Kentucky coalfields." And 
during the strike, writer Waldo Frank organized an 
"Independent Miners Relief Committee" to bring 
food to the miners. Busloads of northern college 
students came South to support the miners, hand- 
ing out food and copies of the Bill of Rights. Flor- 
ence Reece's song, "Which Side Are You On?" also 
served to spread the word about the conflict, and 
became a lasting favorite of labor and civil rights ac- 
tivists. 

For people around the country, the Harlan 
County uprising of the early 1930s demonstrated 
the limits of the company paternalism and welfare 
capitalism of the 1920s. In this way, it helped pave 
the way for the Wagner Act of 1935, which guaran- 
teed workers the right to organize and created a 
legal process for attaining union recognition. The 
northern writers and organizers who told the story 
of Harlan County to the rest of the country helped 
to cast union organization as American and demo- 
cratic, and the actions of the companies as tyranni- 
cal, violent, and arbitrary. Finally, the ultimate vic- 
tory of the miners showed that even under the most 
difficult conditions, in the most rural communities, 
workers could organize and win union representa- 
tion. The mineworkers' union, with its stronghold 
in Harlan County and Appalachia, would remain a 
powerful force in the United States throughout the 
1930s, 1940s, and the entire postwar era. 

See Also: APPALACHIA, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON; UNITED MINE WORKERS OF 
AMERICA (UMWA); "WHICH SIDE ARE YOU 
ON?" 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dreiser, Theodore, et al. Harlan Miners Speak: Report on 
Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields. 1932. 

Gaventa, lohn. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and 
Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. 1980. 

Hevener, lohn W. Which Side Are You On? The Harlan 
County Coal Miners, 1931-39. 1978. 

Kopple, Barbara, director and producer. Harlan County, 
U.S.A. 1976. 

Taylor, Paul F. Bloody Harlan: The United Mine Workers 
of America in Harlan County, Kentucky, 1931-1941. 
1990. 

Kim Phillips -Fein 



HARLEM RIOT (1935) 

On the afternoon of March 19, 1935, Lino Rivera, 
a 16-year-old Puerto Rican youth, was observed 
stealing a ten-cent pocket knife from the E. H. 
Kress store on 125th street in New York's Harlem. 
When two store employees attempted to detain 
him, Rivera resisted, biting both of his captors. A 
police officer was called. To avoid a hostile crowd 
gathering at the front of the store, the patrolman 
escorted the suspect from the store through the 
basement to a rear entrance. Rumors began to cir- 
culate that Rivera had been beaten by the police. 
Soon reports claimed that he had been killed. Police 
attempted to persuade irate shoppers that no harm 
had come to the boy, but they refused to be calmed. 
At 5:30 the store was closed and the crowd spilled 
out onto the streets. A group of men tried to hold 
a public meeting to protest the alleged beating, but 
two speakers were arrested and charged with "un- 
lawful assembly." 

The mob spread to 7th Avenue and Lennox Av- 
enue, smashing store windows and looting shops 
as they went. More than five hundred police officers 
were summoned to put down the disturbance. They 
were pelted with rocks and bottles; eight were in- 
jured. The New York Times reported that one hun- 
dred people were treated at local hospitals. Four 
people, three of them African American, died from 
injuries suffered during the night of rioting. More 
than one hundred persons were arrested. Two hun- 
dred stores were sacked and property damage was 
estimated at two million dollars. 



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The following day, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia 
claimed that the riot was "instigated and artificially 
stimulated by a few irresponsible individuals." Dis- 
trict Attorney William C. Dodge announced that he 
was launching a grand jury investigation into Com- 
munist influence behind the rioting. Rev. Adam 
Clayton Powell, Jr., writing in the New York Post, 
discounted charges of radical agitation. He blamed 
the unrest on "empty stomachs, overcrowded tene- 
ments, filthy sanitation, rotten foodstuffs, chiseling 
landlords and merchants, discrimination in relief, 
disenfranchisement, and ... [a] disinterested ad- 
ministration." 

The committee of prominent citizens appointed 
by LaGuardia to investigate the causes of the riot 
found no evidence that it had been instigated by 
Communists, terming it a "spontaneous outbreak." 
Their unpublished report echoed Powell's charges, 
identifying the riot's causes as "the injustices of dis- 
crimination in employment, the aggressions of the 
police, and the racial segregation." Another factor, 
not mentioned by the committee, was the "don't 
buy where you can't work" campaign against white 
merchants organized by Powell and other commu- 
nity activists. 

The Harlem Riot has been identified by sociolo- 
gist Allen D. Grimshaw, in his work Racial Violence 
in the United States (1969), as the first manifestation 
of a "modern" form of racial rioting. He cites three 
distinctive features that set it apart from previous 
instances of urban racial conflict: (1) violence "di- 
rected almost entirely against property," (2) the ab- 
sence of clashes between racial groups, and (3) 
"struggles between the lower-class Negro popula- 
tion and the police forces." Previous race riots had 
been characterized either by mobs of whites attack- 
ing blacks or by clashes between groups of both 
races. Most subsequent racial disturbances would 
resemble the Harlem riot. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; BLACK METROPOLIS; 
DON'T BUY WHERE YOU CAN'T WORK 
MOVEMENT; RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Greenburg, Cheryl. Or Does It Explode?: Black Harlem in 
the Great Depression. 1998. 



Greenberg, Cheryl. "The Politics of Disorder: Reexamin- 
ing Harlem's Riots of 1935 and 1943." Journal of 
Urban History (18) 1984: 395-411. 

Paul T. Murray 



HARRISON, BYRON "PAT" 

Byron Patton ("Pat") Harrison (August 29, 
1881-June 22,1941) was a United States senator 
and strategist for major New Deal legislation. He 
was born in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, to Robert 
A. Harrison, a Civil War veteran, and Anna Patton 
Harrison. He was educated in the public schools of 
Crystal Springs and attended Louisiana State Uni- 
versity on a baseball scholarship for two years. 
Later, while a high school teacher and principal, he 
studied law in the evenings. After admission to the 
bar in 1902 he moved rapidly into political office 
through election for two terms as a state district at- 
torney and then U.S. congressman from 1911 to 
1919. 

Harrison was an ardent supporter of President 
Woodrow Wilson, but his reservations about signif- 
icant aspects of New Freedom legislation suggested 
that Harrison was not truly committed to progres- 
sivism. In 1918, as a strong advocate of Wilson's 
preparedness program, however, Harrison defeated 
the obstructionist James K. Vardaman in a cam- 
paign for the U.S. Senate. He was reelected three 
times. During the 1920s, as one of the leaders of the 
Democratic minority, he was known as an effective 
and zestful "gadfly." 

The ascension of the Democrats to majority 
control in 1933 placed Harrison as chair of the Fi- 
nance Committee, where he wielded enormous in- 
fluence based on congressional longevity and a 
happy combination of personal qualities that made 
him perhaps the most popular man in the Senate. 
He was a consummate legislative broker who suc- 
ceeded in steering to passage major components of 
the New Deal: fourteen revenue bills, including the 
Wealth Tax Act (1935) and the undistributed profits 
tax (1936); the 1935 Social Security Act and the 
1939 amendments; the National Industrial Recov- 
ery Act; and the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Acts 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



1.25 



A T C H ACT 



F 



19 3 9 



of 1934 and 1940. Harrison's support of the early 
New Deal was based upon his devotion to the 
Democratic Party and the exigencies of the Great 
Depression. He differed with President Franklin D. 
Roosevelt over revenue measures that redistributed 
wealth and New Deal reform that veered toward 
social engineering. The president's support for the 
election of Alben W. Barkley as Senate majority 
leader in 1937, a contest Harrison lost by one vote, 
led to an open break. The breach was not healed 
until Roosevelt turned to Harrison in 1940 to win 
passage of the Lend-Lease Act. He was voted in 
1939 by Washington correspondents as the most 
influential of all senators. In January 1941, six 
months before his death due to colon cancer, Harri- 
son became Senate president pro tempore. 

See Also: DEMOCRATIC PARTY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Harrison Papers, Williams Library, University of Missis- 
sippi. Oxford. 

Patterson, James T. Congressional Conservatism and the 
New Deal Coalition. 1967. 

Swain, Martha. "The Lion and the Fox: Senator Pat Har- 
rison and President Franklin D. Roosevelt." Journal 
of Mississippi History 38 (1976): 333-359. 

Swain, Martha. Pat Harrison: The New Deal Years. 1978. 

Martha H. Swain 



HATCH ACT OF 1939 

The Hatch Act of 1939 banned federal employees 
from participating actively in political campaigns or 
from using their official positions to coerce voters. 
The Pendleton Act of 1883 and several executive or- 
ders had limited partisan political activity by career 
civil servants. During the 1930s, the number of fed- 
eral government relief workers ballooned. Conser- 
vative Democrats and Republicans hoped to pre- 
vent Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt's 
administration from using relief monies to influ- 
ence congressional primaries and elections. In 
1938, New Deal liberal candidates seeking renomi- 
nation or to unseat conservative Democrats in Ken- 
tucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania were accused 



of diverting Works Progress Administration (WPA) 
funds to enhance their electoral prospects. The 
Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee upheld 
those accusations in January 1939. 

Democratic Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico 
complained that several relatives of rival New Mex- 
ico Democratic Senator Dennis Chavez had coerced 
WPA officials. In January 1939 Hatch introduced 
legislation prohibiting the assessment or solicita- 
tion of funds from WPA employees and the remov- 
al of any personnel because of refusal to change po- 
litical affiliation. Section 9 prevented federal 
officials and workers from using their positions to 
interfere in presidential or congressional primaries 
or elections. Enforcement was left to department 
heads, and violators were subject to a $1,000 fine or 
imprisonment for one year. 

Hatch Act supporters claimed that a politically 
neutral civil service would achieve an impartial gov- 
ernment and protect federal workers from coercion 
or threats by superiors. Critics countered that the 
Hatch Act was vague and overly broad, denied mil- 
lions of federal employees freedom of speech and 
association, and discouraged political participation 
among political activists. 

The Senate adopted the Hatch measure in April 
1939 and the House followed suit in July. President 
Roosevelt disliked Section 9, but reluctantly signed 
the bill into law on August 2. The Hatch Act initially 
magnified the influence of local bosses, rural legis- 
lators, and labor unions. The original law, therefore, 
was extended in 1940 to include 250,000 state em- 
ployees paid wholly or partially from federal funds 
and to require the nonpayment and removal of vio- 
lators. A 1950 amendment reduced the penalty to 
90 days suspension without pay. 

Divided Supreme Courts upheld the constitu- 
tionality of the Hatch Act in 1947 and 1972, regard- 
ing public employment as a privilege subject to rea- 
sonable conditions. The Commission on Political 
Activity of Government Personnel in 1966 recom- 
mended relaxing restrictions and penalties. In 1993 
Congress adopted the Federal Employees Political 
Activities Act, which permitted most federal civil 
servants to run for public office in nonpartisan elec- 
tions, contribute money to political organizations, 
and campaign for or against candidates in partisan 
elections. 



W6 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



W L E Y 



S M T 



TARIFF 



See Also: WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION 
(WPA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Eccles, James. The Hatch Act and the American Bureaucra- 
cy. 1981. 

Ponessa, Jeanne. "The Hatch Act Rewrite." Congressional 
Quarterly Weekly Report (13 November 1993): 
3146-3147. 

Porter, David L. Congress and the Waning of the 'New Deal. 
1980. 

Porter, David L. "Senator Carl Hatch and the Hatch Act 
of 1939." New Mexico Historical Review 47 (April 
1973): 151-164. 

David L. Porter 



HAWKS, HOWARD. See GANGSTER FILMS. 



HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF 

The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of June 17, 1930, was 
the final act in a phase begun in the 1860s, during 
which, with occasional counter movements, duties 
on imports increased, particularly under Republi- 
can administrations. The destabilizing economic ef- 
fects of World War I led Congress to raise duties 
substantially via the Fordney-McCumber tariff in 
1922 in response to the traditional protectionist 
pleas from manufacturers in labor-intensive indus- 
tries. The trigger for renewed tariff debate in 1929 
was the crisis in American agriculture. After facing 
high prices and increasing indebtedness during the 
wartime expansion, American farmers experienced 
an abrupt collapse of prices, land values, and in- 
comes in the early 1920s. With increased world pro- 
duction, the terms of trade shifted against primary 
producers, especially for staples crops. In response, 
a vocal and more politically organized farm lobby 
campaigned for various public policies to alleviate 
their economic problems. New measures attempt- 
ed to bolster farm credit, but schemes to raise agri- 
cultural prices via federal intervention were vetoed 
by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927 and 1928. 

In 1929 President Herbert Hoover called a spe- 
cial session of Congress to consider the agricultural 



crisis; one result, fourteen months later, was the 
Hawley-Smoot Act. The pro-tariff elements among 
the farming interests included western sugar beet 
growers, wheat producers, and farmers who were 
vulnerable to imports from Canada. Once the con- 
gressional debate was initiated, these groups 
formed a coalition with labor-intensive manufac- 
turers; through standard lobbying and political 
deal-making, the coalition persuaded Congress to 
extend the scale and scope of the increased duties 
on agricultural produce and selected manufactured 
products. In the latter case, the Hawley-Smoot Act 
built on the 1922 tariff. Overall Hawley-Smoot sub- 
stantially increased U.S. tariff levels. Indeed, the ef- 
fective levels of duties, which were fixed in dollar 
terms, increased steeply as the general level of 
prices fell during the economic slump. President 
Hoover had a mixed view of the tariff bill, but was 
not prepared to veto a measure that was in line with 
Republican trade policies. 

The consequences of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff 
Act remain debatable. The early and conventional 
view was that the higher tariffs were a key step in 
the downward spiral of protectionism in the early 
1930s. This interpretation stressed the decline in 
imports to the United States and the associated fall 
in incomes overseas as contributing to the interna- 
tional transmission of the slump. Hawley-Smoot 
was also associated with a spread of protectionism 
overseas, either in retaliation or in response to the 
loss of export earnings. More recently, economic 
historians have noted that trade was a relatively 
small sector of the U.S. economy, and duties would 
have advantaged domestic producers, so Hawley- 
Smoot was not a major contractionary force domes- 
tically. Many European nations had already extend- 
ed their protection of farmers in the late 1920s, so 
the American action continued a trend rather than 
initiating it. Even so, Hawley-Smoot signaled an 
American emphasis on domestic priorities and a 
further constraint on flows of trade and finance that 
compounded the destabilization of the internation- 
al economy in 1930 and 1931. 

See Also: INTERNATIONAL IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



W7 



E A L T 



A N D 



NUTRITION 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Eichengreen, Barry. "The Political Economy of the 
Smoot-Hawley Tariff." Research in Economic History 
12 (1989): 1-43. 

Engerman, Stanley L., and Robert E. Gallman. The Cam- 
bridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 3: 
The Twentieth Century. 2000. 

Fearon, Peter. War, Prosperity, and Depression: The US 
Economy, 1917-45. 1987. 

Schattschneider, E. E. Politics, Pressure, and the Tariff: A 
Study of Free Private Enterprise in Pressure Politics, as 
Shown in the 1929-30 Revision of the Tariff. 1935. 

Michael French 



HEALTH AND NUTRITION 

The Great Depression was both the cause of in- 
creased suffering and a decline in the health status 
of millions of Americans, and, through the New 
Deal, the occasion for some of the most innovative 
and substantive federal reforms in American health 
care. Ironically, while some historically disadvan- 
taged groups, especially rural Americans, gained 
greater access to health care than they had had 
prior to the Depression, this period also marked the 
beginning of one of the worst scandals in American 
public health and medical ethics. 

The massive unemployment and wage cuts of 
the early years of the Depression had a conspicuous 
negative effect on the ability of workers and farmers 
to take care of their medical needs and assure ade- 
quate nutrition for their families. As a result there 
was a marked decline in the quantity and quality of 
health care for those in the lower income brackets, 
a consequent increase in doctors having to provide 
free consultations, and an increase in free care in 
clinics and hospitals. Rural areas, especially in the 
South, were particularly hard hit, with about half of 
the South's population not capable of paying for 
medical care. Cities slashed their appropriations for 
health and sanitation, and some used fear of conta- 
gion to justify violence against migrants and the 
dispossessed who gathered in Hoovervilles within 
their borders. 

Some studies suggest that those on relief were 
almost twice as likely to endure a chronic disease 



as those who made $3,000 a year (a moderate in- 
come), but other studies suggested that those who 
had fallen from middle-class or strong working- 
class positions suffered the most because of their 
unwillingness to take advantage of food and relief 
programs. One study found, for instance, that in 
several major cities undernourishment increased 
noticeably among school children of families who 
had undergone a dramatic decline in their econom- 
ic fortunes. 

Out of these conditions, cities and states started 
to provide food and medical care as early as 1930, 
but these efforts were soon overwhelmed by the 
massive need, and in 1933 the New Deal's Federal 
Emergency Relief Administration intervened to 
provide direct medical care for the indigent. Subse- 
quent programs provided support for states and cit- 
ies to build and improve hospitals, sanatoria, and 
medical clinics; hundreds of such buildings were 
constructed during the New Deal years. The Social 
Security Act of 1935 appropriated funds for the ex- 
pansion of institutions for children with various dis- 
abilities and the development of health education 
all over the country. 

Probably the most important New Deal health 
programs were the Resettlement Administration's 
(1935-1937) efforts to provide medical care for the 
poor in the South, and later the programs of the 
Farm Security Administration (FSA, 1937-1946), 
which, as Michael Grey's New Deal Medicine docu- 
ments, made "medical care delivery a cardinal fea- 
ture of the New Deal's rural rehabilitation pro- 
gram." Over the course of the next six years, the 
FSA established medical care cooperatives in one- 
third of the rural counties in the United States, con- 
centrated in the South and the West. The coopera- 
tives were open to all FSA borrowers and their fam- 
ilies and covered ordinary medical care, obstetrical 
care, emergency surgery, some hospitalizations, 
and ordinary drugs. FSA leaders involved county 
and state medical societies in the planning process, 
ensuring that participation by clients and doctors 
was voluntary, and allowing a free choice of doc- 
tors. While these medical cooperatives were critical 
to the melioration of rural health care, the FSA's 
migrant health program was probably the most in- 
novative and pathbreaking New Deal health initia- 



W8 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



DEALT 



A N D 



NUTRITION 



tive. Emphasizing health education and prevention, 
as well as treatment, the migrant health program 
depended upon nurses (all women) and stretched 
professional boundaries to give them widespread 
clinical and administrative responsibility. 

The tumultuous economic, political, and social 
environment of the New Deal was also the occasion 
for major initiatives in occupational health. Work- 
ers who were thrown out of work in what were 
known as the dusty trades (jobs in mining, con- 
struction, foundries, steel mills, etc. that exposed 
workers to a wide variety of poisonous dusts) ar- 
gued that industry bore the responsibility for their 
predicament. They contended that their plight was 
not the result of individual failing or bad luck, but, 
rather, was due to the inadequate protection of- 
fered them by their employers, and they turned to 
the courts for redress. Thousands of workers in the 
dusty trades, laid off during the Depression, 
brought lawsuits against employers seeking dam- 
ages for exposure to silica. This led to a broad liabil- 
ity crisis threatening the closing of industrial plants 
and a vast economic loss. For the first time, the 
problem of occupational disease moved out of the 
domain of professionals and a few labor unions into 
the arenas of politics, public policy, and popular 
culture, with the result that silicosis (a chronic occu- 
pational lung disease caused by the inhalation of 
finely ground sand) came to be called the "king of 
occupational disease." Before the Depression 
ended, novels, movies, national magazine exposes, 
and intense media attention forced the issue of in- 
dustrially caused chronic disease, especially silico- 
sis, onto the national agenda. 

The financial crisis was addressed, however in- 
adequately, through the eventual inclusion of sili- 
cosis in the various state compensation systems. 
But the political crisis remained as long as the issue 
was in the public arena, and during the mid- 1930s 
came the revelation that perhaps as many as 1,500 
workers had been killed by exposure to silica dust 
while working on a tunnel project in Gaul ey Bridge, 
West Virginia, an incident that Martin Cherniack 
describes in The Hawk's Nest Incident as "America's 
worst industrial disaster." Newspapers and wee- 
klies all over the country made silicosis a national 
scandal, telling the story of how workers had died 




:\m\\m 



During the 1930s, posters like this one prepared under the 
auspices of the Federal Art Project drew attention to pressing 
issues of health and nutrition. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division, WPA Poster Collection 



of acute silicosis and other respiratory diseases 
while constructing this tunnel for the Union Car- 
bide Company. The two thousand workers were 
mostly southern rural blacks drawn to the job and 
away from their families farther south by the prom- 
ise of steady pay during the Depression. They had 
been ordered to drill through a mountain that was 
composed of nearly pure silica, even then known as 
a substance that destroyed lung tissue, incapacitat- 
ing and killing its victims. The fact that the workers 
were primarily poor, black migrants far away from 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



429 



E A L T H AND NUTRITION 




These New Mexico schoolchildren, photographed in 1941, enjoy lunch supplied by the WPA school lunch program, which paid 
cooks to prepare healthful meals using food from the surplus commodities program. National Archives and Records Administration 



their loved ones led management to believe that 
they could cover up the deaths. 

As a result of the publicity and subsequent con- 
gressional hearings, Secretary of Labor Frances 
Perkins sponsored a conference in 1936 that 
brought together representatives of government, 
labor, and industry to help resolve the silicosis cri- 
sis. The importance of a national approach that 
gave workers a voice was represented institutional- 
ly through the creation of the Division of Labor 
Standards, which for the first time focused the at- 
tention of the federal government on occupational 
diseases and the need for engineering reforms to 
protect the work force. Indeed, under the Social Se- 
curity Act, the Public U.S. Health Service provided 



funds to state departments of health for the estab- 
lishment of industrial hygiene divisions. 

The Public Health Service also initiated a vari- 
ety of programs to improve sanitation and health, 
especially in rural areas, but it was one project that 
it began in 1932 and continued for forty years that 
would overshadow the constructive work that the 
Public Health Service did during the Depression. In 
1972 it was revealed that the Public Health Service 
had been engaged in a study of the effects of un- 
treated syphilis on black men in Macon County, 
Alabama. The study involved 399 men who had 
syphilis, and 201 more who were disease-free 
and used as controls. Macon County was one of 
the poorest counties in the South, with an epi- 



U0 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



HEALTH AND NUTRITION 



/OXOID 

WILL ttOTKI rilEM 

DIPHTHERIA 




The FSA agricultural workers camp in Bridgeton, New Jersey, included a clinic, where this child was treated in 1942. Library of 
Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



demic of chronic malnutrition and other serious 
health problems. Rather than deal with the wide- 
spread syphilis among its residents, the Public 
Health Service chose to study what happened to 
these men if their syphilis was left untreated. Ac- 
cording to Jim Jones's Bad Blood, the Tuskegee 
Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, as 
it was called, was the longest-running non- 
therapeutic experiment on human beings in medi- 
cal history. The Tuskegee study is probably the 
best-known health-related activity of the Depres- 
sion era, and it casts a shadow over the govern- 
ment's many positive accomplishments in health 
and nutrition during the period. 



See Also: BREADLINES; CHILDREN AND 

ADOLESCENTS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON; FAMILY AND HOME, IMPACT 
OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; HOME- 
LESSNESS; TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS PROJECT. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Beardsley, Edward H. A History of Neglect: Health Care for 
Blacks and Mill Workers in the Twentieth-Century 
South. 1987. 

Cherniack, Martin. The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's 
Worst Industrial Disaster. 1986. 

Collins, Selwyn D., et al. Research Memorandum on Social 
Aspects of Health in the Depression. 1937. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



Ul 



E A R S T , WILLIAM RANDOLPH 



Fee, Elizabeth. "The Pleasures and Perils of Prophetic 
Advocacy: Socialized Medicine and the Politics of 
American Medical Reform." In Making Medical His- 
tory: The Life and Times of Henry E. Sigerist, edited by 
Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown. 1997. 

Grey, Michael. New Deal Medicine: The Rural Health Pro- 
grams of the Farm Security Administration. 1999. 

Jones, Jim. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, 
rev. edition. 1993. 

Markowitz, Gerald, and David Rosner. Slaves of the De- 
pression: Workers' Letters About Life on the Job. 1987 

Reverby, Susan. Tuskegee 's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee 
Syphilis Study. 2000. 

Rosner, David, and Gerald Markowitz. Deadly Dust: 
Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in 
Twentieth-Century America. 1991. 

Wailoo, Keith. Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease 
Identity in Twentieth- Century America. 1997. 

Gerald Markowitz 



HEARST, WILLIAM RANDOLPH 

William Randolph Hearst (April 29, 1863-August 
14, 1951) was from the 1890s until his death the 
most powerful newspaper publisher in the United 
States. Born in San Francisco to millionaire miner 
George Hearst and philanthropist Phoebe Apper- 
son Hearst, William Randolph Hearst, known to his 
friends and employees as "the Chief," built a media 
empire that at its height in the late 1920s encom- 
passed twenty-six daily newspapers in eighteen cit- 
ies; a Sunday supplement; nine magazines, includ- 
ing Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan; newsreel, 
wire, and syndicated feature services; a film pro- 
duction company; and several radio stations. 

When, in October and November of 1929, the 
stock market crashed, Hearst called for calm, argu- 
ing that the American economy was fundamentally 
sound. Although his personal fortunes were not 
immediately harmed — his primary investments 
were in real estate — his media empire, particularly 
his newspapers, suffered from a fall in advertising 
revenues. Hearst had borrowed heavily to support 
his extravagant lifestyle and purchase new media 
properties, and he could not afford the slightest loss 
of revenues. In May 1930, to raise funds to pay off 



outstanding debts, he incorporated Hearst Consoli- 
dated Publications, Inc., and offered preferred stock 
in the new corporation to the public. While the pre- 
ferred stock offered a 7 percent dividend, which 
was paid regularly until mid 1938, it carried no vot- 
ing rights. 

By the late spring of 1931, when it had become 
apparent that no rapid economic recovery was in 
store, Hearst urged President Herbert Hoover to 
authorize the immediate expenditure of $5 billion 
to provide public works jobs for the unemployed at 
prevailing wages. When Hoover declined to follow 
his advice, Hearst became determined to oppose 
his bid for reelection. Instead, Hearst endorsed 
Texas congressman and Speaker of the House John 
Nance Garner for the Democratic nomination for 
the presidency in 1932, but Hearst switched his en- 
dorsement to Franklin Delano Roosevelt when it 
became clear that Garner could not win the nomi- 
nation. Hearst became an enthusiastic supporter of 
Roosevelt and contributed advice and funds to his 
campaign. Though the publisher opposed the Na- 
tional Industrial Recovery Act and other New Deal 
economic measures, he did not turn against the 
Roosevelt presidency until 1935, when Roosevelt 
notified Hearst that he was going to raise income 
taxes in an effort to preserve democracy and capi- 
talism from threats on the left and on the right. 
Hearst, still deeply in debt from overspending for 
business and personal purposes, responded that 
Roosevelt's graduated income tax was "communis- 
tic" because it redistributed wealth. Hearst prom- 
ised to oppose the president and the tax increase 
with all his resources. 

Hearst's an ti- Communist tirades and his news- 
papers' attacks on Roosevelt and the New Deal 
were so vicious, especially during Roosevelt's cam- 
paign for a second term in 1936, that many of 
Hearst's readers were forced to choose between the 
president and the publisher. When large numbers 
chose Roosevelt and boycotted the Hearst publica- 
tions, the resulting circulation and advertising de- 
cline pushed the Hearst corporations towards 
bankruptcy. In 1937, the Hearst corporations went 
into receivership and Hearst was forced to sell off 
many of his assets, including significant real estate 
holdings, portions of his art collections, and several 
publications. 



U2 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



E L L M A N 



L I L L I 



As newspaper circulations increased during 
World War II and costs declined with the rationing 
of newsprint and the printing of smaller issues, the 
Hearst corporations were able to refinance their 
outstanding loans. By the middle of the 1940s, Wil- 
liam Randolph Hearst had regained control of his 
publishing empire. He spent the last years of his life 
in Beverly Hills, and died in August 1951 at age 
eighty-eight. 

See Also: COMMUNICATIONS AND THE PRESS; 
ELECTION OF 1932; ISOLATIONISM. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Coblentz, Edward D., ed. William Randolph Hearst: A Por- 
trait in His Own Words. 1952. 

Hearst, William Randolph. Correspondence and Papers. 
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 

"Hearst." Fortune 13 (October 1935): 42-55, 123-161. 

Los Angeles Examiner. Archives. Regional History Collec- 
tion, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 

Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph 
Hearst. 2000. 

David Nasaw 



HELLMAN, LILLIAN 

Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, 1905-June 30, 
1984) was one of the greatest American playwrights 
of the twentieth century. She is best known for The 
Children's Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), 
Watch on the Rhine (1941), and Toys in the Attic 
(1960). Many of her plays have been turned into 
successful motion pictures. Hellman's focus on the 
basic human problems of jealousy, greed, coward- 
ice, and ambition give her dramas a weight of emo- 
tional depth, while they also shed light on the 
broader historical and political conflicts of Western 
society in the middle of the twentieth century. The 
Little Foxes, staged at the end of the Great Depres- 
sion with Tallullah Bankhead in a starring role, pro- 
vided a withering indictment of the American capi- 
talist system through its portrayal of a southern 
family torn apart in the course of haggling over seed 
money for the construction of a mill. The radical 
sentiments expressed in the play were a possible 



outgrowth of Hellman's peripheral involvement in 
various Communist front organizations in the 
1930s. Though she later claimed to have never be- 
longed to the Communist Party, Hellman also 
never avoided relationships with those who did. 
This proximity to possible Communists eventually 
led to her being called before the House Committee 
on Un-American Activities in 1952, an ordeal that 
she recounts in one of her famous memoirs, Scoun- 
drel Time (1976). 

Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. 
As a child, she spent half of each year in the South, 
and half in New York City, where her father did 
business. Though she preferred the more easygoing 
lifestyle of New Orleans, she went to college in 
New York and got a job at a publishing house after 
leaving school. Her vivacious personality could not 
endure an office environment for long, however, 
and when the writer Arthur Krober offered to marry 
her and take her to California, she jumped at the 
chance to escape. The working relationship Hell- 
man established with Hollywood lasted much lon- 
ger than her marriage, and by the early 1930s she 
was living with mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. 
The two writers remained close companions until 
Hammett's death in 1961. 

Due to her accomplishments and growth as a 
writer during the 1930s, Hellman became one of 
America's foremost public intellectuals. She was 
never shy about confronting inflammatory topics. 
For instance, her acclaimed play The Children's Hour 
explored issues of lesbianism while also examining, 
twenty years before McCarthyism, the damage 
caused by unsubstantiated public accusations. 
Other writers often criticized her by calling her a 
publicity hound, and author Mary McCarthy once 
said that "everything [Hellman] writes is a lie, in- 
cluding and and the." But these surly critics rarely 
matched Hellman's natural ability to be a true pub- 
lic figure. In her later years, Hellman turned to 
teaching and to the writing of her much-acclaimed 
memoirs, the first volume of which, An Unfinished 
Woman, was awarded the National Book Award in 
1969. Hellman died on Martha's Vineyard in 1984. 

See Also: HAMMETT, DASHIELL; HOUSE UN- 
AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE (HUAC). 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



t33 



E N D E R S N 



LEON 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bryer, Jackson R., ed. Conversations with Lillian Hellman. 
1986. 

Hellman, Lillian. Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. 1973. 

Hellman, Lillian. Six Plays. 1960. 

Michael L. Van Dyke 



HENDERSON, LEON 

Economist and administrator Leon Henderson 
(May 26, 1895-October 19, 1986) was born in Mill- 
ville, New Jersey. He earned a bachelor's degree in 
economics from Swarthmore College in Pennsylva- 
nia in 1920, and gained a national reputation as a 
consumer credit specialist after joining the Russell 
Sage Foundation in 1925. 

Henderson was a prominent critic of the early 
New Deal's pro-business orientation. To assuage 
consumer interests, National Recovery Administra- 
tion (NRA) chief Hugh Johnson appointed Hender- 
son as special adviser in December 1933 and then 
as director of the NRA's research and planning di- 
vision in February 1934. However, Henderson re- 
mained a persistent critic of the NRA's industry- 
written Blue Eagle codes, which supported restrict- 
ed production and high prices. Henderson's 
research revealed the inequity and inefficiency of 
the codes, a conclusion presented at the NRA's 
price hearings in January 1935, which helped to dis- 
credit the agency prior to its abolition. 

Henderson's ideas influenced the evolution of 
the New Deal. He believed that strong competition, 
government enforced if necessary, would generate 
prosperity and that monopolies and price-fixing by 
big business deterred competition. Henderson also 
championed economic planning that empowered 
the government to make basic decisions about pro- 
duction and prices in major industries. Moreover, 
the recession of 1937 to 1938 convinced him that 
increased deficit spending was needed to stimulate 
consumption and bring recovery. As economic ad- 
viser to Works Progress Administration director 
Harry Hopkins, Henderson helped Federal Reserve 
chairman Marriner Eccles persuade President 
Franklin D. Roosevelt to accept this approach in 



April 1938. Accordingly, Henderson acted as a 
bridge between New Dealers who favored a trust- 
busting solution to America's economic problems 
and those who advocated an approach that would 
later be called Keynesianism. Henderson hoped to 
integrate both elements into a broad liberal agenda 
with his appointment as first executive secretary of 
the Congressional Temporary Economic Commit- 
tee, established in June 1938. Disappointed that its 
final report in March 1941 focused on antimono- 
poly concerns, Henderson called for a comprehen- 
sive statement of national economic needs and a 
broad program to meet these needs. 

In April 1941 Roosevelt appointed Henderson 
to head the Office of Price Administration (OPA), 
which regulated the production, distribution, and 
price increases of retail goods. Henderson's robust 
use of government powers to protect consumers in- 
creased his unpopularity with business and con- 
gressional conservatives. Suffering from ill health 
and overwork, Henderson left government after the 
Republicans gained seats in the 1942 congressional 
elections, in which the OPA was an issue. His vi- 
sion of a reform agenda that combined the regula- 
tory, planning, and fiscal powers of government 
went unfulfilled. With the success of wartime deficit 
spending, it was the more limited Keynesian ap- 
proach that became the liberal orthodoxy. 

See Also: ECONOMISTS; KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in 
Recession and War. 1995. 

Hawley, Ellis. The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly. 
1966. 



Iwan Morgan 



HERNDON, ANGELO, CASE 

During a five-year period in the mid-1930s, the An- 
gelo Herndon case focused national attention on 
racial inequality within the southern legal system 
and on the politicized nature of southern justice. 
The affair began in June 1932, when Angelo Hern- 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



E R N D N 



A N 6 E L 



CASE 



don, a nineteen-year-old black Communist, helped 
organize a large interracial demonstration of unem- 
ployed workers in Atlanta, Georgia. Fearful that the 
worsening Depression provided a fertile environ- 
ment for radical political groups, local authorities 
arrested Herndon the following month. Utilizing an 
old law originally enacted to prohibit slave revolts, 
they charged him with "attempting to incite insur- 
rection" against the state of Georgia, a capital of- 
fense. 

While in jail Herndon turned for assistance to 
the International Labor Defense (ILD), a radical 
legal defense organization. Established by Commu- 
nists and other leftists in 1925 in order to defend 
"class war prisoners," the ILD contended that in a 
capitalistic society most legal prosecutions were po- 
litically based. Thus the organization insisted that 
a proper defense must involve not only skillful 
courtroom maneuvers but also "mass pressure" 
outside the courthouse. To defend Herndon the 
ILD violated deep South racial etiquette by retain- 
ing two local African-American attorneys, Benja- 
min J. Davis and John Geer. At Herndon's contro- 
versial trial in January 1933, Davis and Geer 
challenged the constitutionality of the insurrection 
law, arguing that it unreasonably restricted free 
speech. Judge Lee B. Wyatt promptly rejected their 
motions. Following three days of testimony marked 
by prosecutors' emotional attacks on Communism 
and interracial activity, an all-white jury returned a 
verdict of guilty and sentenced the young organizer 
to eighteen to twenty years in prison. 

The ILD promptly initiated a national cam- 
paign on Herndon's behalf, eventually developing 
the case into a cause celebre. After the state supreme 
court rejected Herdon's appeal, the ILD retained 
several specialists in constitutional law and took the 
case to the United States Supreme Court. But in 
May 1935 the court dismissed the appeal, conclud- 
ing that the constitutional issues had not been 
properly raised at the original trial. While the ILD 
prepared to initiate a new round of legal action back 
in Georgia, the group sought additional allies for 
the Herndon campaign. As part of "united front" 
efforts by Communists to organize a broad political 
coalition against fascism in Europe, the ILD now 
sought assistance from non-Communist organiza- 



tions that it had previously disdained. The organi- 
zation eventually formed the Joint Committee to 
Aid the Herndon Defense, which included the Na- 
tional Association for the Advancement of Colored 
People and the American Civil Liberties Union. In 
December 1935 in Atlanta, Judge Hugh M. Dorsey 
unexpectedly struck down the insurrection law, but 
the state supreme court promptly reversed his rul- 
ing, setting the stage for another trip to the U.S. Su- 
preme Court. In April 1937 the high court ruled by 
a vote of five to four in Herndon v. Lowry that the 
insurrection law, as construed and applied, was un- 
constitutional. Justice Owen J. Roberts wrote that 
the Georgia statute "amounts merely to a dragnet 
which may enmesh anyone who agitates for a 
change of government." The ruling not only freed 
Herndon but virtually eliminated further prosecu- 
tions under the controversial law. 

The Herndon case has often been compared to 
the epic Scottsboro case in Alabama, since both 
highlighted racial injustice in southern courtrooms. 
But unlike Scottsboro, the Herndon Case was also 
an important civil liberties case, one that demon- 
strated that southern prosecutors and judges were 
quite willing to violate first amendment rights in 
order to silence radical political movements. Finally, 
by vigorously defending Herndon and openly chal- 
lenging white supremacy in Dixie, the ILD and 
American Communists earned new respect from 
African Americans. 

See Also: COMMUNIST PARTY; INTERNATIONAL 
LABOR DEFENSE (ILD); SCOTTSBORO CASE. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Davis, Benjamin J. Communist Councilman from Harlem: 
Autobiographical Notes Written in a Federal Penitentia- 
ry. 1969. 

Herndon, Angelo. Let Me Live (1937). Reprint, 1969. 

Herndon v. Lowry. 301 U.S. 242. 1937. 

Martin, Charles H. The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern 
Justice. 1976. 

Martin, Charles H. "The Angelo Herndon Case and 
Southern Justice." In American Political Trials, edited 
by Michal R. Belknap, rev. edition. 1994. 

Thomas, Kendall. "'Rouge Et Noir' Reread: A Popular 
Constitutional History of the Angelo Herndon 
Case." In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U5 



E R E S 



Formed the Movement, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, 
et al. 1995. 

Charles H. Martin 



HEROES 

Heroes serve a vital function in every culture and 
every time. They reconcile existing social tensions, 
affirm community values, and give people symbols 
to help shape their identities. Heroes are what peo- 
ple imagine them to be, they exist only so long as 
they are needed, and are transformed according to 
people's needs and expectations. Such needs were 
acute during the Depression years when much of 
what Americans had come to assume about their 
culture was in a state of disarray and disintegration. 
New types of heroes emerged to address this con- 
fusion. In an age of disorder, heroes defied, em- 
braced, or subverted the chaos. In so doing, they 
helped the public survive it. Traditional heroes no 
longer sufficed during the Great Depression, when 
scarcity and widespread unemployment called into 
question the traditional middle-class axiom that 
success followed hard work. As millions were vic- 
timized by forces beyond their control, the "self- 
made men" and Horatio Alger heroes of yesterday 
gave way to the suffering, outlaw, and trickster he- 
roes of the Great Depression. 

Throughout 1930s American culture, victims 
assumed heroic proportions: the impoverished Joad 
family of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, the 
tragically afflicted Lou Gehrig, the resolute Rhett 
Butler at the end of Gone with the Wind, and the mi- 
grant workers and union organizers celebrated in 
the songs of Woody Guthrie. Herbert Hoover, the 
most famous self-made man in America, had be- 
come the chief villain of the Depression, his very 
name synonymous with misery and hopelessness. 
Taking his place was a son of wealth and privilege 
struck unexpectedly by a debilitating disease. 
Franklin Roosevelt's struggle with polio and his 
courageous triumph over adversity mirrored how 
suffering Americans imagined their own plight. 

Outlaw heroes, on the other hand, refused to 
be victimized. Turning the Victorian work ethic 



inside-out, they cynically demonstrated the bene- 
fits of subverting and assaulting the system. Such 
Hollywood gangster films as Scarface (1932), Public 
Enemy (1931), and Little Caesar (1931) mocked im- 
migrant and business success stories with Italian 
and Irish-American antiheroes who advanced in 
their "professions" through ruthless ambition, de- 
ceit, and murder. The exploits of such real-life 
bank-robbers as Bonnie and Clyde and John Dil- 
linger excited Americans so much that the authori- 
ties felt compelled to remind people that these were 
criminals and not folk heroes. 

Other heroes found it more suitable to simply 
work around the system. The hard-boiled detec- 
tives of pulp fiction and film existed alongside the 
legal authorities, going places where the police 
would not and achieving results that they could not 
by circumventing the law. Pulp and comic book su- 
perheroes such as the Shadow, Batman, and even 
Superman sometimes came into conflict with the 
police in the course of their own vigilante crusades. 
At a time when the institutions of power seemed 
inadequate in the face of social crises, these heroes 
appealed to the desire for swift and righteous jus- 
tice. 

Sometimes humor is the best response to a bad 
situation, and Depression-era trickster heroes 
spoke to that virtue. Building upon the comedic 
working-class sensibilities of Charlie Chaplin and 
pioneering in the art of improvised anarchy on film, 
the Marx Brothers ridiculed the ruling classes even 
as they dished out self-deprecating humor for the 
unemployed. Mae West mocked the "important" 
men in her films and demonstrated the sexual 
power that women could wield over them. Warner 
Brothers cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny and 
Daffy Duck provided even more outrageous laughs 
at the expense of snobs, fat-cats, and blowhards. In 
such heroes, powerless Americans could see the 
qualities of resilience, resourcefulness, and wits that 
would get them through the difficult days. For these 
were the true heroes of the Great Depression, the 
common people themselves. 

See Also: GANGSTER FILMS; HARD-BOILED 
DETECTIVES; SUPERMAN. 



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I C K K 



L R E N 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Levine, Lawrence W. "American Culture and the Great 
Depression." Yale Review 74 (winter 1985): 196-223. 

Sklar, Robert. City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield. 1992. 

Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation 
of American Society in the Twentieth Century. 1984. 

Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transforma- 
tion of Youth Culture in America. 2001. 

Bradford W. Wright 



HICKOK, LORENA 

Lorena Alice Hickok (March 7, 1893-May 3, 1968), 
Eleanor Roosevelt's trusted confidante, was born in 
East Troy, Wisconsin. Beaten by a father who 
moved frequently to find work, Hickok left home at 
fourteen, and struggled to finish one year of college 
before joining a Battle Creek, Michigan, newspaper 
as a personal features writer. In 1915, she returned 
to Wisconsin to become the society editor for the 
Milwaukee Sentinel. Bored, Hickok convinced her 
editor to assign her to the city desk, where she de- 
veloped a reputation as a skilled interviewer. She 
transferred to the Minneapolis Tribune in 1917 
where, under the guidance of Tribune editor Thom- 
as J. Dillon, Hickok became such a skilled political 
and sports reporter that in 1928 the Associated 
Press (AP) hired her as a wire reporter. At the AP, 
she became so adept at covering politics, the Lind- 
bergh baby kidnapping, and other dramatic assign- 
ments that her byline appeared atop her stories. 

Hickok, who first met Eleanor Roosevelt in 
1928 when Hickok covered the New York Demo- 
cratic Committee, grew close to Mrs. Roosevelt dur- 
ing the 1932 campaign. The women soon trusted 
one another, with Mrs. Roosevelt speaking honest- 
ly to Hickok about politics, social issues, and her 
fears about her life should her husband win the 
election. The two woman become so close that 
Hickok let Mrs. Roosevelt see her stories before she 
submitted them, and in one case, agreed to Mrs. 
Roosevelt's request that a story be delayed. Their 
campaign experience led to a lifetime of devotion to 
one another. 

In 1933, Hickok, who had fallen in love with 
Mrs. Roosevelt, left the AP because she felt she 



could not write objectively about the Roosevelts. 
The First Lady then recommended that Harry Hop- 
kins hire Hickok to investigate for the Federal 
Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) the con- 
ditions average Americans confronted during the 
Depression. From 1933 to 1935, Hickok visited 
thirty-two states and provided detailed reports on 
New Deal policy, living conditions, and politics to 
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt, and Hop- 
kins. An astute and engaged observer, Hickok as- 
sessed the problems a community faced quickly 
and solicited trenchant comments that helped the 
Roosevelts and Hopkins see their policies from a 
citizen's perspective. 

Hickok provided invaluable advice to Mrs. Roo- 
sevelt as the First Lady struggled to adjust to White 
House life. Hickok recommended that Mrs. Roose- 
velt hold press conferences with women reporters 
and encouraged her to resume writing, most nota- 
bly the First Lady's monthly column Mrs. Roose- 
velt's Page and her daily column My Day. Hickok 
also edited articles Mrs. Roosevelt submitted for 
publication, and served as her friend's trusted 
sounding board, especially after Louis Howe's 
death in 1935 and the president's death in 1945. 
Hickok's intense concern for unemployed coal 
miners spurred Eleanor Roosevelt's interest and 
helped introduce her to the West Virginia resettle- 
ment community later known as Arthurdale. In the 
early years of the New Deal, the two women vaca- 
tioned together and Hickok accompanied Mrs. 
Roosevelt on her official visit to Puerto Rico. When 
Hickok's FERA assignment ended, the First Lady 
arranged for Hickok to work for the New York 
World's Fair from 1937 to 1940, to serve as execu- 
tive secretary of the women's division of the Demo- 
cratic National Committee from 1940 and 1945, and 
to live in the wartime White House. 

Hickok's worsening diabetes forced her to 
leave her job with the Democratic National Com- 
mittee. In 1947, Eleanor Roosevelt helped her 
friend secure a job with the New York State Demo- 
cratic Committee. Hickok's health continued to de- 
cline, and in 1954, a frail, partially blind Hickok 
moved to Hyde Park to be closer to Mrs. Roosevelt. 
The two women collaborated on Women of Courage 
and Eleanor Roosevelt tried to stabilize Hickok's fi- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



1.37 



H I 6 



LANDER FOLK 



S ( 



L 




Lorena Hickok (far right) with Eleanor Roosevelt (second from left) and friends. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



nances. Hickok would write a biography of Mrs. 
Roosevelt and six children's biographies before her 
death in 1968. 

See Also: ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Black, Allida M. Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roose- 
velt and the Shaping of Postwar Eiberalism. New York: 
Columbia University Press, 1996. 

Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 
1884-1933; Vol. 2: 1933-1938. New York: Viking, 
1992, 1999. 

Lowitt, Richard, and Maurine Beasley, eds. One Third of 
a Nation: Eorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depres- 
sion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. 

Allida M. Black 



HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL 

Established near Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1932, 
the Highlander Folk School was an important out- 
post of labor education and union organizing in the 
South during the 1930s. Through residential work- 
shops, off-campus extension efforts, and communi- 
ty-based programs, the staff, headed by Myles Hor- 
ton, simultaneously attempted to educate leaders 
for a new social order while enriching the cultural 
values of the southern Appalachian region. 

In its initial years, Highlander's objectives usu- 
ally outpaced its actual achievements. The school 
involved itself in local strikes that were no more 
than temporarily successful, and internal differ- 
ences over policies, curriculum, finances, and ideol- 



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SIDNEY 



ogy were almost constant concerns. Highlander's 
staff members sincerely supported the interests of 
the working class and the cause of racial integra- 
tion. But the faculty's participation in socialist- 
related activities in the early and mid-1930s did lit- 
tle to increase the school's appeal to southern wage 
earners, and it repeatedly found itself compelled to 
acquiesce to southern white sentiment and not 
admit black workers as students. 

Nonetheless, in aiding mine, lumber, textile, 
and relief workers in Tennessee, and in introducing 
ways to overcome racial prejudice, Highlander an- 
ticipated the efforts of the Congress of Industrial 
Organizations (CIO) to form interracial industrial 
unions in the South. Staff members served as union 
organizers for the 1937 Textile Workers Organizing 
Committee campaign and managed the education- 
al component of several other union drives thereaf- 
ter, assisting locals in maintaining and expanding 
their activities and teaching workers how to bargain 
collectively and live successfully under union con- 
tracts. Through its fieldwork, the Highlander faculty 
learned more about the problems facing unionizing 
southern laborers and used these experiences to 
improve the school's promotion of the southern 
labor movement. Indeed, by the late 1930s High- 
lander was a vital source of labor education in the 
South, holding semiannual residence terms for 
men and women representing nearly every labor 
and progressive organization in the region and ex- 
perimenting with educational ventures such as 
music and drama programs, writers' workshops, 
and junior union camps. It would become fully in- 
tegrated in 1944. 

Such initiatives generated both controversy and 
support. Attacked on the one hand by southern in- 
dustrialists, some Tennessee newspapers, and local 
officials angered by Highlander's mobilization of a 
labor-led political coalition, and on the other by 
leftists impatient with the school's refusal to be suf- 
ficiently doctrinaire, staff members adhered to a 
loosely-defined set of democratic principles that 
they believed offered concrete solutions to the con- 
cerns of southern workers. This broad-based com- 
mitment led to a decade of close cooperation be- 
tween Highlander and the CIO. 

That relationship soured after World War II, 
however. Frustrated by what it considered to be the 



narrowing of organized labor's agenda, and unable 
to forge a farmer-labor coalition, the school's lead- 
ership resolved that it would not attain its goals 
until it challenged southern segregation. Highland- 
er subsequently became a significant forum for the 
civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The 
center remains committed to ongoing struggles for 
social justice in Appalachia and the Deep South in 
the twenty-first century. 

See Also: AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); 
CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS 
(CIO); RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Adams, Frank. Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of High- 
lander. 1975. 

Glen, John M. Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd edi- 
tion. 1996. 

Horton, Aimee Isgrig. The Highlander Folk School: A His- 
tory of Its Major Programs 1932-1961. 1989. 

Horton, Myles, with ludith Kohl and Herbert Kohl. The 
Long Haul: An Autobiography. 1990. 

Iohn M. Glen 



HILLMAN, SIDNEY 



Sidney "Hilkie" Hillman (March 23, 1887-July 10, 
1946) was president of the Amalgamated Clothing 
Workers of America (ACW), founding member of 
the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), co- 
director of the federal Office of Production Man- 
agement (OPM) during World War II, and director 
of the CIO Political Action Committee. Born in Za- 
gare, Lithuania, to a family of merchants and rab- 
bis, Hillman's intellectual achievements at a young 
age enabled him to pursue rabbinical studies. At 
Yeshiva, Hillman chafed under severe restrictions 
against secular training, and in 1903, he joined the 
socialist Bund. As a young revolutionary and labor 
organizer, Hillman fled Russia in late 1906 to avoid 
the czar's persecution. He immigrated to the Unit- 
ed States the following year. 

Settling in Chicago, Hillman went to work in 
the needle trades where he experienced oppressive 



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SIDNEY 



labor conditions. He emerged as a local leader of in- 
dependent immigrant garment workers during the 
violent Chicago garment strike of 1910, garnering 
notice from such Progressive leaders as Jane Ad- 
dams. In 1914 Hillman assumed the presidency of 
the new Amalgamated Clothing Workers of Ameri- 
ca, an organization devoted to industrial unionism, 
led largely by socialists, anarchists, and Bundists, 
and made up predominantly of women and Jewish 
immigrants — three factors that encouraged the en- 
mity of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) 
and conservative craft unions. Hillman's organizing 
talents were prodigious: by the end of World War 
I the ACW represented nearly 50 percent of the na- 
tion's garment workers. 

In the reactionary 1920s, employers, AFL offi- 
cials, and government representatives increasingly 
targeted Hillman for his allegiance to left-labor po- 
litical organizations, especially his close relation- 
ship to supporters of the Russian revolution. Some 
of the nation's leading attorneys, including Har- 
vard's Felix Frankfurter, rushed to defend Hillman. 
The 1924 convention of the ACW endorsed the 
presidential candidacy of Progressive Robert M. La 
Follette, signaling a moderation in Hillman's social- 
ist activism. For founding ACW cooperative banks 
and housing programs, and for instituting a union 
unemployment insurance plan, Hillman was recog- 
nized by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as "the flaming 
genius of union labor in the U.S." by the late 1920s. 

As the Depression worsened in the early 1930s, 
Hillman's commitment to a workers' vision of "in- 
dustrial democracy," in which workers' organiza- 
tions were made more powerful without revolu- 
tionary class struggle, led him to endorse a cautious 
course of action for the ACW, including agreeing to 
wage cuts, endorsing prohibitions against child 
labor, and boycotting sweatshop -manufactured 
goods. He campaigned vigorously for a national 
unemployment insurance plan. Hillman was well 
regarded within the Democratic Party of Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt, and he counted among his con- 
fidantes such leading New Dealers as Frankfurter, 
Louis Brandeis, Harold Ickes, and Senator Robert 
Wagner. Although Hillman held reservations about 
the labor provisions of the National Industrial Re- 
covery Act, he did accept appointment to the Na- 



tional Industrial Recovery Board (NIRB) and quickly 
emerged as labor's most audible voice in the Na- 
tional Recovery Administration (NRA) and in 
Washington. 

Hillman found his service on the NIRB acutely 
frustrating, though by 1935 the ACW had recovered 
from its early Depression-era slump and its mem- 
bers had achieved significant wage increases. With 
the Schechter decision, which declared the NRA un- 
constitutional, Hillman's optimism that govern- 
ment intervention in the economy would lead to 
economic recovery faded. In response, Hillman 
turned to the solution of mass industrial unionism. 
At the 1935 AFL convention, Hillman advocated 
the right of autoworkers to industrial union repre- 
sentation in a series of floor debates that culminat- 
ed in a fight between the United Mineworkers' 
John L. Lewis and the craft-based carpenter's presi- 
dent William Hutcheson. Within days, the Com- 
mittee for Industrial Organization, later called the 
Congress of Industrial Organizations, was founded 
as a federation of industrial unions closely tied to 
the Democratic Party. Among the unions newly af- 
filiated with the CIO were those in mining, the nee- 
dle trades, typography, auto, steel, rubber, radio, 
oil, millinery, and mill and smelting. Initially, the 
CIO attempted to work within the institutional 
framework of the AFL, but by mid-1936 the AFL 
executive council suspended the ten founding 
unions of the new federation; expulsion of the ren- 
egade unions followed in 1937. Hillman served as 
vice-president of the fledgling organization. 

Although considered a labor moderate, Hill- 
man himself had little patience for peacemaking 
within the AFL; instead, his experience as president 
of the ACW led him to endorse a "new unionism," 
incorporating a mass movement for industrial 
unionism with bureaucratic interventionism of the 
sort expressed most clearly by Roosevelt's Second 
New Deal and the expansion of the welfare state. 
A significant component of the new unionism vi- 
sion was rationalization within the workplace with 
the intent of eliminating outmoded work practices 
and bringing efficiency in production to employers. 
Roosevelt's secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, 
called regularly on Hillman for advice. That advice 
was respected even by Roosevelt, who reportedly 



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LEWIS 



said upon encountering congressional opposition 
to the 1937 Fair Labor Standards Act, "I will never 
let Hillman down." 

Hillman was so wedded to the Roosevelt ad- 
ministration and the new unionism ideal that by 
the late 1930s his political opponents within and 
outside of organized labor questioned his commit- 
ment to the CIO rank and file. As a supporter of 
Roosevelt's reelection to an unprecedented third 
term, Hillman found himself in opposition to 
Lewis, the president of the CIO, and to members 
of the Communist Party. Hillman's support proved 
key to Roosevelt's reelection in 1940, while the 
Hillman -Roosevelt coalition secured the election of 
Philip Murray to the presidency of the CIO in the 
same year. For his unwavering support, the admin- 
istration rewarded Hillman with positions on the 
National Defense Advisory Commission, the Office 
of Production Management, and in 1942 the War 
Production Board. Hillman also directed the CIO's 
Political Action Committee, an organization seen 
by opponents as too closely tied to the Roosevelt 
administration. 




Troubled by President Harry Truman's unpre- 
dictable attitudes toward progressive labor, alarm- 
ed by what seemed an impending red scare, and 
frustrated by failures of the CIO's southern orga- 
nizing campaign Operation Dixie, Hillman died of 
heart disease in July 1946. 

See Also: AMALGAMATED CLOTHING WORKERS 
(ACW); AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR 
(AFL); CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGA- 
NIZATIONS (CIO); ORGANIZED LABOR. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dubofsky, Melvyn. The State and Labor in Modern Ameri- 
ca. 1994. 

Fraser, Steven. Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the 
Rise of American Labor. 1991. 

Josephson, Matthew. Sidney Hillman: Statesman of Ameri- 
can Labor. 1952. 

Nancy Quam-Wickham 



A 1936 photograph by Lewis Hine of a miner's child in the 
Scotts Run area of West Virginia. National Archives and 
Records Administration 



HINE, LEWIS 

Lewis Wickes Hine (September 26, 1874-Novem- 
ber 3, 1940) was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. After 
taking extension courses from Frank E. Manning, 
professor at the Wisconsin Normal School, he at- 
tended the University of Chicago for one year in 
1900. Manning, just appointed superintendent of 
New York's Ethical Culture School (ECS), hired 
Hine in 1901 as an assistant teacher of geography 
and nature study. Hine used his camera as an edu- 
cational tool and ran the ECS photography club. 
After completing his degree in education at New 
York University, Hine decided to forge a free-lance 
career in sociological photography. In 1904 he di- 
rected his attention to photographing immigrants 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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HISTORY 



INTERPRET 



T I N 



A N D 



MEMORY 



arriving at Ellis Island in New York Harbor. In 1907, 
he began illustrating the six -volume Pittsburgh Sur- 
vey (1909-1914) of steelworkers' working and living 
conditions. He then gained renown among social 
reformers when the National Child Labor Commit- 
tee enlisted him to document the problem of work- 
ing children in America, a project he pursued from 
1908 to 1918. Hine also photographed the after- 
math of World War I in France and Belgium for the 
American Red Cross. 

In the early 1920s Hine concluded, "I had done 
my share of negative," and he decided to turn his 
lens toward the "intelligent interpretation of the 
world's workers" through a "new-worker" series of 
photographs depicting heroic visions of human 
strength, dignity, and productivity in the context of 
the machine age. The most important series from 
this project, published as Men at Work (1932), fol- 
lowed laborers during the construction of New 
York's Empire State Building. Although one critic 
decried Hine's "exaggerated desire to glorify the 
working class," Hine insisted that his work was "in- 
terpretative" rather than "documentary." He noted, 
"If I could tell the story with words, I wouldn't need 
to lug around a camera." He further declared, "I 
wanted to show the things that had to be corrected 
. . . that had to be appreciated." Still, he experi- 
mented with "art" photography while taking a few 
commercial assignments. The first major exhibition 
of his work was held at the Yonkers Art Museum 
in New York in 1931. 

The American Red Cross sent Hine to drought- 
ridden rural Arkansas and Kentucky in 1931. After 
the publishing of his portfolio of mill workers, 
Through the Loom (1933), and its exhibition at the 
1933 World's Fair, the Tennessee Valley Authority 
hired Hine to photograph construction of two 
dams. Roy Stryker, head of the Historical Section of 
the Farm Security Administration, chose not hire 
Hine for the FSA photography staff; although 
Stryker admired Hine's work, he knew his artistic 
temperament demanded more control over images 
than Stryker permitted FSA photographers. How- 
ever, in 1936 the Works Progress Administration 
appointed Hine head photographer for the Nation- 
al Research Project studying productivity and tech- 
nological change for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 



He focused on Civilian Construction Camps, un- 
employed miners, rural communities, and urban 
workers, but his work was not completed by 1937 
due to poor health. 

In 1938, the Columbia Broadcasting Corpora- 
tion and the British Broadcasting Corporation hired 
Hine to prepare specials on the working man. Life 
magazine later bought some of his photos, the New 
York State Museum assembled a permanent collec- 
tion of his work, and the New York Public Library 
began collecting it, as did a number of major art 
museums. The reformist Russell Sage Foundation 
funded two folios of his images of Ellis Island and 
child laborers. Applauded for the pioneering quality 
of his documentary vision, Hine nevertheless strug- 
gled financially throughout his career, and he died 
in near poverty in 1940. 

See Also: PHOTOGRAPHY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gutman, ludith Mara. Lewis W. Hine and the American 
Social Conscience. 1967. 

Gutman, ludith Mara. Lewis W. Hine, 1874-1940: Two 
Perspectives. 1974 . 

Kemp, lohn R., ed. Lewis Hine: Photographs of Child Labor 
in the New South. 1986. 

Hine, Lewis. Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern 
Men and Machines. 1932. Rev. edition, 1977. 

Rosenblum, Walter; Alan Trachtenberg; and Naomi 
Rosenblum. America and Lewis Hine: Photographs 
1904-1940. 1984. 

Steinorth, Karl, ed. Lewis Hine: Passionate journey , Photo- 
graphs, 1905-1937. 1997. 

Blanche M. G. Linden 



HISTORY, INTERPRETATION, AND 
MEMORY OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION 

From Franklin Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan, 
the legacy and memory of the Great Depression 
shaped American culture and politics, and continue 
to stand as major interpretive questions for schol- 
ars. Because of the Depression and New Deal, gen- 
erations of Americans supported an active presi- 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



I S T R Y 



INTERPRETATION 



N D 



M E M R V 



dency and expansive national government, and 
insisted that frugality was a virtue, even as they en- 
joyed economic prosperity. Perhaps the most en- 
during political legacy of the Great Depression was 
the Democratic Party's half-century hold on Con- 
gress. A coalition crafted by Roosevelt insisted that 
Social Security, farm commodity price supports, 
and the regulation of banking, securities, wages, 
and working hours remained essential duties of the 
national government. Generations of labor union 
members voted for the party that secured their right 
to organize. As direct memories of the Depression 
receded, Americans' loyalties to particular New 
Deal programs waned, but most citizens still look 
to the president and Congress for economic initia- 
tives and leadership in times of crisis, both legacies 
of the Depression years. 

Great Depression scholarship has focused not 
only on the event's causes, but also on the govern- 
ment's responses to the challenge. Herbert Hoo- 
ver's presidency was long judged a failure on the 
grounds that he did little to ameliorate the crisis. By 
the 1970s a more nuanced version of Hoover ap- 
peared, one that emphasized his progressive im- 
pulses and recognized that he took unprecedented 
government action in the face of hard times. Many 
Americans of the 1930s and later assumed a direct 
causal relationship between the stock market crash 
of October 1929 and the Great Depression. Most 
scholarship (e.g., Robert S. McElvaine) has pointed 
to the more fundamental problem — that consumer 
demand could no longer keep up with produc- 
tion — and has emphasized the weakness of the na- 
tion's banking system and relatively unregulated 
securities markets of the 1920s. Historians and 
economists continue to debate the roots of Ameri- 
can economic conditions of the 1930s, although 
practically all agree that the phenomenon was in- 
ternational rather than strictly American in charac- 
ter. Such interpretations trace the Depression to the 
unstable international economic situation created 
by post-World War I tariff barriers and war repara- 
tions. 

From the 1930s through the 1960s Roosevelt 
himself stood as the central figure in most accounts 
of the Great Depression. The image of Roosevelt as 
master pragmatist and unparalleled politician 



reached its zenith in Arthur Schlesinger's Age of 
Roosevelt trilogy (1957-1960). By the 1960s some 
historians viewed the Depression less as the occa- 
sion for the emergence of Rooseveltian consensus 
than as the crisis of liberal capitalism; the New Deal 
thus became not a triumph of moderate reform, but 
a successful maneuver by capitalists to save the old 
order (e.g., Barton Bernstein). By the 1970s and the 
1980s, historians continued to produce a rich litera- 
ture on the Depression years, assessing the particu- 
lar impact of the Depression on minorities and 
women (e.g., Harvard Sitkoff and Susan Ware), for 
instance, and exploring the social and cultural his- 
tory of the Depression (e.g., Richard Pells). Recent 
scholarship on Depression-era politics has empha- 
sized not the boldness and initiatives of the New 
Deal, but the relatively limited bureaucratic capacity 
of the American government. 

Representations of the Depression have ap- 
peared regularly in American culture from the 
1930s to the present. In the 1930s, comic strips such 
as Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie noted the 
country's hard times, sometimes excoriating the 
rich, but always assuring Americans that their insti- 
tutions were sound. Films such as William Well- 
man's The Public Enemy (1931) and Frank Capra's 
Meet John Doe (1941) attempted to explain the De- 
pression. John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of 
Wrath (1939) and John Ford's 1940 film adaptation 
provided the most enduring representation of Dust 
Bowl poverty. Economic hard times also appeared 
in popular songs, such as "Brother, Can You Spare 
a Dime?" However, most music painted a rosier 
picture; "Happy Days Are Here Again" became the 
Democratic Party theme song until the Clinton 
years. During the prosperous years of the 1950s and 
1960s fewer writers and artists gave their works a 
Depression setting, perhaps because some 1930s 
communitarian responses to the Depression ap- 
peared suspect in the context of the Cold War, but 
also because of a changed focus on civil rights and 
other contemporary struggles. By the 1970s some 
television series, such as The Waltons (1972-1981), 
rediscovered the Depression. But such images were 
tinged by nostalgic longing for home and commu- 
nity bonds rather than an anxious memory of sys- 
temic economic failure. The musical and movie 
Annie (1982) emphasized grit, individualism, and 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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luck. Studs Terkel's oral history of the Depression 
reminded readers that for millions of Americans the 
1930s were not the good old days, but hard times. 
Nostalgia for World War II during the late 1990s 
and early 2000s again focused popular attention on 
the generation that weathered the Depression, al- 
though the lessons drawn emphasized individual 
character rather than the need for bold, large-scale 
government responses to common national prob- 
lems. 

See Also: ALLEN, FREDERICK LEWIS; CAUSES OF 
THE GREAT DEPRESSION; HOOVER, HERBERT; 
NEW DEAL; ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bernstein, Barton. "The New Deal: The Conservative 
Achievements of Liberal Reform." In Toward a New 
Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, edited by 
Barton Bernstein. 1970. 

Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Eiberalism in 
Recession and War. 1995. 

Garraty, John A. The Great Depression: An Inquiry into the 
Causes, Course, and Consequences of the Worldwide 
Depression of the 1930s as Seen by Contemporaries and 
in the Light of History. 1986. 

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 
1929-1941. 1984, 1993. 

Pells, Richard. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Cul- 
ture and Social Thought in the Depression Years. 1973. 

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt. 
1957-1960. 

Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of 
Civil Rights as a National Issue. 1978. 

Stock, Catherine McNicol. Main Street in Crisis: The Great 

Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern 

Plains. 1992. 
Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great 

Depression. 1970. 
Ware, Susan. Holding Their Own: American Women in the 

1930s. 1982. 
Wilson, foan Hoff. Herbert Hoover, Forgotten Progressive. 

1975. 

Trent A. Watts 



HITLER, ADOLF 

Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889-April 30, 1945) was a 
founding member and leader of the National So- 



cialist Party of Germany (NSDAP, Nazi Party) from 
1922. He became chancellor of Germany on Janu- 
ary 30, 1933, a post he held until taking his own life 
as the victorious Allied powers marched on Berlin 
in April 1945. 



BEGINNINGS 

Hitler was born into lower-middle-class re- 
spectability in the small Austrian town Braunau am 
Inn near the border with Germany. Unsuccessful 
and unhappy at school, he left at the age of sixteen 
to pursue a career as a painter in the imperial capital 
but twice was rejected by the Academy of Graphic 
Arts in Vienna. The rejection was a serious blow to 
his pride, and he spent the years from 1907 to 1913 
in Vienna, eking out an impoverished existence by 
selling his paintings and sleeping in flophouses. 
Life in Vienna played a crucial role in shaping Hit- 
ler's anti-Semitism, which was to become his guid- 
ing principle in NSDAP policies. Moreover, his de- 
cision to join a Bavarian infantry regiment in 1914 
(he was rejected as unfit by the Austrian army) 
helped to cement his prejudices and his determina- 
tion to right the wrongs that, he believed, had 
brought on Germany's World War I defeat and the 
Treaty of Versailles, the peace agreement signed at 
the palace of Versailles in June 1919. Hitler believed 
this treaty humiliated the German people. 

Twice decorated with the Iron Cross by the 
German Imperial government, Hitler nonetheless 
failed to rise above the lowly rank of lance-corporal 
during the war because he was deemed to lack the 
right qualities to make him an effective leader. In- 
jured in combat, he was employed by the German 
army to collect intelligence against extremist politi- 
cal groups operating in Munich. In September 1919 
the work brought him into contact with the Ger- 
man Workers' Party, a small group consisting of no 
more than forty members. By July 1921 Hitler had 
become leader of the party, demonstrating his par- 
ticular skills as an orator who was both appealing 
and charismatic while articulating bigoted views 
and woolly promises. He now exuded the self- 
confidence of a man who believed his destiny was 
to lead the German people. Hitler experienced a 
short period of notoriety as leader of an attempted 
putsch against the regional government in Bavaria 



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H I T L E R 



ADOLF 



and the national government in Weimar — the small 
town in the state of Thuringia that was home to 
Germany's first republican government — in No- 
vember 1923, which landed him in jail for less than 
a year. It took the following five years for the 
NSDAP or Nazi Party to begin making political in- 
roads in the Weimar Republic. 

THE ROAD TO POWER 

Hitler used the years from 1924 to 1928 to 
strengthen the party and his grip on it, while the 
early half-baked policies of the NSDAP developed 
into a cohesive ideology. The Nazi Party's first po- 
litical victory came in May 1928 when the town of 
Coburg in Bavaria gave the NSDAP a majority in 
local elections. The timing of the Nazis first elector- 
al success coincided with early signs that German 
economic performance was stalling: industrial out- 
put had dropped for the first time since 1924, levels 
of foreign investment had fallen, and the number 
of people employed had begun to slide downward. 
By the following year, Germany was in the midst of 
a full-blown economic crisis. Declining levels of 
foreign investment and rules governing monetary 
policy imposed on the German government and 
the central bank, the Reichsbank, meant that gov- 
ernment at every level, local, regional, and national, 
found itself desperately short of funds to pay for 
even the most basic of services. 

The rules governing membership in the gold 
standard meant that the successive German gov- 
ernments found it almost impossible to formulate 
an effective policy to combat the crisis. In order to 
regain the foreign investment they had lost, the 
Reichsbank raised interest rates, while the minority 
government of the "Hunger Chancellor" Heinrich 
Bruning, which took office in March 1930, adhered 
to the principles of economic orthodoxy by raising 
interest rates and acting to limit government 
spending. Germany had become very dependent 
on foreign investment, and Bruning believed he 
had to go along with what the bankers wanted — 
gold standard orthodoxy — if he were to regain for- 
eign investment in Germany. However, this strate- 
gy lay in tatters in the wake of the banking crisis 
that gripped Germany in the summer of 1931. 

Briining's inability to offer the German elector- 
ate any real solutions to the second major economic 




Adolf Hitler (standing in car) salutes parading troops in 
Nuremberg in 1935. National Archives and Records 
Administration 



crisis to grip the country in less than ten years re- 
flected the widespread failure of all politicians in 
the center of German politics to offer either viable 
or appealing solutions to the economic collapse. In- 
stead, it was the extremist political parties, the Ger- 
man Communist Party (KPD) and the Nazi Party, 
which were the political beneficiaries. The crisis 
provided Hitler with the opportunity to capture the 
support of more than one-third of the voting popu- 
lation. Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 
1933, because of a potent combination of well- 
organized party activism (the NSDAP was success- 
ful in capturing the support of farmers by combin- 
ing party political rallies with practical agricultural 
advice for example), winning slogans, and the col- 
lusion of leading political figures who, while not 
Nazis, supported Hitler's rise to power because 
they believed he would prevent Germany's slide 
into civil war. The Nazis also made enthusiastic use 
of political violence, particularly against the Com- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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munists. But the NSDAP made it clear that Jews, 
Poles, and other groups whom they considered so- 
cially undesirable were their enemies too. After Jan- 
uary 1933 these groups were to become Nazism's 
first victims. 

The first big electoral breakthrough came on 
September 14, 1930, when the NSDAP became the 
second-largest party in the German parliament, the 
Reichstag. By July 1932 Hitler had run Germany's 
aging president and war hero Paul von Hindenburg 
a close race in presidential elections, and Hitler's 
position in the Reichstag was strengthened by elec- 
tions in which the NSDAP gained 37.3 percent of 
the vote, making it the largest party in the Reichs- 
tag. Although the Nazi vote fell by some four per- 
cent in the November elections of 1932, the machi- 
nations of power-brokers in the German state, such 
as former Director of the Reichsbank Hjalmar 
Schacht and ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen, en- 
sured that the chancellorship was delivered into 
Nazi hands. Although at first in a cabinet dominat- 
ed by conservatives, by March 1933 the Nazis had 
succeeded in suspending civil rights in Germany, 
arrested their leading left-wing opponents, and 
with the passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, 
1933, secured comprehensive law-making powers 
and unprecedented control of German society. 



THE NAZI RECOVERY 

Part of the Nazis' electoral appeal lay in their 
bold prescriptions for economic recovery. They 
promised to reorganize the economy to serve the 
interests of the nation and not the greedy demands 
of foreign bankers; they proposed new schemes to 
generate employment and to value the "ordinary 
German." But they skillfully avoided any talk of re- 
distributing wealth, so as not to put off middle -class 
supporters, including big business groups. The 
Nazis intended to exploit capitalism, not destroy it. 

The measures put in place to quell the German 
banking crisis of 1931 provided the foundation for 
Nazi economics. In September 1934, Schacht, now 
restored as director of the Reichsbank, issued the 
"New Plan," which turned the 1931 exchange con- 
trols into a complex system of monetary and trade 
restrictions. All imports had to be authorized by the 
German government, and German capital could 



not be moved abroad freely. (Of course, this action 
had implications for Jews and other groups who 
were trying to escape the country.) Germany be- 
came increasingly detached from the international 
economy, signing only bilateral trading agreements 
with countries that either sold essential commodi- 
ties or whose governments were central to German 
diplomatic ambitions. 

Under the Nazis, state policy came to control 
prices, wages, private investment banks, and all 
other aspects of investment. Despite all the hype, 
however, not all Nazi public works schemes were 
as effective as they claimed to be in soaking up un- 
employment or generating recovery more broadly. 
The most effective schemes centered on public 
building and construction programs that involved 
renovating houses and building new roads. From 
1935, the state's management of the domestic 
economy took a sinister turn as public investment 
in rearmament replaced civilian job creation as the 
basis for continued economic expansion — a move 
cemented by the introduction of the Four -Year Plan 
under the control of Nazi Minister and Chief Com- 
mander of the Luftwaffe (airforce) Hermann Go- 
ring. Aircraft production, for example, now leaped 
from its 1935 level of around three thousand aircraft 
a year to an annual average well in excess of five 
thousand. But this emphasis on military output also 
meant that consumables like clothing and house- 
hold goods became a poor second in Nazi priorities. 

Nazi spending policies were also used as a lever 
to extend the party's control over German society. 
Trade unions were destroyed; the government con- 
trolled wage rates (between 1933 and 1938 they 
dropped by around seven percent) and introduced 
compulsory labor service for some 400,000 men be- 
tween 1933 and 1935. The drop in German unem- 
ployment from a level of more than six million in 
1932 to less than a million by 1937 was spectacular, 
but the cost to civil liberties in Germany was incal- 
culable. In 1933 the Nazi publication the Volkischer 
Beobacher was proud to claim that Franklin Roose- 
velt had adopted the policies of Hitler and Mussoli- 
ni. There were parallels, albeit superficial ones, be- 
tween, for example, U.S. and German public-works 
schemes and the declared ambitions of the Reich 
Labor Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps. 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



L I D A Y 



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But the curtailment of individual and corporate 
freedoms in Germany was the clearest indication 
that U.S. and German recovery policies differed 
fundamentally from one another. 

See Also: DICTATORSHIP; EUROPE, GREAT 

DEPRESSION IN; KRISTALLNACHT; MUSSOLINI, 
BENITO; STALIN, JOSEPH; WORLD WAR II AND 
THE ENDING OF THE DEPRESSION. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Barkai, A. Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory and Policy. 
1990. 

Bessel, Richard, ed. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Com- 
parisons and Contrasts. 1996. 

Borchard, Knut. Perspectives on Modern German Economic 
History and Policy. 1991. 

Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. 2000. 

Fischer, Conan. The Rise of the Nazis, rev. edition. 2001. 

Garraty, John. "The New Deal, National Socialism and 
the Great Depression." American Historical Review 
78 (1973): 907-944. 

James, Harold. The German Slump: Politics and Economics, 
1932-36. 1986. 

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris. 1998. 

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis. 2000. 

Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspec- 
tives of Interpretation, rev. edition. 1993. 

Overy, Richard. The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932-38, 
rev. edition. 1995. 

Overy, Richard. War, Economy and the Third Reich. 1994. 

Patricia Clavin 



HOLC. See HOME OWNERS LOAN 
CORPORATION. 



HOLIDAY, BILLIE 



One of the most innovative jazz singers of all time, 
Billie Holiday (April 7, 1915-July 17, 1959) began 
her legendary singing career in Harlem nightclubs 
at the height of the Great Depression, catching the 
public's attention with her unique diction, phras- 
ing, and emotive vocals. 

Born Eleanora Fagan Gough in 1915 to teenage 
parents, Holiday spent her early years in poverty in 



Baltimore, Maryland. Her father, a jazz guitarist 
with Fletcher Henderson's band, never supported 
his family. Young Holiday dropped out of school in 
the fifth grade to run errands for a brothel. In 1927, 
she and her mother moved to New York City. Des- 
perate for money, she auditioned as a dancer in a 
Harlem speakeasy, Pod and Jerry's Log Cabin, but 
was hired as a singer instead. Growing up imitating 
Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, singing came 
naturally to Holiday. 

In 1933, jazz writer and producer John Ham- 
mond heard Holiday perform. Impressed with her 
bluesy renditions of jazz standards, he signed her 
to Columbia Records. The Depression created fi- 
nancial and racial difficulties for many African 
Americans, but black artists prospered during the 
1930s because New Deal legislation established the 
Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, 
providing unemployed artists and writers with 
work. The WPA contributed to the flourishing cul- 
tural scene in Harlem, in which Holiday was an in- 
tegral figure. She spent much of the 1930s perform- 
ing and touring with jazz legends Count Basie, 
Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington, but it was 
her collaboration with saxophonist Lester Young, 
who nicknamed her "Lady Day," that highlighted 
her unique vocal talents, jumpstarting her record- 
ing career. Between 1935 and 1938, she released 
approximately eighty songs marketed for the black 
jukebox audience. In 1935, she made her first of 
many appearances at Harlem's Apollo Theater, and 
in 1939 she became the first black performer to in- 
tegrate Artie Shaw's band. 

The same year, she performed her trademark 
song "Strange Fruit," a powerful condemnation of 
lynching, to an integrated audience at the Cafe So- 
ciety, a New York nightclub. The song came to rep- 
resent the black artist's experience with racism. In- 
creasing racial hostilities slowed Holiday's touring 
and hindered her commercial success. She spent 
the majority of the 1940s in New York performing 
and recording hit songs for Decca Records to avoid 
the violence of the South. In 1946, she appeared 
alongside Louis Armstrong in the film New Orleans, 
but expressed anger over having to portray a do- 
mestic. Her popularity as a singer afforded her little 
protection from the racial discrimination of the era. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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Although a success professionally, addiction 
and abusive relationships marred her personal life. 
She died in 1959 of complications from drug addic- 
tion. Despite poverty, racism, and sexism, Holiday 
remains one of the most influential American sing- 
ers of all time. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; ELLINGTON, DUKE; 
JAZZ; MUSIC. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Clarke, Donald. Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times 
of Billie Holiday. 1994. 

Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. "Or Does It Explode?" Black Har- 
lem in the Great Depression. 1991. 

Holiday, Billie, with William Duffy. Lady Sings the Blues. 
1956. 

Margolick, David. Strange Truit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Soci- 
ety, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. 2000. 

Mary L. Nash 



HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM 
INDUSTRY 

Motion pictures had already occupied a central 
place in American entertainment for nearly thirty 
years prior to the onset of the Great Depression. 
But during the ensuing decade, the Hollywood film 
industry assumed a new level of importance in the 
lives of Americans and in the shaping of a national 
culture. Movies offered needed escape for Depres- 
sion-weary audiences, and they created powerful 
myths to reconcile social tensions and affirm tradi- 
tional values. Indeed, by the time the nation went 
to war, the products of Hollywood had become vir- 
tually synonymous with America itself. 

SOCIAL DISORDER IN THE MOVIES, 
1930-1934 

The stock market crash of 1929 came at a par- 
ticularly difficult moment for Hollywood movie stu- 
dios caught in the process of financing the transi- 
tion from silent to talking pictures. Initially, the 
popular novelty of sound was enough to keep audi- 
ences coming to the movies, and moviegoers in 



1930 actually outnumbered those in 1929. But by 

1931 attendance had dropped, and Hollywood lost 
millions of dollars over the next several years. The 
movie industry cut salaries and production costs, 
lowered admission prices, and closed up to a third 
of the nation's theaters. Despite the steady popular 
demand for entertainment and escape, Hollywood 
appeared far from Depression-proof. Desperate to 
lure audiences back into theaters, the motion pic- 
ture industry experimented with new genres, 
themes, and subject matter. Hollywood's own fi- 
nancial depression had largely ended by 1934, but 
not before the industry had tested the boundaries 
of cultural acceptability in its drive to win over 
moviegoers wracked by social dislocation. 

Certainly the most controversial films to 
emerge from this era were the gangster pictures. 
Director Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1930), star- 
ring Edward G. Robinson as the Al Capone- 
inspired nemesis, established the basic elements of 
the genre. An ethnic criminal protagonist would 
climb his way to the top of the mob, leaving a path 
of bullet-riddled corpses behind him, only to meet 
his fatal comeuppance in a hail of police gunfire at 
the end. The recent introduction of sound allowed 
for gunshots, screams, and squealing tires to ampli- 
fy the unprecedented violence central to all these 
films. The Public Enemy (1931) included an unfor- 
gettable scene of Jimmy Cagney's gangster charac- 
ter shoving a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face. Di- 
rector Howard Hawk's Scarf ace (1932), starring Paul 
Muni, featured characters and situations so disturb- 
ing that it was almost too explosive for its time. 

While there are many ways to interpret such 
films, it seems clear that Depression-era audiences 
must have experienced a vicarious thrill by seeing 
nihilistic gangster antiheroes shoot their way 
through a society in chaos, for such disorder paral- 
leled the lives of millions of suffering and frustrated 
Americans. Gangster pictures also reflected a cyni- 
cal view of society, in which the Victorian middle - 
class success ethic had been perverted into a drive 
fueled by merciless and ultimately self- destructive 
ambition — a suitable metaphor for the causes of the 
Depression itself. 

Some movies spoke even more directly to the 
theme of common Americans victimized by cruel 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



HOLLYWOOD 



AND T 



E FILM 



I N D 



S T R Y 




Eleanor Roosevelt with Shirley Temple, one of the most popular movie stars of the Depression era, in 1938. Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt Library 



economic and social forces. In LeRoy's powerful I 
Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Paul Muni 
plays an unemployed war veteran wrongly impli- 
cated in a robbery and sentenced to hard labor in 
a brutal Southern prison. After escaping, he estab- 
lishes a new life as a respected engineer, but is sent 
back to prison after his vengeful wife betrays his 
identity to the authorities. He escapes once again, 
but only to the life of a fugitive, running from shad- 
ows and stealing to survive. An unjust society thus 
forces a good man to become a criminal. 

Comedies of the early 1930s also captured the 
prevailing mood of disorientation. The Marx Broth- 
ers (Groucho, Chico, Harpo, andZeppo) developed 
an inimitable style of lightning- quick improvisation 



and anarchic humor that sometimes left even their 
supporting cast confused but had audiences literally 
rolling in the aisles. In such films as Animal Crackers 
(1930), Horse Feathers (1932), and A Night at the 
Opera (1935) the Marx Brothers typically played the 
role of unemployed charlatans who mocked the 
pretensions and snobbery of the upper class. In 
Duck Soup (1933) Groucho satirized a "reforming" 
national leader who was in fact out for himself. At 
a time when much of the nation was pinning their 
hopes on Franklin D. Roosevelt, the film was not as 
well received as it was to be in later years. Mae West 
became the most influential female comedian of 
her time by subverting middle-class norms of sexu- 
al propriety and male dominance with smirking 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 6 R E A F DEPRESSION 



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S T R Y 



double entendres. W. C. Fields sharply satirized 
family life in The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) 
and established a funny, yet vaguely unsettling, 
screen character deeply at odds with civilization. 

The search for a winning formula to get audi- 
ences into the theaters led some studios to exploit 
the fantastic, the bizarre, and the grotesque. Uni- 
versal Pictures found a youthful market for horror 
with such films as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein 
(1931), and The Mummy (1932). PJCO's King Kong 
(1933) employed pioneering special effects to tell 
the story of a gigantic ape captured from his tropical 
island home and brought to New York City by 
greedy promoters. After escaping, rampaging 
through the city, and scaling the Empire State 
Building with his captive woman, Kong is killed by 
American fighter planes, and the audience is left 
oddly ambivalent about the justice in his tragic fate. 

The Depression era also saw the birth of the ex- 
ploitation film. Certainly the most bizarre stab at 
winning an audience through shock was Freaks 
(1932), which documented the underworld of actu- 
al deformed sideshow performers. Not for the 
squeamish, this oddity has since become a cult fa- 
vorite, but it is doubtful whether many contempo- 
rary moviegoers were ready for it. The remarkably 
lurid and inept Reefer Madness (1938) purported to 
be an expose of the demented marijuana subcul- 
ture. Its effect, however, was probably more likely 
to titillate and inspire curiosity in the "devil weed." 

While most of Hollywood's output during the 
early Depression years remained well within the 
bounds of mainstream social acceptability, the at- 
tention generated by the most lurid, violent, and 
sexually provocative films supplied new ammuni- 
tion to those calling for greater censorship. Since 
the earliest days of the motion picture industry, 
such interest groups as the Catholic Legion of De- 
cency had worked to restrain the cultural influence 
of movies and control their content, but the studios 
had so far resisted most outside pressure. Con- 
fronted with diminishing profits and the uncertain- 
ties of a Depression-wracked market, however, 
Hollywood capitulated. In 1934 the industry ap- 
pointed Joseph Breen to supervise the Motion Pic- 
ture Production Code Administration. When Mar- 
tin Quigley, a Catholic layman and motion picture 



trade publisher, first prepared the Production Code 
in 1930, moviemakers had treated it mainly as a 
public relations tool. But now Breen would have the 
absolute authority to approve, censor, or reject any 
Hollywood movie subject to the code. The code 
prohibited a whole range of actions and expres- 
sions, including the kind of suggestive sexuality 
that had recently made its way into the movies. It 
also dictated that all "bad" acts had to be followed 
by sure punishment or rehabilitation, and insisted 
on no ambiguity between good and evil. The en- 
forcement of the Production Code effectively ended 
Hollywood's brief era of adventurism in the early 
1930s. 

THE RETURN TO ORDER, 1935-1940 

The films of the second half of the decade re- 
flected both the influence of the code and the desire 
of leading moviemakers to shift the artistic focus of 
their industry. Top Hollywood producers like Dar- 
ryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox and MGM's 
Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick decided that 
there was greater prestige and profit to be gained 
from more conservative and dignified pictures that 
appealed to the ideals, dreams, and traditional val- 
ues of moviegoers. As a result, the films of the later 
Depression years tended to reinforce and reaffirm 
the social order, rather than challenge or disrupt it. 

One could see the changes, for example, in the 
new style of comedy. Gone was the edgy and sub- 
versive humor of the early 1930s, and in its place 
were such lighthearted "screwball" comedies as My 
Man Godfrey (1936), Topper (1937), and The Phila- 
delphia Story (1940). Although these films some- 
times played with social conventions, they ulti- 
mately affirmed the sanctity of marriage, accepted 
class divisions, and upheld the status quo. Mae 
West, W. C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers contin- 
ued to make movies, but only with their wilder im- 
pulses tamed into more insipid vehicles that traded 
on past glories. The most anarchic and irreverent 
humor in film could no longer be found in live- 
action features, but survived in the madcap animat- 
ed shorts directed by Leon Schlesinger and Chuck 
Jones at Warner Brothers and by Tex Avery at 
MGM. 

The later Depression years also saw the steady 
release of big-budget films based on classic novels 



450 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF F H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



HOLLYWOOD 



AND T 



E FILM 



I N D 



S T R Y 



and respectable best-sellers. Such pictures as Muti- 
ny on the Bounty (1935), The Wizard of Oz (1939), 
and the biggest film of the decade, Gone with the 
Wind (1939) provided high-quality entertainment 
couched within conservative morality: respect au- 
thority, cherish small-town communities, and per- 
severe with individual courage in the face of adver- 
sity. Likewise, Walt Disney produced dazzling 
animated films adapted from classic fairy tales and 
children's stories like Snow White and the Seven 
Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940), each of which 
extolled respect for traditional values. 

Two of the most important directors of the de- 
cade, Frank Capra and John Ford, produced films 
that aimed to reconcile traditional Jeffersonian val- 
ues with the new reality of big government inter- 
ventionism in the New Deal era. Americans would 
prevail in these hard times, so assured the movies, 
because of their intrinsic morality and simple integ- 
rity. Capra celebrated the decency of the common 
man and praised the virtues of small-town America 
in films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), 
which pitted the plainspoken idealist Jefferson 
Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart, against corrupt 
senators presiding over an ineffectual U.S. govern- 
ment. Ford reinvented the Western film as cine- 
matic art and a symbol of patriotic regeneration 
with Stagecoach (1939), featuring a star-making per- 
formance by John Wayne. He then went on to di- 
rect the greatest of all motion pictures about the 
Depression, The Grapes of Wrath (1940). While ac- 
knowledging the positive role played by federal 
New Deal agencies, the true heroes in Ford's adap- 
tation of John Steinbeck's novel are the Joad family 
themselves, who maintain their heartland spirit and 
noble dignity throughout a grim exodus from the 
Oklahoma Dust Bowl to the wretched migrant 
camps of California. As Tom Joad, actor Henry 
Fonda delivered the film's definitive speech, prom- 
ising his mother as he bids her farewell, "I'll be all 
around . . . Wherever there's a fight so hungry 
people can eat . . . Wherever there's a cop beating 
a guy, I'll be there . . . And when the people are 
eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses 
they build, I'll be there too." In further affirmation, 
his mother closes the film with another rallying 
speech, "Can't wipe us out. Can't lick us. We'll go 
on forever. 'Cause we're the people." 



With few exceptions, Hollywood's image of the 
"common man" did not include a place for black 
Americans. Aside from a few roles allotted for ser- 
vants and slaves, such as Hattie McDaniel's charac- 
ter in Gone with the Wind and Paul Robeson's sing- 
ing performance in Showboat (1936), blacks found 
expression primarily in independently-produced 
"race movies." Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering 
black filmmaker of the silent era, directed several 
films during the 1930s. And the gangster genre 
lived on in black films like Am I Guilty (1940) years 
after the Production Code effectively killed it in 
Hollywood. 

Various political winds blew through the mo- 
tion picture industry during the 1930s, some with 
a far-lasting impact. Frightened by the 1934 Cali- 
fornia gubernatorial campaign of socialist Upton 
Sinclair, the studios distributed to theaters reels of 
what amounted to campaign attack ads that helped 
to foil his election bid. But the film industry as a 
whole tilted toward liberal causes. In 1936, despite 
wide mainstream isolationist sentiment, the Holly- 
wood Anti-Nazi League organized to highlight the 
menace of international fascism and champion the 
Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. The leftist 
politics of the Popular Front attracted idealists 
within Hollywood, and the film industry also 
became a base for Communist Party organizers, 
who successfully recruited a number of movie 
workers. Within a decade many of these leftist writ- 
ers, directors, and actors would find themselves 
under attack and sometimes even blacklisted for 
their Depression-era politics, as Hollywood suc- 
cumbed to the red-baiting of the Cold War. 

See Also: CAGNEY, JAMES; CAPRA, FRANK; 

CHAPLIN, CHARLIE; DISNEY, WALT; FORD, 
JOHN; FREAKS; GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE 
HOUSE; GANGSTER FILMS; GOLD DIGGERS OF 
1933; GONE WITH THE WIND; I AM A FUGITIVE 
FROM A CHAIN GANG; LITTLE CAESAR; MARX 
BROTHERS; MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON; 
OUR DAILY BREAD; PRODUCTION CODE 
ADMINISTRATION (HAYS OFFICE); SNOW WHITE 
AND THE SEVEN DWARFS; WELLES, ORSON; 
WEST, MAE; WIZARD OF OZ. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



i.5 1 



L M E S 



OLIVER WENDELL 



J R 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bergman, Andrew. We're in the Money: Depression Ameri- 
ca and Its Films. 1971. 

Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood: The 
Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Films. 2002. 

Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in 
Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 
1930-1960. 1980. 

Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The 'Negro in Ameri- 
can Film, 1900-1942. 1993. 

Hamilton, Marybeth. "When I'm Bad, I'm Better": Mae 
West, Sex, and American Fntertainment. 1995. 

Home, Gerald. Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: 
Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists. 
2001. 

Kendall, Elizabeth. The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Ro- 
mantic Comedy of the 1930s. 1990. 

Louvish, Simon. Monkey Business, the Lives and Legends 
of the Marx Brothers: Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, 
with Added Gummo. 2000. 

May, Lary. The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics 
of the American Way. 2000. 

McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. 
1992. 

Munby, Jonathan. Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening 
the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. 1999. 

Roberts, Randy, and James Olson. John Wayne: American. 
1995. 

Sarris, Andrew. "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet": The Ameri- 
can Talking Film: History, and Memory, 1927-1949. 
1998. 

Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, 
and the Studio System. 1981. 

Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood 
Filmmaking in the Studio Era. 1988. 

Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, 
and Commerce of Walt Disney. 1968. 

Sklar, Robert. City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield. 1992. 

Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of 
American Movies. 1975. 

Smoodin, Eric. Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons 
from the Sound Era. 1993. 

Bradford W. Wright 



HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, JR. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (March 8, 1841-March 
6, 1935) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His fa- 



ther was a physician and literary figure; his mother, 
Amelia Lee Jackson, a prominent society leader ac- 
tive in charitable causes. Holmes's mother, to 
whom the future Supreme Court justice bore a 
close physical resemblance, was the daughter of a 
prominent Boston lawyer and judge. Holmes at- 
tended private schools and Harvard but he benefit- 
ed especially from the strong intellectual influence 
of his parents, whose visitors regularly included 
major writers and thinkers of the day. 

A student at Harvard when the nation erupted 
in civil war, Holmes promptly enlisted in the infan- 
try, graduated from college, and was given a com- 
mission as a second lieutenant. As a member of the 
Army of the Potomac, he developed an impressive 
record and was injured in combat on three occa- 
sions. When his injuries forced his resignation from 
the service in 1864, he held the rank of captain. 

On returning to Boston, Holmes attended Har- 
vard Law School, then toured Great Britain and the 
continent of Europe to complete his education. A 
clerkship in Boston and admission to the bar in 
1867 followed. In 1872, Holmes married his child- 
hood friend Fanny Dixwell and joined a Boston firm 
specializing in commercial and admiralty law. But 
he also had an enduring interest in legal scholar- 
ship, and in 1881, a few days before his fortieth 
birthday, his Lowell Lectures in Boston were pub- 
lished as a book. The Common Law would become 
one of the most influential studies of its kind, exert- 
ing a major impact on the development of the so- 
ciological and legal realist schools of jurisprudence. 

Following publication of The Common Law, 
Holmes taught a semester at Harvard University, 
then accepted an appointment as a justice of the 
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, on which 
he served twenty years, becoming its chief justice in 
1899. 

In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt ap- 
pointed Holmes to a seat on the United States Su- 
preme Court. In his scholarly writings, Holmes had 
stressed the degree to which judges' life experi- 
ences, rather than logic, guided their decisions. As 
a justice, however, he generally opposed judicial in- 
terference with legislative judgments, especially in 
regulatory cases. Dissenting in Lochner v. New York 
(1905) and related cases, striking down maximum 



452 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



M E L E S S N E S S 



hour (Lochner), minimum wage, and other state 
and federal regulations, he attacked the Court's use 
of substantive due process as a weapon against eco- 
nomic legislation. Personally, he was skeptical of 
government efforts to control the economy. But in 
his view such decisions rested with legislators and 
the electorate, not with the courts. 

Holmes usually gave non-economic substan- 
tive guarantees a narrow reading as well, refusing 
to equate laws forbidding tenant farmers to break 
their labor contracts with involuntary servitude. But 
the version of the clear and present danger test he 
ultimately embraced in Abrams v. United States 
(1919) and other World War I dissents was clearly 
more protective of free speech than the majority in- 
terpretation of the First Amendment in that era. He 
also joined Justice Louis Brandeis's dissent in Olms- 
tead v. United States (1928), declaring that wiretap- 
ping should be subjected to Fourth Amendment re- 
quirements. 

When Chief Justice William Howard Taft re- 
signed from the bench in 1930, Holmes thrived in 
his brief role as acting chief justice. He also contin- 
ued to challenge the Court's growing body of rul- 
ings restricting federal and state regulatory authori- 
ty. When a majority, in Farmers Loan and Trust Co. 
v. Minnesota (1930), overturned his opinion gener- 
ously construing state tax power in Blackstone v. 
Miller (1903), the justice dissented, expressing his 
"anxiety" over the Court's further encroachment on 
"the Constitutional rights of the States." 

After Holmes' beloved wife Fanny died in 1929, 
however, his own health had begun to decline, as 
had his ability to keep abreast of the Court's work. 
In 1932, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes visited 
his home, explaining that a majority of the Court 
had asked Hughes to suggest that Holmes resign. 
Without apparent opposition or resentment, 
Holmes complied, sending the president his retire- 
ment letter on January 12, 1932. In 1935, he died at 
his home in Washington. He had served thirty 
years on the bench, under four chief justices. He is 
remembered as one of the Court's most outstand- 
ing jurists. 

See Also: BLACK, HUGO; DOUGLAS, WILLIAM O.; 
FRANKFURTER, FELIX; HUGHES, CHARLES 
EVANS; SUPREME COURT. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Alschuler, Albert W. Law without Values: The Life, Work, 
and Legacy of Justice Holmes. 2000. 

Baker, Liva. The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and 
Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes. 1991. 

Novick, Sheldon M. Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver 
Wendell Holmes. 1989. 

White, G. Edward. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and 
the Inner Self. 1993. 

TlNSLEY E. YARBROUGH 



HOMELESSNESS 

Poor people without permanent shelter have al- 
ways had a presence in the United States, and the 
homeless were much noticed on the edges of grow- 
ing cities or riding the railroads during the nine- 
teenth century. But Hooverville shantytowns and 
migrant Okie families driving West during the De- 
pression brought unprecedented national attention 
and federal intervention to the problem of home- 
lessness. Even during the Depression years, howev- 
er, the experience of the homeless was not uniform 
and aid programs were far from comprehensive. 
Public response to the homeless alternated be- 
tween antagonism and empathy. 

In the late 1920s there were already increasing 
numbers of homeless people in community shel- 
ters. When the Depression hit, many of the newly 
unemployed headed to cities looking for jobs, over- 
whelming municipal lodging houses and private 
agencies. In 1931, for example, the number of 
homeless using shelters in Minneapolis increased 
fourfold over the previous year. Local and regional 
response was mixed, but certain patterns emerged. 
Cities could be more or less lenient in enforcing set- 
tlement laws, which mandated prior residency for 
relief and the return of potential public charges to 
their state of legal residence. In practice, though, 
few cities offered more than a night's shelter and a 
meal for nonresidents. In the Deep South, tran- 
sients could be arrested and sent to work on chain 
gangs, and the few cities that had municipal shel- 
ters for the local poor excluded African Americans 
from them. Chicago expanded separate services for 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



1.53 



H M E L E S S N E S S 



.... 




Homeless people lived in shacks under the arches of the D Street Bridge in Marysville, California. Photographed by Dorothea 
Lange in February 1940, there were about twenty-eight shacks under the bridge, mostly housing single men. Native Archives and 
Records Administration 



the homeless of both races, and a 1931 protest of 
the homeless in New York City led to improve- 
ments at the municipal lodging house. Still, much 
of the additional shelter was provided by private or- 
ganizations like the Salvation Army. Religious mis- 
sions provided shelter regardless of residency sta- 
tus, though they required that the homeless attend 
religious services. Small charities started soup 
kitchens and breadlines for anyone who was hun- 
gry- 
Contemporary depictions of the homeless por- 
trayed those waiting in breadlines as iconic victims 
of the nation's economic ruin. Though single 
women were frequently absent from the lines and 
rarely represented, they made up an increasing, 



though still small, percentage of the conservatively 
estimated 1.25 million unattached (i.e., not in fami- 
lies) homeless tallied in a 1933 census of 765 cities. 
The standard social work policy was to send tran- 
sient women back to the residence of their families 
or husbands, so some homeless women avoided 
urban aid agencies. Many traveled on trains dressed 
in men's clothes, though this did not insure their 
safety. As "Boxcar" Bertha Thompson recalled, fe- 
male hobos, like their male counterparts, took to 
the road for lack of money and the desire for free- 
dom. 

More visible was the increasing number of beg- 
gars. It became untenable to enforce anti-begging 
laws when some poor people deliberately tried to 



451. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



M E L E S S N E S S 



get arrested for the shelter of a lockup and when 
the increasing number of newly unemployed semi- 
skilled and white-collar workers elicited public 
sympathy. Most visible, perhaps, were the home- 
less who rode in boxcars and set up hobo camps or 
"jungles" at junctions and in cities. In 1932, World 
War I veterans traveled by train to Washington, 
D.C., and set up a large shantytown that swelled 
with those who supported their demand for ad- 
vance payment of war bonuses. When President 
Herbert Hoover sent the U.S. Army to route this 
"bonus army" of the country's "worthiest" poor, 
public opinion turned even more against him. 

The increasing number of homeless children — 
an estimated one-fifth of the homeless population 
was nineteen or younger — also attracted the atten- 
tion of advocates. Many of these youngsters left 
home so as not to burden their families, which 
often were already disrupted or on relief. In 1932 a 
coalition of welfare advocates urged the Senate to 
pass a federal homeless program that would, in 
providing relief for the transient homeless, save the 
character of America's children. 

In May 1933, President Roosevelt established 
the Federal Transient Service (FTS) as part of the 
Federal Emergency Relief Act. FTS was designed to 
provide aid for homeless people who were ineligi- 
ble for local relief because they had not lived in any 
given state for more than the year required for set- 
tlement status. FTS eventually established pro- 
grams in every state except Vermont. The service al- 
lotted the most money to California, which, with 
4.7 percent of the nation's population, handled 14 
percent of the nation's transients. FTS ran shelters 
that provided food, clothing, and medical care to 
residents, as well as work training and education 
programs to some who stayed for long periods. FTS 
also started camps in rural areas where homeless 
men were assigned public work and conservation 
projects, such as flood control and park improve- 
ment. Many camps and centers were partly self- 
governed and staffed by residents. FTS also paid for 
rooms in boarding houses or YMCAs to accommo- 
date transient women, and the agency allotted 
apartments and relief payments to families; as 
Harry Hopkins, director of the Federal Emergency 
Relief Administration, wrote, "shelter care for fami- 




Many sharecroppers, like these living along the highway in 
New Madrid county, Missouri, in 1939, became homeless 
when they were evicted from their farms after drought caused 
their crops to fail. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs 
Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



lies was taboo." FTS left the issue of integration and 
equality up to local practice. Many urban FTS cen- 
ters were segregated, and in the South separate 
black shelters were, according to a 1934 FTS report, 
"not quite equal to those provided for the whites." 

In 1935, FTS was phased out because, accord- 
ing to Hopkins, transients had "to be recognized as 
being no different from the rest of the unem- 
ployed." The end of FTS marked a general shift 
away from direct relief and toward work-related 
and constituency-specific New Deal programs. 
However, only about 20 percent of the unemployed 
transients formerly housed by FTS were able to get 
jobs with the Works Progress Administration; few 
young transients were eligible for the Civilian Con- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



455 



H M E L E S S N E S S 




Homeless men take shelter in the heal homeless men's bureau dormitory in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1936. Library of Congress, Prints 
& Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



servation Corps, and the Resettlement Administra- 
tion's forty-five camps for migratory workers could 
not meet demand. Meanwhile, the number of 
homeless people increased in the latter half of the 
decade as factories closed and tenant farmers were 
displaced. Moreover, between January 1938 and 
October 1939, eight states increased residency re- 
quirements for relief. Few states allowed settlement 
status to carry over until acquired in another state 
so that typically those who moved were ineligible 
for aid. In most cities, overwhelmed private shelters 
and police stations led to increased hostility to- 
wards transients. Some communities, especially in 
the South and West, used extralegal means, such as 
border patrols, forced removals, and unwarranted 
arrests, to keep the homeless out. 

John Steinbeck's portrayal of a transient farm 
family's struggle for survival in The Grapes of Wrath 



(1939) raised public sympathy for the homeless, 
though it did not address the majority of the home- 
less population, which lived in cities, and the dis- 
proportionate number of homeless African Ameri- 
cans and Mexican seasonal workers. A month after 
the premier of John Ford's 1940 film version of 
Steinbeck's story, a House committee began hear- 
ings on interstate migration of the destitute, but the 
advent of World War II shifted its focus to an inves- 
tigation of defense migration. As many of the 
homeless joined the army and found employment 
in war industries, relief programs were reduced and 
city shelters closed; those homeless who remained 
were left to the missions, casual employment agen- 
cies, and skid row hotels. It was not until 1969 that 
the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the 
residency requirements for benefit eligibility. 
Homelessness would not recapture the national at- 
tention it had during the Depression until the late 



456 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



M E 



OWNERS 



LOAN 



C R P R A E I N 



H L C 



1970s, when it was thrust to the fore as a result of 
deindustrialization and urban renewal. 

See Also: BONUS ARMY/BONUS MARCH; 

BREADLENES; CHARETY; CHELDREN AND 
ADOLESCENTS, EMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSEON ON; FAMELY AND HOME, EMPACT 
OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; SOUP 
KITCHENS; TRANSEENTS. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Anderson, Nels. On Hobos and Homelessness, edited by 
Raffaele Rauty. 1998. 

Box-Car Bertha with Ben Reitman. Boxcar Bertha: An Au- 
tobiography. 1937. 

Crouse, Joan M. The Homeless Transient in the Great De- 
pression: New York State, 1929-1941. 1986. 

Gold, Christina Anne Sheehan. "Hoovervilles: Home- 
lessness and Squatting in California during the 
Great Depression." Ph.D. diss., University of Cali- 
fornia, Berkeley, 1998. 

Golden, Stephanie. The Women Outside: Meanings and 
Myths of Homelessness. 1992. 

Kusmer, Kenneth L. Down and Out, On the Road: The 
Homeless in American History. 2002. 

Reed, Ellery F. Tederal Transient Program: An Evaluative 
Survey, May to July 1934. 1934. 

Uys, Michael, and Lexy Lovell, directors and producers. 
Riding the Rails. 1997. 

Wickenden, Elizabeth "Reminiscences of the Program 
for Transients and Homeless in the Thirties." In On 
Being Homeless: Historical Perspectives, edited by Rick 
Beard. 1987. 

Yael Schacher 



HOME OWNERS LOAN 
CORPORATION (HOLC) 

Diminished wages, widespread unemployment, 
and few, if any, refinancing options made it difficult 
for home owners to meet monthly mortgage pay- 
ments during the Great Depression. By the spring 
of 1933, with almost a thousand foreclosures a day, 
President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress on 
April 13, 1933, for "legislation to protect small 
home owners from foreclosure." Lawmakers re- 
sponded by creating the Home Owners Loan Cor- 
poration (HOLC) on June 13, 1933. 



The HOLC, which was under the supervision 
of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, did not ac- 
tually lend money to home owners. Instead, the 
agency purchased and refinanced mortgages in de- 
fault or foreclosure from financial institutions 
(lenders). In exchange for mortgages, the HOLC 
gave lenders government bonds paying 4 percent 
interest (later reduced to 3 percent). Capitalized 
with $200 million from the U.S. Treasury, the 
HOLC was authorized to issue $2 billion in bonds, 
an amount eventually increased to $4.75 billion. 
During a peak period in the spring of 1934, it pro- 
cessed over 35,000 loan applications per week and 
employed almost 21,000 people in 458 offices 
throughout the country. The law authorizing the 
HOLC's lending activities expired on June 12, 1936. 
By that time, the HOLC had made 1,021,587 loans, 
making it the owner of approximately one-sixth of 
the urban home mortgage debt in the United 
States. The HOLC's operations were not officially 
terminated until February 3, 1954. 

The Roosevelt administration credited the 
HOLC with a restoration of economic morale, a re- 
duction of foreclosure rates, and payment of almost 
$250 million in delinquent taxes to state and mu- 
nicipal governments. Subsequent scholars have 
generally agreed with this positive evaluation, as- 
serting that the HOLC was significant because it in- 
troduced the long-term, self-amortizing mortgage. 
Indeed, with HOLC mortgages refinanced at 5 per- 
cent interest over fifteen years, home ownership 
became feasible for those who had been previously 
unable to afford short-term mortgages at high in- 
terest rates. 

Some commentators, however, criticized the 
HOLC's practice of indirectly assisting home own- 
ers through programs that directly aided mortgage 
lenders. The urban reformer Charles Abrams point- 
ed out that, on average, the HOLC refinanced the 
mortgages it purchased for only 7 percent less than 
the previous, admittedly inflated, value of the prop- 
erty in question (the value of residential real estate 
had risen appreciably during the 1920s). The 
HOLC, for example, might refinance a $10,000 
mortgage as if the initial amount loaned to the 
home owner had been $9,300, but that figure — 
$9,300 — could still be significantly higher than the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E E H E 6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



V>1 



V E R 



H E R 



E R E 



current deflated market value of the property. 
Under this arrangement, lenders only had to forego 
a small part of their capital, plus they received 
government-backed bonds in place of frozen mort- 
gages. On the other hand, by propping up the face 
values of its refinanced mortgages, the HOLC com- 
pelled home owners to repay inflated 1920s mort- 
gage loans with deflated 1930s wages. 

The HOLC also developed a neighborhood 
mortgage rating system. The lowest rated neigh- 
borhoods — those with high concentrations of racial 
minorities — were "redlined" by the HOLC, a term 
denoting an area considered too risky for govern- 
ment mortgage assistance. Redlining was adopted 
not only by private lenders, but also by public agen- 
cies, most notably the Federal Housing Administra- 
tion (FHA), which was part of the National Hous- 
ing Act of 1934. The FHA, by extending mortgage 
insurance to lenders, encouraged banks to liberalize 
financing terms for potential homeowners. Thus, 
while the HOLC and the FHA assisted some Amer- 
icans in keeping their homes or in purchasing new 
ones, they both used redlining to prevent minority 
groups, especially African Americans, from doing 
likewise. This practice helped perpetuate and ex- 
tend the pattern of segregated neighborhoods and 
suburbs throughout America. 

See Also: FEDERAL HOUSING ADMINISTRATION 

(FHA); HOUSING; NATIONAL HOUSING ACT OF 
1934. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Abrams, Charles. The Future of Housing. 1946. 

Henderson, A. Scott. Housing and the Democratic Ideal: 
The Life and Thought of Charles Abrams. 2000. 

Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbaniza- 
tion of the United States. 1985. 

Keith, Nathaniel S. Politics and the Housing Crisis Since 
1930. 1973. 

Radford, Gail. Modern Housing for America: Policy Strug- 
gles in the New Deal Era. 1996. 

A. Scott Henderson 



HOOVER, HERBERT 



Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874-October 
20, 1964) was an engineer, financier, humanitarian, 
public servant, president of the United States, and 
elder statesman. Born in West Branch, Iowa, he was 
the second of three children of Jesse Clark Hoover, 
a blacksmith, inventor, and seller of farm imple- 
ments, and his wife, Huldah Minthorn, a minister 
of the Society of Friends. Both parents died before 
"Bertie" was ten. He spent his adolescence in Ore- 
gon in the household of his maternal uncle and at- 
tended the Quaker academy his uncle superintend- 
ed before going to work as an office boy in his 
uncle's land development office. 

At age seventeen, Hoover became the youngest 
member of the "pioneer class" of Leland Stanford 
Junior University in Palo Alto, California. He stud- 
ied geology, engaged in campus politics as an anti- 
fraternity "barbarian," was elected treasurer, intro- 
duced fiscal responsibility in the football program, 
and met his future wife, Lou Henry, a fellow Iowan. 
He graduated in May 1895, not yet twenty-one 
years old. Always a loyal alumnus and generous 
contributor, in 1912 Hoover began half a century of 
service on Stanford's board of trustees. His bene- 
factions included the Stanford Union, the Food Re- 
search Institute, and the Graduate School of Busi- 
ness. In 1919, he founded at Stanford the Hoover 
Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, a vast 
archive of records relating to political events of the 
early and mid-twentieth century. 

Hoover worked briefly as a common miner be- 
fore joining a prestigious San Francisco engineering 
firm. In 1897, Bewick, Moreing and Company of 
London hired him as an "inspecting engineer" to 
find and develop new properties in Australia, the 
most spectacular of which was the Sons of Gwalia 
mine. Success led to an assignment to China as 
technical consultant to the director-general of 
mines in Chihli province, at a substantial increase 
in salary. En route, Hoover stopped in Monterey, 
California, to marry Lou Henry. In Tientsin, they 
came under fire during the Boxer Rebellion. Again, 
success earned promotion, a partnership in Bewick, 
Moreing, which lasted until he established his own 
firm in 1908. As an engineer and financier, Hoover 



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became known as the "doctor of sick mines," trav- 
eling around the world five times with his wife and 
two sons. In addition, Hoover and his wife collabo- 
rated in the translation of a sixteenth-century Latin 
mining text, De Re Metallica, by Georg Bauer 
(known as Agricola). Hoover also published exten- 
sively in mining journals and lectured at the Co- 
lumbia School of Mines. By 1914, he had made a 
considerable fortune and was looking for a way to 
enter public life, perhaps as the publisher of an 
American newspaper. 

FOOD RELIEF DURING WORLD WAR I 

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, 
both Hoovers aided the repatriation of stranded 
Americans. Herbert Hoover next established the 
Commission for Relief in Belgium, which provided 
millions of tons of food to starving people in Bel- 
gium and France from 1914 until the American dec- 
laration of war in 1917. Hoover then returned to the 
United States as food administrator in the Wilson 
administration. Orchestrating a massive but decen- 
tralized campaign for voluntary cooperation in food 
conservation to support the war effort, Hoover be- 
came a master of public relations as well as a valued 
member of Wilson's war cabinet. At the end of the 
war, he resumed international food relief with the 
American Relief Administration, which combined 
humanitarian aid with major contributions to the 
economic reconstruction of Europe. 

SECRETARY OF COMMERCE 

Although briefly considered by both parties as 
a presidential nominee in 1920, Hoover became 
secretary of commerce in the cabinet of Warren G. 
Harding, remaining in that post through most of 
the administration of Calvin Coolidge as well. 

Hoover energetically reorganized and expand- 
ed the Department of Commerce from a minor 
agency into a complex organization with far- 
sweeping domestic and international influence. 
Major divisions dealt with industry, trade, and 
transportation. A new bureau collected and distrib- 
uted statistics, consistent with Hoover's belief that 
business efficiency depended on accurate and 
shared information. The Bureau of Standards en- 
couraged systematization of industrial technology. 




Herbert Hoover (left) and Secretary of Labor James }. Davis 
outside the White House in the early 1920s, when Hoover 
was secretary of commerce. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division 



Appropriations for the Bureau of Foreign and Do- 
mestic Commerce increased by nearly half, its 
branch offices at home and abroad doubled, and 
personnel grew five-fold. The workforce was racial- 
ly desegregated. New divisions supervised aviation, 
radio, and housing. 

With an engineer's concern for efficiency and a 
progressive's dedication to community responsibil- 
ity, Hoover advocated a form of capitalism based on 
associationalism and cooperation. Believing that 
waste, selfishness, and destructive competition led 
to inefficiency and unemployment, he sought to 
make government a servant of self-regulating eco- 
nomic units. He favored diversification of stock 
ownership, attacked the twelve-hour workday in 
the steel industry, and encouraged trade associa- 
tions and individual firms to standardize products 
and processes to eliminate waste. The Department 
of Commerce undertook massive educational cam- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE 6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



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V E R , HERBERT 




President Herbert Hoover (seated) signs the farm relief bill in June 1929. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division 



paigns to convince business leaders and the public 
to embrace fact-based planning, voluntary cooper- 
ation, and community responsibility. More than 
two hundred conferences addressed topics ranging 
from unemployment to highway safety, housing, 
conservation, and child health. Experts highlighted 
conditions, disseminated information, and rallied 
public support for already-developed solutions. 

In 1927 when the Mississippi River flooded a 
20,000 square mile area, leaving 600,000 people 
homeless, Hoover took personal charge, mobilizing 
local and state resources, the Red Cross, the Army 
Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard, and countless 
volunteers to evacuate, shelter, and feed flood vic- 
tims; to provide sanitation and combat epidemics; 
and to finance low-cost rehabilitation loans. In an- 
other example of federal, local, and private partner- 
ship, he negotiated an interstate agreement for ac- 
cess to the waters of the Colorado River and federal 
construction of a dam in Boulder Canyon that 
would provide hydroelectric power to municipal 



and private distributors. He advocated a network of 
waterways that eventually became the Saint Law- 
rence Seaway. 

Hoover articulated his philosophy of "Ameri- 
can Individualism" in a small book published in 
1922. A unique combination of individual enter- 
prise and community obligation, it called for educa- 
tion, competition, individual liberties, and "volun- 
tary organizational cooperation for the common 
good." 



PRESIDENCY 

When Calvin Coolidge did not "choose to run" 
for another term as president in 1928, Hoover rode 
"Republican prosperity" to an easy victory over 
Alfred E. Smith, who also suffered the political 
liabilities of being a Roman Catholic and an oppo- 
nent of prohibition. The president-elect then made 
a "good neighbor" tour of eleven Latin American 
countries. 



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President Hoover (left) and President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the way to Roosevelt's inauguration in Washington, D.C., on 
March 4, 1933. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



Hoover hoped for a presidency in which Amer- 
ican individualism, associationalism, expertise, and 
technology would bring greater rationality, efficien- 
cy, humanity, and more widespread prosperity to 
the American people. As he had during his years as 
secretary of commerce, he recruited experts and 
commissioned extensive research, expecting that 
their data and analysis would form the basis for en- 
lightened public policy. The White House Confer- 
ence on Child Health and Protection produced a 
nineteen-point Children's Charter as well as a 35- 
volume report that influenced social workers for 
many years and inspired much local legislation. 
Ironically, a major set of findings, published in 1933 
as Recent Social Trends documented the extraordi- 



nary modernization of the United States at precise- 
ly the time when public belief in the "American 
dream" was at its lowest. 

Events forced Hoover's administration to focus 
primarily on the domestic economy rather than for- 
eign affairs. He welcomed the London Treaty of 
1930, which reduced all categories of naval arma- 
ments, but he failed to obtain abolition of offensive 
weapons, such as bombers and chemical warfare, 
by participants at the World Disarmament Confer- 
ence in Geneva in 1932. In Latin America, he re- 
nounced dollar diplomacy, repudiated the Roose- 
velt Corollary, removed the Marines from their 
twenty-year occupation of Nicaragua, and prepared 
for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Haiti. When 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE 6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



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Japan invaded China, Hoover's belief in voluntary 
international cooperation, collective persuasion, 
and moral force led him to insist on a doctrine of 
nonrecognition of territorial acquisitions obtained 
by force in violation of treaty rights. 

As one of the few who had recognized eco- 
nomic imbalances and warned about a runaway 
stock market in the 1920s, Hoover anticipated that 
he would have to oversee remedies and corrections. 
To combat the long-standing agricultural depres- 
sion, the Federal Farm Board encouraged creation 
of farmers' organizations to withhold surpluses 
until prices became more favorable. The stock mar- 
ket crash of 1929 revealed serious structural weak- 
nesses in the domestic and international econo- 
mies. Depressed farm incomes, values, and 
purchasing power led to failures of country banks 
that gradually expanded to undermine larger finan- 
cial institutions. Sales declined; manufacturers 
stockpiled inventories of durable goods. Overpro- 
duction in industries like automobiles had an im- 
pact on collateral production, such as steel. Building 
stagnated. European financial dependence on the 
United States required an increase in exports or a 
decrease in debt, but the Hawley-Smoot tariff 
proved an insurmountable obstacle. 

Hoover struggled to persuade industrial, labor, 
agricultural, utility, and financial leaders to main- 
tain wages, hence purchasing power, and plan for 
renewed business progress. Believing that the na- 
tion suffered from a crisis in confidence, he worked 
tirelessly to restore faith in the spiritual and eco- 
nomic strength of the country. He appealed to the 
traditions of voluntary cooperation, private charity, 
and community responsibility to combat human 
suffering and launched an anti-hoarding campaign 
to encourage Americans to spend their way out of 
the Depression. His efforts failed. Employers fur- 
loughed first a few and then more workers. Bankers 
refused to risk loans without full collateral. Relief 
needs outstripped the resources of private and local 
relief agencies. And frightened Americans hid cash 
they might soon need if conditions worsened. Hoo- 
ver's own optimistic statements rang hollow in the 
face of mounting unemployment. A devastating 
drought in the summer of 1930 accelerated farm 
problems and rural bank closings. Hoover resisted 



demands for direct federal relief because he feared 
undermining the character of independent, self- 
reliant Americans. He hoped that construction of 
public works that would eventually pay for them- 
selves would provide employment until the econo- 
my revived. He left direct relief to local and state 
governments, but their resources proved insuffi- 
cient to stem the tide of economic decline and 
human suffering. 

Hoover traced the origins of America's Depres- 
sion to Europe. American loans, German repara- 
tions, and Allied war debts formed a vicious cycle. 
Federal Reserve manipulation of credit to aid Euro- 
pean countries had created too-easy money in the 
United States during the 1920s. And, beginning in 

1931, a series of European financial debacles 
marched inexorably toward the United States. 
French withdrawals from Central European banks 
brought them to the verge of collapse. Hoover 
countered with a one-year moratorium on inter- 
governmental debts and reparations to provide a 
respite for retrenchment. That September, howev- 
er, Britain was forced to abandon the gold standard, 
and the gold drain shifted to New York. The Glass- 
Steagall Act of 1932 shored up American currency, 
but bank failures escalated. 

At this point, Hoover substantially modified his 
resistance to federal government intervention. To 
stem the tide of bank failures, he first encouraged 
private bankers to form the National Credit Corpo- 
ration to make loans to industrial concerns and 
banks. When their efforts proved perfunctory and 
problems increased, he proposed the Reconstruc- 
tion Finance Corporation (RFC), primarily funded 
by the Treasury, for the same purposes. RFC loans 
significantly reduced the number of bank failures in 

1932. He would soon support RFC financing of 
public works and loans to states for direct relief. 

But Hoover labored under serious political 
handicaps. He had never run for public office before 
winning the presidency. His previous experiences 
with public persuasion had been fueled by wartime 
patriotism or 1920s optimism. During his presiden- 
cy, however, even when the Republicans controlled 
both houses of Congress in the first two years, he 
proved too progressive for the conservatives and 
too conservative for the progressives. The 1930 in- 



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terim election brought about a Democratic- 
controlled House of Representatives, where presi- 
dential hopeful John Nance Garner presided as 
speaker. Garner obstructed the Hoover administra- 
tion whenever possible, most particularly by delay- 
ing passage of the Relief and Reconstruction Act 
until July 1932. Although Hoover's analysts claimed 
that the Depression was coming to an end that 
summer, it would take six months for the impact to 
"trickle down" to the ordinary citizen. The presi- 
dential election was four months away. 

By summer 1932, in an effort to boost prices, 
farmers were using roadblocks to prevent delivery 
of milk and livestock to markets. Cities such as De- 
troit saw hunger marches and demonstrations de- 
manding half- wages for those laid off. The destitute 
lived in tarpaper shacks in "Hoovervilles" and ex- 
isted on handouts or scraps from garbage cans. Vet- 
erans journeyed to Washington to demand early 
payment of a war service bonus but were routed by 
the army commanded by General Douglas MacAr- 
thur. Hoover received the blame. Meanwhile, 
Democratic Party publicist Charles Michaelson or- 
chestrated a highly effective smear campaign 
against Hoover. The 1932 election was less a victory 
for Franklin D. Roosevelt than a resounding defeat 
for Hoover. 

The lame-duck administration remained in of- 
fice for nearly four months, an interregnum that 
was nearly as calamitous as that in 1860 to 1861. 
Hoover tried to tie his successor to his repudiated 
policies. Roosevelt avoided that contamination, 
while appearing ignorant of economics and the in- 
ternational situation. European countries defaulted 
on their World War I debts in December. Publica- 
tion of RFC loans, at the initiative of Speaker and 
Vice President-elect Garner, precipitated new and 
disastrous runs on the banks in January. Revela- 
tions before the Senate Banking and Currency 
Committee in February uncovered gross improprie- 
ties by major banks and bankers during the 1920s 
that further undermined public morale. Roosevelt 
first ignored and then rejected Hoover's proposal of 
a joint statement to bolster public confidence. On 
March 3, 1933, the eve of the inauguration, even the 
biggest New York and Chicago banks were in peril. 
Despite pleas from the Federal Reserve Board and 



others, Hoover refused to act without an endorse- 
ment from Roosevelt, which the president-elect re- 
fused to give. The governors of New York and Illi- 
nois declared bank holidays, bringing to thirty-four 
the number of states that had closed their banks 
rather than face ruin. Roosevelt subsequently de- 
clared a national bank holiday and holdovers from 
Hoover's administration crafted the plans for re- 
opening the banks. 



POST-PRESIDENTIAL YEARS 

After he left office on March 4, 1933, Hoover re- 
mained publicly silent for eighteen months, primar- 
ily out of concern that his criticism of the new ad- 
ministration's policies might be blamed for 
impeding economic recovery. During this time, 
however, he arranged for publication of collections 
of public papers to demonstrate the effectiveness of 
the policies of his presidency. In the fall of 1934, he 
broke his silence with the publication of The Chal- 
lenge to Liberty. Originally conceived as an updated 
reissue of American Individualism, The Challenge re- 
affirmed Hoover's belief in American liberalism and 
expressed his alarm at the social and economic 
changes he perceived in "National Regimentation" 
in fascist regimes abroad and, by implication, in the 
New Deal at home. Liberty, liberalism, and the 
sanctity of the United States Constitution became 
recurring themes as Hoover spoke out during the 
1930s. He became a major critic of the New Deal, 
arguing that it failed to bring the United States out 
of the Great Depression while undermining both 
the capitalist economic system and the indepen- 
dent initiative of American citizens. 

Simultaneously, Hoover pursued his own re- 
entry into the political arena, unsuccessfully seek- 
ing the 1936 and 1940 Republican presidential 
nominations. Hoping to persuade Republicans to 
vindicate his anti-Depression activities as president 
and to affirm his political philosophy, he tried to 
persuade the party to initiate a new "interim con- 
vention" in 1938 to craft a platform for the next na- 
tional contest that would shape the choice of a can- 
didate in 1940. The party resisted transformation 
according to the Hoover model. Meanwhile, the 
Democrats established a pattern of running against 
Hoover in every presidential election from 1932 on- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE 6 R E A E DEPRESSION 



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wards, while Republican candidates did their best 
to avoid association with him. 

Facing continued rejection at home, Hoover re- 
turned to Europe in 1938, his first visit since Ver- 
sailles. Lauded by governments and those he had 
fed, he also received a first-hand education in Euro- 
pean politics. He returned home convinced that an- 
other great war was coming and that the United 
States should stand aside from the conflagration. 
He devoted himself to that position from the out- 
break of war in Europe in 1939 until the attack on 
Pearl Harbor in 1941. Hoover loyally supported the 
declaration of war and hoped that he might be of 
service. Ignored again, he and his longtime asso- 
ciate, former ambassador Hugh Gibson, were 
among the many prominent persons who pub- 
lished plans for a framework of postwar peace. 

The new war produced new human suffering, 
and Hoover tried to recreate his feeding activities of 
the 1914 to 1917 period, but he failed in the face of 
resistance by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. 
Hoover would have to wait for Roosevelt's succes- 
sor to recall him to national service. In 1946, Presi- 
dent Harry Truman dispatched the "Great Human- 
itarian" on a worldwide mission to assess the needs 
of the hungry and the capabilities of food- 
producing nations to contribute to postwar relief. 
The following year, he went abroad again to ad- 
dress hunger in Germany and Austria. His reports 
also contributed to the mitigation of harsh postwar 
treatment of defeated Germany. 

Truman, and his successor, Dwight Eisenhow- 
er, also drafted Hoover to address the enormous 
growth of federal bureaucracy resulting from the 
New Deal and the war. In both cases, the Commis- 
sion on Organization of the Executive Branch of the 
Government, known as the Hoover Commission, 
concluded in 1949 and in 1955 with recommenda- 
tions for increasing efficiency, streamlining federal 
bureaucracy, and rolling back New Deal encroach- 
ments. Some of its proposals, such as the creation 
of a Department of Defense, were enacted. 

After his presidency, Hoover devoted himself to 
the preservation and propagation of the historical 
record of his public life. Virtually every speech and 
public statement between 1933 and 1960 was re- 
printed in eight volumes called Addresses upon the 



American Road. He published three volumes of 
memoirs and edited several collections of docu- 
ments, ranging from The Ordeal ofWoodrow Wilson 
about Versailles to An American Epic, a four-volume 
annotated collection of papers from his long career 
in international relief. At the end of his life, he had 
completed a volume tentatively entitled Freedom 
Betrayed, as yet unpublished, dealing with the for- 
eign policy of the Roosevelt administration. 

Hoover also devoted himself to gentler sub- 
jects. As chairman of the Boys' Clubs of America, he 
took particular pleasure in establishing clubs for a 
million of those he described as "pavement boys." 
He published a collection of his correspondence 
with children under the title On Growing Up. He 
wrote a slim volume of his observations on angling, 
called Fishing for Fun and to Wash Your Soul. He was 
the force behind the creation of the humanitarian 
organization CARE and the United Nations agency 
UNICEF. 

Herbert Hoover — orphan boy from West 
Branch, self-made millionaire, public servant more 
than politician — personified the American dream. 
If his presidency was blighted by the crisis of that 
dream in the Great Depression, he lived long 
enough to be acknowledged as both an elder 
statesman and a world humanitarian. 

See Also: ELECTION OF 1928; ELECTION OF 1932; 
HOOVER, LOU HENRY; PRESIDENT'S 
EMERGENCY COMMITTEE FOR EMPLOYMENT 
(PECE); PRESIDENT'S ORGANIZATION FOR 
UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF (POUR); REPUBLICAN 
PARTY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Best, Gary Dean. Herbert Hoover: The Post-presidential 
Years, 1933-1964. 1983. 

Best, Gary Dean. The Politics of American Individualism: 
Herbert Hoover in Transition, 1918-1921. 1975. 

Burner, David. Herbert Hoover: A Public Life. 1978. 

Dodge, Mark M., ed. Herbert Hoover and the Historians. 
1989. 

Fausold, Martin L. The Presidency of Herbert C. Hoover. 
1985. 

Fausold, Martin L., and George L. Mazuzan, eds. The 
Hoover Presidency: A Reappraisal. 1974. 

Gelfand, Lawrence E., ed. Herbert Hoover: The Great War 
and Its Aftermath, 1914-23. 1979. 



U<. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF E H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



HOOVER 



EDGAR 



Hawley, Ellis, ed. Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: 
Studies in New Era Thought and Practice. 1981. 

Herbert Hoover Reassessed: Essays Commemorating the Fif- 
tieth Anniversary of the Inauguration of our Thirty-first 
President. 1981. 

Hoover, Herbert. Addresses upon the American Road, 8 
vols. 1938-1961. 

Hoover, Herbert. An American Epic, 4 vols. 1959-1964. 

Hoover, Herbert. American Individualism. 1922. 

Hoover, Herbert. The Challenge to Eiberty. 1934. 

Hoover, Herbert. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, 3 vols. 
1951-1952. 

Hoover, Herbert. The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson. 1958. 

Hoover, Herbert, and Hugh Gibson. The Problems of Last- 
ing Peace. 1942. 

Hoover, Herbert, and Lou Henry Hoover, trans. De Re 
Metallica. 1912. 

Myers, William Starr, ed. The State Papers and Other Pub- 
lic Writings of Herbert Hoover, 2 vols. 1934. 

Myers, William Starr, and Walter H. Newton, eds. The 
Hoover Administration: A Documented Narrative. 
1936. 

Nash, George H. The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer, 
1874-1914. 1983. 

Nash, George H. The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humani- 
tarian, 1914-1917. 1988. 

Nash, George H. Herbert Hoover and Stanford University. 
1988. 

Nash, George H. The Life of Herbert Hoover: Master of 
Emergencies, 1917-1918. 1996. 

Nash, Lee, ed. Understanding Herbert Hoover: Ten Perspec- 
tives. 1987. 

Robinson, Edgar Eugene, and Vaughn Davis Bornet. 
Herbert Hoover: President of the United States. 1975. 

Smith, Richard Norton. An Uncommon Man: The Triumph 
of Herbert Hoover. 1984. 

Smith, Richard Norton, and Timothy Walch, eds. Fare- 
well to the Chief: Former Presidents in American Public 
Life. 1990. 

Thalken, Thomas T., ed. The Problems of Lasting Peace Re- 
visited. 1986. 

Wilbur, Ray Lyman, and Arthur Mastick Hyde, eds. The 
Hoover Policies. 1937. 

Wilson, Joan Hoff. Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive. 
1975. 

Susan Estabrook Kennedy 




/. Edgar Hoover, circa 1950. National Archives and Records 
Administration 



HOOVER, J. EDGAR 



John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895-May 2, 1972) 
was appointed director of the Federal Bureau of In- 
vestigation (FBI) in 1924 and served until his death 
forty-eight years later. Founded in 1908 as the Bu- 
reau of Investigation (the word Federal was added 
in 1935), the FBI blossomed under Hoover during 
the Great Depression and particularly during the 
New Deal years. 

A lifelong resident of Washington, D.C., Hoo- 
ver worked in the Library of Congress while study- 
ing law at George Washington University. He 
joined the Department of Justice in 1917, working 
in the Alien Enemies Bureau. Appointed chief of 
the General Intelligence Division in 1919, Hoover 
helped organize the notorious Palmer Raids that 
rounded up aliens suspected of radicalism. Five 
years later, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone 
appointed the 29-year-old Hoover director of the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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Bureau of Investigation. In the wake of Teapot 
Dome and other Warren G. Harding administration 
scandals, the new director had a mandate to termi- 
nate all domestic political surveillance and confine 
all investigations to violations of federal law. 

Having quickly purged the FBI of corrupt 
agents, Hoover had little to do because there were 
few federal criminal statutes on the books. He filled 
the time, in direct defiance of Stone's order, by dab- 
bling in surveillance. This was especially true after 
the Great Depression commenced. The FBI opened 
files on such things as Communist Party involve- 
ment in the Scottsboro Boys rape case and occa- 
sionally provided political intelligence to the Her- 
bert Hoover White House. For the Depression's 
first four years, however, the director's bureaucracy 
remained a tiny and relatively insignificant part of 
the federal government. 

Things began to change in 1933 with the De- 
pression era's creeping nationalization of crime 
control. In effect, the FBI emerged as one of the 
New Deal's alphabet agencies with a mission to in- 
vestigate a rapidly expanding list of federal crimes. 
This included spectacular combat against John Dil- 
linger and other high-profile bank robbers. For ex- 
ample, the New Deal's Federal Deposit Insurance 
Corporation (FDIC) provided the wherewithal for 
the FBI to investigate any robbery of a bank insured 
by the FDIC. The Roosevelt administration also 
helped Hoover with a massive media campaign to 
portray G-men as heroic defenders of public life 
and limb, property and virtue. A public relations ge- 
nius in his own right, Hoover tilted this campaign 
to construct what might best be described, with 
only a hint of exaggeration, as a cult of personality. 

Pumped up into a formidable crime fighting 
force as the Great Depression wound down in the 
late 1930s, Hoover's FBI moved on to exploit a cau- 
tious Roosevelt administration mandate to revive 
political surveillance under the rubric of "subversive 
activities." If the White House was principally con- 
cerned with native fascism as the nation reluctantly 
prepared for the possibility of war with Germany 
and Japan, Hoover was principally concerned with 
domestic Communist activities. In one of the De- 
pression era's greater ironies, the director defined 
subversive activities on the left broadly enough to 



encompass the very New Deal liberals who had res- 
cued the FBI from oblivion. Another irony is that 
the director did so while successfully cultivating 
what several cabinet officials described as a close 
personal relationship with the president. Secretary 
of the Interior Harold Ickes, for one, claimed that 
Roosevelt believed that Hoover was devoted to him 
personally. 

In the wake of the Great Depression and World 
War II, Hoover and his FBI went on to help shape 
the history of McCarthyism and the modern civil 
rights movement. The latter included not only ex- 
tensive surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (e.g., 
wiretaps), but systematic harassment pursued with 
a startling ferocity. The pressures of the Depression 
had simply reinforced the things Hoover had 
learned as a young man, in the aftermath of World 
War I, on his old Alien Enemies and General Intelli- 
gence desks. The pressures of the 1960s would do 
the same. By the time of his death, Hoover had, in 
his own way in both cases, enforced the law and 
spied on law abiding citizens in seven different dec- 
ades. 

See Also: CRIME; LAW ENFORCEMENT; 
PROHIBITION. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gentry, Curt. /. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. 
1991. 

O'Reilly, Kenneth. Hoover and the Un- Americans: The FBI, 
HUAC, and the Red Menace. 1983. 

Powers, Richard Gid. G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American 
Popular Culture. 1983. 

Powers, Richard Gid. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. 
Edgar Hoover. 1988. 

Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret 
Life of J. Edgar Hoover. 1993. 

Lheoharis, Athan, and John Stuart Cox. The Boss;/. Edgar 
Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. 1988. 

Kenneth O'Reilly 



HOOVER, LOU HENRY 

Best known as the wife of Depression-era president 
Herbert Hoover, Lou Henry Hoover (March 29, 



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1874-January 7, 1944) was also actively involved in 
organizations that promoted independence and 
health for girls and women. Born in Waterloo, 
Iowa, the elder of two daughters of a banker who 
encouraged her independence and love of the out- 
doors, she moved with her family to Whittier, Cali- 
fornia, and later to Monterey. After completing nor- 
mal school, she earned a degree in geology at 
Stanford University, where she met Herbert Hoo- 
ver. They married in 1899 and immediately sailed 
for China, where they survived the Boxer Rebellion. 
Many more journeys took them and their two sons 
around the world several times in the first decade 
of the twentieth century, while Herbert prospered 
as a consulting engineer and financier. An accom- 
plished linguist, Lou Hoover, with assistance from 
her husband, also translated from Latin and pri- 
vately published De Re Metallica, a sixteenth- 
century mining text. 

With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, 
both Hoovers assisted Americans stranded abroad 
and later headed relief organizations for starving 
Europeans. Lou Hoover became an effective speak- 
er and fundraiser in the United States. America's 
declaration of war in 1917 brought the couple to 
Washington, D.C., he as food administrator and 
she to engage in civic works, including creating liv- 
ing and eating facilities for the growing number of 
young women in war agencies. A quiet philanthro- 
pist throughout her life, Lou Hoover "lent" college 
tuition money to young people but did not cash 
their repayment checks. 

When Herbert Hoover became secretary of 
commerce, Lou embraced the Girl Scouts as an 
ideal organization to foster education, recreation, 
and independence of young women. She served 
the organization as national commissioner, nation- 
al president from 1922 to 1925, vice president and 
chairman of the national board of commissioners, 
and, after she became first lady, honorary president. 
During the 1920s, she focused on organization and 
emphasized recruitment and training of leaders, 
obtaining grants to support these activities. In the 
1930s, she was again named national Girl Scout 
president and she became a more public voice, trav- 
elling extensively on Girl Scout business. Mean- 
while she was an early supporter of the National 



Amateur Athletic Federation and served as presi- 
dent of its women's division. She encouraged 
women to pursue careers as well as marriage and 
motherhood. 

During Herbert Hoover's term as president of 
the United States from 1929 to 1933, the first lady 
attended to social obligations and also arranged the 
first extensive inventory and history of White 
House furnishings. She was severely criticized for 
entertaining the wife of the only black member of 
Congress. She promulgated her husband's volun- 
tary approaches to the Great Depression with 
women's groups and the Girl Scouts. Hiring her 
own staff, she became a clearinghouse for relief ap- 
peals. 

After leaving the White House, Hoover sup- 
ported the Friends of Music at Stanford, the Salva- 
tion Army, and Republican organizations. When 
her husband crusaded for relief of the "small de- 
mocracies" at the start of World War II, she again 
supported his efforts. In all her activities, Lou Henry 
Hoover lived by two mottoes: "don't forget joy" 
and "lead from behind." 

See Also: HOOVER, HERBERT. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Allen, Anne Beiser. An Independent Woman: The Life of 
Lou Henry Hoover. 2000. 

Cottrell, Debbie Mauldin. "Lou Henry Hoover," in 
American First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacy, 
ed. Lewis L. Gould. 1996. 

Mayer, Dale C. "Not One to Stay at Home: The Papers 
of Lou Henry Hoover." Prologue 19 (Summer 1987): 
85-97. 

Mayer, Dale C. "An Uncommon Woman: The Quiet 
Leadership Style of Lou Henry Hoover," in Presiden- 
tial Studies Quarterly 20 (Fall 1990): 685-698. 

Mayer, Dale C, ed. Lou Henry Hoover: Essays on a Busy 
Life. 1994. 

Pryor, Helen P. Lou Henry Hoover: Gallant First Lady. 
1969. 

Susan Estabrook Kennedy 



HOPKINS, HARRY 

Harry Lloyd Hopkins (August 17, 1890-January 29, 
1946) was a progressive -era social worker, federal 



E N C Y C t P E D I A OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U7 



P K I N S , HARRY 




Harry Hopkins (right, at microphone) speaks at the dedication of the Louisiana State University Stadium, a WPA construction 
project, in November 1936. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



relief administrator during the Great Depression, 
and wartime presidential advisor who carved out a 
unique niche for himself in Franklin D. Roosevelt's 
administrations. Hopkins and Roosevelt developed 
a close relationship based on mutual trust and ad- 
miration, a position that afforded Hopkins a con- 
siderable amount of power. From 1933 to 1938, 
Hopkins played a crucial role in the development 
of social policies and legislation devised by the ad- 
ministration to counteract the devastating effects of 
the Depression. In this sense, Hopkins became one 
of the major architects of the American welfare sys- 
tem. Beginning in 1939, Roosevelt educated Hop- 
kins in international affairs, and during the war 
years, Hopkins served as the president's unofficial 



wartime emissary to Winston Churchill and Joseph 
Stalin, as administrator of war production, and as 
an advisor at most of the major conferences. 

EARLY LIFE AND CAREER 

Harry Hopkins was born in 1890 in Sioux City, 
Iowa, the fourth child of David Aldona (Al) Hop- 
kins and Anna Pickett Hopkins. The family, always 
struggling financially, moved numerous times 
around the Midwest before finally settling in Grin- 
nell, Iowa, in 1901, a town selected by Anna mainly 
because Grinnell College was located there. During 
Hopkins's four years at Grinnell, where he was a 
mediocre student but a first-rate athlete and stu- 
dent leader, he absorbed a blend of the Social Gos- 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



P K I N S 



R R Y 



pel and the practical workings of the American re- 
public as taught in his political science and applied 
Christianity courses. In addition, Hopkins's profes- 
sors impressed upon him a reverence for democra- 
cy and a dedication to public service. 

Soon after his graduation in 1912, Hopkins left 
rural Iowa to pursue a career as a social worker at 
Christodora Settlement House in New York City's 
Lower East Side, where he quickly became attuned 
to the squalid conditions in the urban slum and the 
destitution that so often accompanied the instabili- 
ty of waged labor in industrial centers. His first job 
there was as a counselor for the settlement house's 
summer camp for boys in Bound Brook, New Jer- 
sey. He later served as head of boys' activities at the 
settlement house on Avenue B. There he met and 
married his first wife, fellow settlement worker and 
suffragist Ethel Gross, who initiated Hopkins into 
the exciting reform environment of lower Manhat- 
tan. This work in progressive -era New York City 
had a profound effect on Hopkins. He began to for- 
mulate a secular view of poverty and came to un- 
derstand that there were profound consequences to 
unemployment, that most people wanted to be 
self-sufficient, and that the dole took away a per- 
son's pride. 

In 1913, in the midst of an economic recession, 
Hopkins accepted a position with New York City's 
Association for Improving the Condition of the 
Poor (AICP), a private charitable agency dedicated 
to both relieving poverty and reforming the individ- 
ual. Hopkins joined the agency first as a friendly 
visitor, but soon, having demonstrated his capabili- 
ties as an observant and efficient social worker, he 
was appointed superintendent of the Association's 
Employment Bureau. His mandate was to suggest 
ways to eliminate unemployment, which was seen 
by the AICP as the second most frequent cause of 
poverty, illness being the first. Hopkins went into 
the tenements of the largely immigrant population 
of the Lower East Side and saw firsthand the de- 
grading effects of poverty, a condition he agreed 
was caused largely by unemployment. During this 
phase of his career, he began to develop a set of 
convictions concerning poverty and unemployment 
that came to define the relief policies he later pro- 
posed to the Roosevelt administration in the midst 



of the Great Depression, according to which those 
who wanted to work and, for whatever reason, 
could not find employment would be provided jobs 
by the government; those unable to work would be 
provided government assistance. 

In 1915, Hopkins and an AICP colleague, Wil- 
liam Matthews, worked creatively to try to solve the 
problem of increasing unemployment in New York 
City. When they learned that the Bronx Zoological 
Park had received a generous donation of land but 
could not afford to develop it for use, Hopkins and 
Matthews proposed a solution by devising what 
was likely the first work relief program in New 
York. The two social workers offered to provide un- 
employed men to clear the land, and, moreover, 
raise enough money from private sources to pay 
their wages if the Bronx Zoo would provide the staff 
to supervise the work. This Bronx Zoo project (even 
though privately funded) provided a loose proto- 
type for future public work programs. 

Another main cause of poverty during this peri- 
od was single motherhood. The New York state 
legislature, encouraged by social workers and pro- 
gressive reformers, addressed that issue by passing 
the 1915 Mothers' Assistance Act, which allocated 
local public funds to support poor but deserving 
single mothers. New York Mayor John Purroy Mit- 
chel appointed Hopkins as head of the Board of 
Child Welfare (BCW), the agency established to ad- 
minister this program. From 1915 to 1917 Hopkins 
administered what was called the widows' pension 
to women considered worthy of help. This work re- 
flected some of the most important political issues 
of the era, especially the value placed on home life 
that had been articulated at the 1909 White House 
Conference on Children — no child should be re- 
moved from the home for reasons of poverty alone. 
Furthermore, the enabling legislation that allotted 
money for such programs established the legitima- 
cy of public outdoor relief, that is, using state 
money to assist the needy outside of institutions. 
This experience reinforced Hopkins's belief that it 
was the responsibility of the government, through 
agencies such as the BCW, to devise effective, state- 
funded programs to help the deserving needy. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U9 



P K I N S 



A R R Y 



WORLD WAR I AND THE 1920s 

With America's entrance into World War I, 
Hopkins (ineligible for the draft because of poor 
eyesight) joined the American Red Cross, first in 
New Orleans (Gulf Division) working in the Civil- 
ian Relief Division. Also called Home Service, this 
division was central to the Red Cross because it 
aided families of servicemen, as well as wounded 
and demobilized soldiers and sailors. During this 
time, because the South lacked both an established 
network of trained social workers and an integrated 
group of agencies, Hopkins had the opportunity to 
create an organization from the ground up. He con- 
sequently built Civilian Relief into a smoothly oper- 
ating service agency for military families experienc- 
ing hardships because of the war. To accomplish 
this, Hopkins initiated an array of educational pro- 
grams in order to train social workers in the South. 
Hopkins and his staff of about two hundred work- 
ers served approximately ten to fifteen thousand 
families each month. To further professionalize the 
work he and his colleagues were engaged in, he 
joined with other social workers to draft the charter 
for the American Association of Social Workers in 
June of 1920. When the Red Cross Gulf Division 
merged with the Southwestern Division after the 
war, Hopkins went to Atlanta as general manager 
in 1921. Through his work in the American Red 
Cross, Hopkins became nationally known and en- 
tered into the upper ranks of the social work profes- 
sion. 

In 1922, Hopkins returned to New York City 
with his family. He worked for the AICP until 1923 
when he took a job as general director of the New 
York Tuberculosis Association and directed his en- 
ergies toward public health issues. For him, illness 
resulting from an unfriendly and unhealthy envi- 
ronment was merely another form of social injus- 
tice and a preventable cause of poverty. During his 
tenure with the Tuberculosis Association, Hopkins 
expanded the agency by absorbing the New York 
Heart Association. True to his liberal, progressive 
social work background, he cared little for the bot- 
tom line and was often criticized for his free- 
spending style. When he joined the association it 
had a surplus of $90,000; when he left it seven years 
later, it carried a deficit of $40,000. Still, everyone 



close to the association was delighted with Hop- 
kins's work there. 



THE GREAT DEPRESSION YEARS 

With the onset of the Great Depression, Hop- 
kins drew on his previous experiences to address 
the problems brought about by the high levels of 
unemployment. The crisis reinforced his belief that 
public works programs, federally funded and ratio- 
nally planned, could be used to mitigate the effects 
of widespread unemployment. In 1931, New York 
State governor Franklin D. Roosevelt called on 
Hopkins to run the first state relief organization, the 
Temporary Emergency Relief Administration 
(TERA), which provided both direct relief and work 
relief to the state's unemployed. The TERA was the 
first instance of a state accepting responsibility for 
citizens suffering from the effects of the Depres- 
sion. 

In 1933, President Roosevelt named Hopkins as 
federal relief administer. Convinced that jobs were 
the antidote to poverty, Hopkins used his growing 
influence with the president to push for govern- 
ment-sponsored jobs programs that would put 
money immediately into the pockets of newly- 
employed workers. These programs included the 
Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), 
the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the 
Works Progress Administration (WPA). The pro- 
gressive-era notion that the industrial system lay at 
the heart of the economic ills threatening the nation 
shaped Hopkins's early New Deal policies and pro- 
grams. With an original allocation of $500 million, 
the FERA provided the states with matching grants, 
one federal dollar for every three they raised, in 
order to provide relief for the unemployed. While 
direct relief (known as the dole) proved crucial for 
the survival of many families, recipients also re- 
ceived FERA jobs in exchange for needs-based re- 
lief payments. For Hopkins the important element 
of a jobs program was that it would ensure that 
American workers could retain their dignity as the 
breadwinners. Under the more radical and short- 
lived Civil Works Administration (CWA), the un- 
employed got a job and did not have to undergo 
any investigation to ascertain need. Under this pro- 
gram, one did not have to be on relief to get a job 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



P K I N S 



R R Y 



and wages were based not on need but on the work 
performed. The CWA reflected Hopkins's firm con- 
viction that most people simply wanted to work 
and that jobs were always the best antidote to pov- 
erty. The issues that shaped relief policy during the 
First New Deal continued to define the much de- 
bated relationship between relief and recovery and 
between citizens and the government that plagued 
the administration for the next several years. Much 
of this debate had to do with the widespread fear 
that continued government relief, even in the form 
of jobs, would foster dependency. 

Early in 1934, Harry Hopkins began formulat- 
ing a new program for the nation's unemployed 
that emphasized the importance of work, not only 
as a relief measure but as an integral part of the na- 
tional recovery effort. The unemployed needed the 
opportunity to work for wages and industry needed 
consumer dollars in order to survive. Hopkins be- 
came convinced that a permanent national pro- 
gram of employment assurance, working in concert 
with unemployment insurance, would not only 
lead to economic recovery for the nation, but would 
ensure real security for American families and pre- 
serve the nation's democratic values. Hopkins and 
other New Deal liberals believed that under- 
consumption was retarding the nation's economic 
recovery. The solution lay in cooperation between 
the government and private industry to insure that 
the American worker earned a sufficient wage to af- 
ford a decent standard of living. 

In late 1934, Roosevelt named Hopkins to the 
cabinet-level committee for economic security di- 
rected to write legislation that would protect Amer- 
ican citizens from the vagaries of life in a modern 
industrial society. The Social Security Act, passed in 
August 1935, laid the foundations for the American 
welfare system by enacting legislation that estab- 
lished old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, 
and aid to dependent children. This legislation built 
the foundation of the American welfare system that 
defined American social policy until 1996. Howev- 
er, the act contained no permanent program for un- 
employment. Instead, with the president's vigorous 
encouragement, Congress passed the Emergency 
Relief Appropriation Act, which gave Roosevelt the 
broad authority to create the National Emergency 



Council on May 6, 1935, out of which emerged the 
Works Progress Administration (WPA). Roosevelt 
named Hopkins as WPA director, with the mandate 
to find government-funded jobs for the vast army 
of unemployed workers on relief. Despite critics 
who castigated the WPA and its director as being 
either too liberal or too political, the WPA was 
enormously successful. In 1938, Hopkins presented 
to Roosevelt a report that listed an impressive array 
of 158,000 projects undertaken by approximately 
five million WPA workers earning an average of $52 
a month. Although 80 percent of WPA funds were 
spent on construction projects, including roads, 
bridges, parks, playgrounds, air landing fields, and 
public buildings, there were also numerous non- 
construction jobs available. Sewing, educational, 
health, and clerical projects abounded; WPA work- 
ers provided disaster relief, did scientific research, 
restored historic sites, and engaged in conservation 
programs. Over the course of seven years, the WPA 
generated more than three million jobs each year, 
at a total cost of $10.7 billion. 

Despite the overwhelming number of unem- 
ployed men seeking relief, women formed a critical 
portion of the unemployed in 1935. Therefore, 
Hopkins, with the wholehearted support of Eleanor 
Roosevelt, established a Women's and Professional 
Division within the WPA, headed by Ellen Wood- 
ward. In addition, Hopkins extended aid to the ar- 
tistic community and received a great deal of criti- 
cism when he developed the WPA Federal Arts 
Project, known as Federal One. This program had 
roots in FERA and CWA programs to help the 
country's thousands of unemployed artists, musi- 
cians, actors, and writers. The Federal Music Project 
provided work for musicians under the directorship 
of Nokolai Sokoloff. The Federal Theatre Project, 
under the direction of former Grinnellian Hallie 
Flanagan, brought live theater to about a million 
people each month in forty cities and twenty-two 
states. Holger Cahill directed the Federal Artists' 
Project, which provided work for thousands of un- 
employed muralists, easel painters, sculptors, and 
art teachers. The main program of the Federal Writ- 
ers' Project, under the leadership of Henry Alsberg, 
was the production of the American Guide series, 
which included volumes providing detailed infor- 
mation on various states. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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U S E UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE 



U A C 



In late 1938, Roosevelt appointed Hopkins as 
Secretary of Commerce, thinking that this would 
set him up as a viable liberal candidate for president 
in 1940. However, the public perception of Hop- 
kins's tax and spend and elect policy proved to be 
too much of a political liability. In addition, his in- 
creasingly poor health kept him out of the presi- 
dential race. 

AFTER THE DEPRESSION 

During World War II, Hopkins acted as Roose- 
velt's unofficial assistant and advisor. In 1941, at the 
president's request, Hopkins traveled to England 
and Russia on diplomatic missions to ascertain the 
allies' defense needs. On his return, Roosevelt di- 
rected Hopkins to oversee the massive buildup of 
war production after the passage of the legislation 
establishing the Lend-Lease plan. After Pearl Har- 
bor was attacked in December 1941, Hopkins be- 
came a central figure in the nation's mobilization 
and a trusted confidante to the president. The 
worldwide attention that Hopkins received as Roo- 
sevelt's wartime advisor and emissary to Winston 
Churchill and Joseph Stalin, as administrator of 
Lend-Lease and mastermind of war production, 
and as the shadowy figure behind Roosevelt at the 
war conferences has somewhat subsumed his role 
as an architect of the American welfare system. Yet 
Hopkins always took great pride that he was able 
to marshal the resources of the federal government 
to champion the rights of the poorest one-third of 
the nation. 

Hopkins died in early 1946 as a result of long- 
term digestive illness and complications relating to 
stomach cancer. 

See Also: CIVIL WORKS ADMINISTRATION (CWA); 
FEDERAL EMERGENCY RELIEF ADMINIS- 
TRATION (FERA); WORKS PROGRESS 
ADMINISTRATION (WPA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Adams, Henry H. Harry Hopkins: A Biography. 1977. 

Charles, Searle F. Minister of Relief: Harry Hopkins and the 
Depression. 1963. 

Hopkins, lune. Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Re- 
former. 1999. 

Mclimsey, George T. Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and 
Defender of Democracy. 1987. 



Tuttle, Dwight William. Harry L. Hopkins and Anglo- 
American-Soviet Relations, 1941-1945. 1983. 

Iune Hopkins 



HOUSE UN-AMERICAN 
ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE (HUAC) 

Between 1938 and 1968, the House of Representa- 
tives maintained a committee with a remit to inves- 
tigate "subversive and un-American propaganda," 
a mission that it often and controversially pursued 
with indiscriminate enthusiasm. Samuel Dickstein, 
a New York congressman of Russian Jewish de- 
scent, had long been concerned about the behavior 
of fascistic and anti-Semitic groups during the De- 
pression, and in January 1937 he introduced a reso- 
lution in the House calling for an investigation of 
organizations promoting "un-American propagan- 
da." The resolution was tabled, but soon after, 
Texas Democrat Martin Dies introduced a similar 
motion. The anti-labor Texan's targets were on the 
left, but the two congressmen cooperated and se- 
cured a majority for the proposal in May 1938, with 
the tacit support of the House leadership and Vice 
President John Nance Garner, and HUAC was es- 
tablished as a temporary special committee. Con- 
tradicting Dickstein's original intent, HUAC fo- 
cused less on Nazi groups and more on 
Communists, who were said to have penetrated 
New Deal agencies. Dies became the committee 
chair, and Dickstein was excluded. 

HUAC was the product of the conservative co- 
alition of Republicans and rural and southern Dem- 
ocrats who had turned against the New Deal and 
had become the dominant political force in the 
lower House. The committee won the blessings of 
radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, patriotic 
groups such as the Paul Reveres, right-wing colum- 
nists such as George Sokolsky, and anticommunist 
leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). 
It was largely guided by its head of research, Dr. J. 
B. Matthews, who, after a career as a prominent fel- 
low traveller (a term mainly applied to intellectuals 
sympathetic to the Communist cause but not party 
members), had turned on his former associates 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



HOUSE 



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AMERICAN A C T I V I E I E S C M M I E T E E ( H II A C ) 



with an apostate's zeal. With the American Com- 
munist Party reaching its heyday, war looming in 
Europe, and fears growing of fifth column activities 
in the United States, HUAC secured broad public 
approval. 

Under Dies, HUAC was a vehicle for attacking 
the New Deal and its labor and popular front allies, 
some of which were Communist fronts. It paid 
some attention to fascist groups such as the Ger- 
man-American Bund, but its principal targets were 
New Deal agencies such as the Works Progress Ad- 
ministration (especially its suspect Federal Theater 
Project), New Deal allies such as the Congress of 
Industrial Organizations (CIO), and such popular 
front groups as the American League for Peace and 
Democracy. HUAC initially relied on voluntary wit- 
nesses, often drawn from anticommunist groups 
eager to denounce the left. John P. Frey of the AFL 
testified that Communists were operating through 
the CIO, and Walter Steele, head of the American 
Coalition of Patriotic Societies, which represented 
over a hundred patriotic organizations, named 
hundreds of other organizations as subject to com- 
munist influence. Early on, HUAC acquired a repu- 
tation for biased proceedings. One target in 1938 
was the CIO-Democratic Party alliance in Michi- 
gan, which was identified with the celebrated 1937 
sit-down strikes at General Motors in Flint. The 
strikers had been afforded the protection of the Na- 
tional Guard by the New Deal governor Frank Mur- 
phy, who was running for re-election in the fall of 
1938. In October HUAC visited Detroit as part of a 
series of hearings into the labor movement. Wit- 
nesses attributed the sit-down strikes to Commu- 
nists, whom they recklessly linked to Murphy. A fu- 
rious Franklin Roosevelt made his first public 
assault on HUAC, but Murphy, a major symbol of 
the New Deal, lost re-election, apparently the vic- 
tim of red-baiting. 

With the midterm elections over, HUAC be- 
came a bit less energetic. Criticized for its preoccu- 
pation with Communist and front groups, it made 
some effort to investigate anti-Semitic and Nazi 
groups in 1939 and 1940, particularly after the 
Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and the outbreak of war 
in Europe. But resident aliens and the Communist 
Party and its alleged New Deal links remained fa- 



vorite targets, and Dies relished harassing the Roo- 
sevelt administration. With Dies warning of sub- 
version in the defense industries as German armies 
swept across Europe, the committee rose in public 
estimation and its appropriation was increased. But 
beginning in 1941, when the United States entered 
the war as an ally of the Soviet Union and American 
communists became enthusiastic supporters of the 
war effort, the "little red scare" faded. Thereafter, 
HUAC rarely held public hearings, and its activities 
consisted of little more than the cavortings of the 
chairman, who mostly used his office to release the 
names of federal employees he thought should be 
dismissed for their alleged front associations. 
HUAC might have redeemed itself in 1943 when it 
investigated the internment of Japanese Americans, 
but it used the occasion to encourage scare stories 
about Japanese subversion. By that time HUAC was 
being accused of hindering the war effort and its 
public support had diminished; in 1944 Martin Dies 
decided not to seek re-election to Congress. In Jan- 
uary 1945, in a skilful parliamentary maneuver, 
Representative John Rankin of Mississippi secured 
a resolution making HUAC a permanent commit- 
tee. It would re-emerge powerfully in the Cold War 
era. 

See Also: ANTICOMMUNISM; COMMUNIST PARTY. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bentley, Eric, ed. Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from 
Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American 
Activities, 1938-1968. 1971. 

Goodman, Walter. The Committee: The Extraordinary Ca- 
reer of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. 
1968. 

Heale, M. J. American Anticommunism: Combating the 
Enemy Within, 1830-1970. 1990. 

Ogden, August Raymond. The Dies Committee: A Study 
of the Special House Committee for the Investigation of 
Un-American Activities, 1938-1944. 1945. 

Powers, Richard Gid. Not without Honor: The History of 
American Anticommunism. 1995. 

Taylor, Telford. Grand Inquest: The Story of Congressional 
Investigations. 1955. 

Wreszin, Michael. "The Dies Committee, 1938." In Con- 
gress Investigates, 1792-1974, edited by Arthur M. 
Schlesinger, Jr. and Roger Bruns. 1975. 



M. J. Heale 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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U S I N G 



HOUSING 



The devastating effects of the Great Depression on 
both the U. S. home -building industry and the 
homeowner were immediately visible. Residential 
home building and home repair came to a near 
standstill, contributing to unemployment in thou- 
sands of related industries ranging from lumber to 
real estate. Historian Kenneth Jackson calculated 
that between 1928 and 1933 new home construc- 
tion dropped 95 percent and expenditures on home 
maintenance fell 90 percent. By early 1933 half of 
the nation's homeowners were in default on their 
mortgages. 

In his famous oral history of the Great Depres- 
sion, Hard Times (1970), Studs Terkel recounted 
how Americans blamed themselves or other family 
members for the humiliation of repossession. The 
nation's foremost symbol of individualism and se- 
curity was revealed to be just another commodity 
subject to seizure. In a typical account, Slim Collier 
recalled how his father, a tool and die maker, re- 
sponded to the loss of his real estate with "anger 
and frustration [that] colored my whole life." A de- 
cade earlier, local bankers and businessmen proba- 
bly applauded the real estate investments made by 
Collier's father as a sound strategy to improve his 
economic and class standings. 

Families who could not afford to pay their 
mortgages or rents had few options. In order to 
avoid the public humiliation of eviction, most 
moved in with other family members or friends be- 
fore legal proceedings were instituted. In both rural 
and urban areas, some families remained as squat- 
ters in their own houses or apartments or in homes 
vacated by others who had been evicted by banks 
or landlords. A small minority sought shelter or 
housing assistance from religious or private charita- 
ble organizations. Homeless families gathered in 
makeshift communities called Hoovervilles, devoid 
of safe drinking water and sanitation facilities. Au- 
tomobiles, railroad cars, grain bins, barns, sheds, 
and shacks also provided shelter for members of 
the peaceful army of the dispossessed. 

The devastation of the home-building industry 
and the dissolution of the American Dream of 
home ownership destroyed any vestiges of a 



laissez-faire approach to the housing market. 
Seemingly moved by the plight of the millions of 
families who suffered the social and economic in- 
dignities of eviction, deferred ordinary home main- 
tenance, or abandoned hope of purchasing a home, 
Congress and the administrations of Presidents 
Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt passed 
a plethora of housing bills. Both administrations 
and Congress considered the revitalization of the 
home construction, real estate, and home finance 
sectors of the economy to be paramount in solving 
the housing problems faced by ordinary Americans. 

Seeking to maintain the status quo, the 1931 
President's National Conference on Home Building 
and Home Ownership downplayed calls for the 
creation of a federally financed public housing pro- 
gram. Instead, it promoted housing legislation and 
policy that encouraged suburban growth and urban 
decline — trends that had emerged a decade earlier 
with the rise of automobile ownership and road 
construction. The first piece of housing legislation 
supported by President Hoover, the Federal Home 
Loan Bank Act (1932), increased the amount of 
capital available to banks to lend to home builders. 
The Emergency Relief and Reconstruction Act, 
passed in 1932 with support of Hoover, authorized 
the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to offer 
loans to limited-dividend housing corporations for 
the construction of urban housing. The only project 
instituted under the program was New York City's 
Knickerbocker Village — New York was the only 
state that had the necessary enabling legislation. 

Under President Roosevelt's New Deal, the 
number, scope, and effectiveness of federal housing 
programs increased dramatically. As historian Gail 
Radford observed in 1996, under Roosevelt, a "bi- 
furcated" federal housing policy emerged that . . . 
provided broad political and financial support for 
housing agencies that aided upper- and middle- 
income families, such as the Home Owners Loan 
Corporation (HOLC), established in April 1933, 
and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 
created in June 1933. By contrast, programs that as- 
sisted families who could not afford to purchase or 
rent a home on the private market, such as those 
created under the Federal Emergency Administra- 
tion of Public Works Administration (PWA) in 1933 



W, 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



HOUSING 




This dark hallway in a Chicago rooming house was typical of the living conditions facing many poor urban Americans during the 
Depression. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



W5 



U S I N G 




These dilapidated buildings stood on the Georgia State Capitol Homes site in Atlanta, Georgia, before the U.S. Housing Authority 
demolished them and began a construction project on the site during the late 1930s. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



and the United States Housing Authority (USHA) 
in 1937, were poorly funded and subject to political 
attack. 

The HOLC and the FHA did not directly spur 
economic recovery, but they did help to preserve 
the economic and social value of home ownership 
among wage-earning families. According to one 
estimate, the HOLC refinanced approximately one- 
tenth of the nation's nonfarm residences between 
1933 and 1935. At the same time, the policies 
adopted by these agencies supported informal 
practices of racial and social class residential segre- 
gation and urban divestment. Through its sale of af- 
fordable home mortgage insurance and its creation 
of minimal construction standards, the FHA en- 



couraged the growth of outlying suburban areas, 
which were usually segregated by race and class, 
and discouraged investment in older, urban neigh- 
borhoods where greater racial, ethnic and religious 
diversity often existed. 

Ironically perhaps, the New Deal agencies that 
helped to preserve the commercial housing market, 
such as the FHA, are less celebrated than two other 
Roosevelt administration initiatives that frequently 
are portrayed as political failures — the federally 
subsidized, low-income public housing program 
and the model community programs. In 1933 and 
1934 the PWA's Division of Housing offered low- 
interest loans to several limited-dividend housing 
corporations for the construction of urban housing. 



476 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



HOUSING 




The Georgia State Capitol Homes site in Atlanta in the early 1940s after completion of the U.S. Housing Authority construction 
project. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



Catherine Bauer, author of the classic 1934 study 
Modern Housing, regarded Philadelphia's PWA- 
financed Carl Mackley Houses as a model commu- 
nity, partly because of the way architects Alfred 
Katsner and Oscar Stonorov used architectural de- 
sign and community planning to foster resident in- 
teraction. The optimism Bauer and other reformers 
expressed in the early days of the public housing 
movement began to erode when the PWA discon- 
tinued the loan program in 1934 and began to build 
public housing directly. Although a few PWA-built 
public housing developments, such as Atlanta's 
Techwood Homes, featured sleek international- 
style architecture, civic art, and community facili- 
ties, inadequate funding resulted in the elimination 



from most developments of the amenities advocat- 
ed by reform-minded planners. 

The USHA inherited the public housing pro- 
gram from the PWA in 1937 upon the passage of 
the United States Housing Act, commonly known 
as the Wagner- Steagall Act. The USHA provided 
long-term, low-interest loans to local public hous- 
ing authorities for the construction of public hous- 
ing developments, and then it subsidized their op- 
eration. Strict per-unit construction cost limits 
inserted into the Wagner-Steagall Act by the politi- 
cal allies of the home -building, real estate, and 
banking sectors resulted in housing that was fre- 
quently inferior in terms of location and appear- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



W7 



U S T N 



CHARLES 



ance, and its inhabitants were economically and so- 
cially stigmatized. 

In 1937 the Farm Security Administration was 
assigned responsibility for the Greenbelt Town and 
Subsistence Homestead programs started three 
years earlier. Originally under the direction of Roo- 
sevelt braintruster Rexford G. Tugwell, the three 
Greenbelt towns — Greenbelt, Maryland; Green- 
dale, Wisconsin; and Greenhills, Ohio — 
demonstrated the social and economic value of 
comprehensive community planning and the merit 
of alternatives to commercial housing. Subsistence 
Homesteads such as Arthurdale, West Virginia, 
which combined subsistence agriculture and indus- 
trial labor shared at least two characteristics with 
the low-income, public housing program: Both 
were woefully underfunded, and both were highly 
vulnerable to political attack. Neither the low- 
income public housing developments nor the ex- 
perimental communities built under the New Deal 
excited sufficient interest to muster the political and 
economic power necessary to bring about a funda- 
mental shift in patterns of housing development 
and ownership. 

The Great Depression threatened the American 
Dream of homeownership, practically extinguished 
the demand for new residential home building, and 
dramatically curtailed home improvements. Un- 
willing to accept the political consequences of a fur- 
ther reduction in housing standards, Congress and 
Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt assembled the 
funds necessary to shore up the declining private 
fortunes of the home-building industry and vali- 
date the sanctity of home ownership. But the Unit- 
ed States's housing woes did not end with the 
Great Depression: mobilization for World War II 
only worsened the problem wage-earning families 
in rural and urban areas encountered during the 
Depression — a scarcity of affordable housing. De- 
spite massive federal government intervention, the 
United States remained one-third poorly housed 
throughout the Great Depression. 

See Also: BAUER, CATHERINE; CITIES AND SUBURBS; 
FEDERAL HOUSING ADMINISTRATION (FHA); 
FEDERAL NATIONAL MORTGAGE ASSOCIATION 
(FNMA); FEDERAL SAVINGS AND LOAN 
INSURANCE CORPORATION (FSLIC); 



GREENBELT TOWNS; HOMELESSNESS; 
REGIONAL PLANNING ASSOCIATION OF 
AMERICA. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Arnold, Joseph. A New Deal in the Suburbs: A History of 
the Greenbelt Town Program, 1935-1965. 1971. 

Bauer, Catherine. Modern Housing. 1934. 

Biles, Roger. "Nathan Straus and the Failure of U.S. Pub- 
lic Housing, 1937-1942." The Historian 53 (Autumn 
1990): 33-46. 

Conkin, Paul K. Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal 
Community Program. 1959. 

Fisher, Robert Moore. Twenty Years of Public Housing. 
1959. 

Friedman, Lawrence. Government and Slum Housing. 
1968. 

Gelfand, Mark I. A Nation of Cities: The Federal Govern- 
ment and Urban America. 1975. 

Hays, R. Allen. The Federal Government and Urban Hous- 
ing: Ideology and Change in Public Policy. 1985. 

lackson, Kenneth. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization 
of the United States. 1985. 

Keith, Nathaniel. Politics and the Housing Crisis Since 
1930. 1973. 

Knepper, Cathy. Greenbelt: A Living Legacy of the New 
Deal. 2001. 

Lubove, Roy. "Homes and a 'Few Well-Placed Fruit 
Trees': An Object Lesson in Federal Housing." Social 
Research 27 (Winter 1960): 469-486. 

McDonnell, Timothy. The Wagner Housing Act: A Case of 
the Legislative Process. 1957. 

Pommer, Richard. "The Architecture of Urban Housing 
in the United States During the Early 1930s." Journal 
of the Society of Architectural Historians 37 (December 
1978): 235-264. 

Radford, Gail. Modern Housing for America: Policy Strug- 
gles in the New Deal Era. 1996. 

Vale, Lawrence. From the Puritans to the Projects: Public 
Housing and Public Neighbors. 2000. 

Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History 
of Housing in the United States. 1981. 

Kristin M. Szylvian 



HOUSTON, CHARLES 

Charles Hamilton Houston (1895-1950), law pro- 
fessor, litigator, and civil rights legal strategist, 



W8 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



H 



S T N 



A R L E S 



played a principal role in conceptualizing, defining 
and setting the pace of the legal phase of the 
African -American struggle against racial discrimi- 
nation and segregation in education from the 1930s 
to 1950. His work was pivotal in the education of 
African -American lawyers; the development of a 
legal strategy to destroy the constitutional under- 
pinnings of racial segregation; the litigation of suits 
challenging racial discrimination in education, em- 
ployment, and housing; and the incorporation of an 
activist philosophy of social engineering into the ju- 
risprudential matrix of the United States. 

Born Charles Hamilton Houston in Washing- 
ton, D.C., on September 3, 1895, to William LePre 
Houston, a lawyer, and Mary Ethel Hamilton 
Houston, a hairdresser and former teacher, Hous- 
ton attended racially segregated public schools until 
his graduation from M Street High School in 1911. 
He graduated with honors from Amherst College in 
Massachusetts in 1915. After teaching briefly at 
Howard University and serving as an officer in the 
segregated armed forces during World War I, 
Houston attended Harvard Law School. There he 
became the first African-American editor of the 
Harvard Law Review (in 1921) and earned both his 
LL.B. with honors (1922) and the Doctorate in Ju- 
ridical Science (1923). He was admitted to the Dis- 
trict of Columbia bar in 1924 and joined his father 
to form a law practice, Houston and Houston. 

During the Great Depression and the New 
Deal era, Houston practiced and taught law. As the 
chief academic officer and Vice Dean of Howard 
University's Law School, Houston not only institut- 
ed new procedures and standards, but also re- 
allocated funds to satisfy the requirements for the 
law school's approval by the American Bar Associa- 
tion and accreditation by the Association of Ameri- 
can Law Schools. As a professor of law, Houston 
introduced to Howard's students a non-traditional 
philosophy of law he called social engineering. The 
principal concepts of Houston's philosophy of so- 
cial engineering were two: first, the propriety of cre- 
ative and strategic use of the legal system by law- 
yers to bring about just results and equal protection 
of the law; second, the duty of lawyers in the United 
States to use law as an instrument of social change, 
democratic advancement, and racial justice. Beyond 



that, he challenged African-American lawyers to 
serve as interpreters and proponents of the race's 
rights and aspirations. Practicing lawyers and How- 
ard's students, among them Thurgood Marshall 
and Oliver Hill, were further challenged to work for 
African Americans' full citizenship rights and 
equality under the law. 

As the first salaried special counsel for the Na- 
tional Association for the Advancement of Colored 
People (NAACP) from 1934 to 1950, Houston con- 
ceptualized and implemented, with Thurgood Mar- 
shall as his assistant special counsel, a protracted 
litigation campaign to have racial segregation in 
public education declared illegal. Taking into ac- 
count institutionalized racism and the Supreme 
Court's reliance upon precedent, the campaign's 
scores of skilled and committed lawyers affiliated 
nationally and locally with the NAACP and its sep- 
arately incorporated legal defense and educational 
fund focused on gradually but systematically invali- 
dating the controlling precedent for racial segrega- 
tion — the "separate but equal" doctrine set forth in 
Flessy v. Ferguson (1896) — and on establishing new 
precedents for interpretation of the Fourteenth 
Amendment's equal protection clause. These law- 
yers included, but were not limited to Marshall, 
Hill, Robert Carter, William Hastie, Z. Alexander 
Looby, James Nabrit, Constance Baker Motley, 
Conrad Pearson, Louis Redding and Arthur Shores. 
With Houston's direction during the latter 1930s 
and his advice to Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP's 
Legal Defense Fund, and cooperating attorneys 
throughout the 1940s, test cases were argued until 
adequate precedents had been established to 
launch in 1950 a direct attack on the legality of ra- 
cially segregated schools in the states and the Dis- 
trict of Columbia. This final phase of the litigation 
campaign culminated in the 1954 Brown v. Board 
and Boiling v. Sharpe rulings of the U.S. Supreme 
Court,that declared racially segregated public 
schools illegal. 

Although serving as a consultant-legal counsel 
to the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund after re- 
turning to private practice in 1940, Houston focused 
his practice on racial discrimination in employment 
and housing. With Joseph Waddy, Spottswood 
Robinson III and other attorneys, Houston won 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



W9 



HOWARD 



UNIVERSITY 



precedent-setting cases before the U.S. Supreme 
Court concerning the duty of fair representation of 
workers and African Americans seeking to pur- 
chase homes. In 1944, efforts to protect African 
American railroad workers against discriminatory 
treatment and racially-motivated violence culmi- 
nated in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, 
William Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railroad 
and Tom Tunstall v. Brotherhood of Locomotive 
Firemen & Enginemen. Agreeing with Charles 
Houston's argument, Supreme Court justices 
handed down an opinion in Steele and Tunstall 
that established the duty of statutory bargaining 
agents to represent fairly and impartially all work- 
ers whose interest by statute they were designated 
to represent in negotiations with employers. In 
Hurd v. Hodge and Urciolo v. Hodge, Houston suc- 
cessfully argued against judicial enforcement of ra- 
cially restrictive covenants to purchase agreements 
in the District of Columbia and in 1948 the U.S. Su- 
preme Court prohibited court enforcement of cove- 
nants to housing contracts that restricted by race 
the sale of homes. 

On April 20, 1950, Charles Houston succumbed 
to a heart attack in Washington, D.C. Although best 
known as Thurgood Marshall's mentor-teacher, 
Houston's lasting legacy includes his transforma- 
tion of Howard University's law school during the 
Great Depression and his training of civil rights 
lawyers, his articulation of a jurisprudence of social 
engineering, and his contributions as legal architect 
and strategist of the legal phase of the early civil 
rights movement. 

See Also: CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES; 

HOWARD UNIVERSITY; NATURAL ASSOCIATION 
FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE 
(NAACP); RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Harper, Conrad. "Houston, Charles H," in Dictionary of 
American Negro Biography, edited by Rayford Logan 
and Michael Winston. 1982. 

Hastie, William H. "Charles Hamilton Houston." Negro 
History Bulletin 13 (1950): 207. 

Houston, Charles H. "Lhe Need For Negro Lawyers." 
Journal of Negro Education 4 (1935): 49-52. 

Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice. 1976. 



McNeil, Genna Rae. Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Hous- 
ton and the Struggle for Civil Rights. 1983. 

Robinson, Spottswood W. "No Lea for the Feeble: Lwo 
Perspectives on Charles Hamilton Houston." How- 
ard Law Journal 20 (1977): 3-4. 

Smith, J. Clay, Jr. Emancipation. 1993. 

"Lributes to Charles Hamilton Houston." Harvard Law 
Review 111 (1998). 

Genna Rae McNeil 



HOWARD UNIVERSITY 



Howard University was founded in 1867 by an act 
of Congress and was named for General Oliver Otis 
Howard, former head of the Freedmen's Bureau. 
Howard's leadership was exclusively white until 
1926, when Reverend Mordecai Johnson became its 
first black president. Virtually coinciding with John- 
son's arrival was a pledge by Congress to provide 
an annual appropriation to support the university's 
endowment. Congress's financial support allowed 
Johnson to implement his plan to improve the aca- 
demic quality of the school. (When Johnson ar- 
rived, only the medical and dental schools — out of 
ten professional and graduate schools — were ac- 
credited.) Johnson made his first move with the law 
school. He hired Charles Houston as the new dean 
and gave him the mandate to secure accreditation. 
Houston, who would become the first legal counsel 
for the National Association for the Advancement 
of Colored People (NAACP) and one of the archi- 
tects of the NAACP's civil rights legal strategies, 
hired William Hastie and James Nabrit, among oth- 
ers. In 1931, Howard's law school was accredited 
and, more importantly, became nationally recog- 
nized for its leadership in civil rights law. Civil 
rights pioneers Thurgood Marshall and Robert Car- 
ter graduated in 1933 and 1940, respectively. Fur- 
thermore, Nabrit, who participated in virtually 
every civil rights brief from 1927 to 1954, created 
the nation's first civil rights law class in 1938. 

Howard's academic prominence was not limit- 
ed to the law school. Scientists like zoologist Ernest 
Everet Just, chemist Percy Julian, anthropologist 
Montague Cobb, and the medical school's Charles 



U0 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



HOWE 



LOUIS MCHENRY 



Drew were all leaders in their disciplines. Alain 
Locke, whose anthology The New Negro gave form 
to the Harlem Renaissance, taught philosophy at 
Howard. Poet and literary critic Sterling Brown was 
also on the faculty, as were pioneering historians 
Charles H. Wesley and Rayford Logan, actor Todd 
Duncan, economist Abram Harris, political scientist 
Ralph Bunche, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and 
education specialists Dorothy Porter Wesley, 
Charles Thompson, and Doxey Wilkerson. 

Many leading education philanthropists added 
to the government's support, thus providing finan- 
cial security for Howard throughout the Great De- 
pression. With its concentration of academic talent, 
Johnson's accreditation and building campaign, 
and secure finances, Howard was the most success- 
ful black academic center in the country. Fisk Uni- 
versity in Tennessee and Atlanta University in 
Georgia were Howard's only competitors, but their 
resources paled in comparison. 

This privileged position, however, did not 
translate into a peaceful existence. During the 1930s 
Howard undergraduates led marches against seg- 
regation in the House of Representatives' dining 
room, protested a national crime conference that 
ignored lynching, held peace rallies, and helped 
lead economic boycotts of local white merchants 
who refused to hire black workers. Faculty mem- 
bers arranged conferences that attacked New Deal 
policies, led community pickets, and organized a 
teachers' union that aligned itself with national 
labor causes and protested local segregation poli- 
cies. Even Mordecai Johnson's actions occasionally 
inspired calls for his ouster: Because he thought the 
economic experiment in the Soviet Union was 
worth further study and because he defended the 
freedom of speech of even his most radical faculty, 
several congressmen were convinced that Johnson 
was a Communist, that he supported Communist 
teachings on campus, and that he harbored Com- 
munists. Federal investigations into Howard's af- 
fairs and teaching practices, however, failed to turn 
up sufficient evidence to fire Johnson or end finan- 
cial support for the university. 

When Howard attained academic excellence in 
the late 1920s it became the seed ground for several 
generations of intellectual and political activists. Al- 



though its popularity among federal officials was 
not unanimous during the Depression, it enjoyed 
public support from such prominent figures as 
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of the 
Interior Harold Ickes. This support continued even 
despite strong faculty criticism of the New Deal. It 
is likely that Roosevelt believed that the symbolic 
importance of a national Negro university far out- 
weighed the significance of any critiques that came 
from its campus. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; BUNCHE, RALPH; 
EDUCATION; HOUSTON, CHARLES. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dyson, Walter. Howard University, the Capstone of Negro 
Education, a History: 1867-1940. 1941. 

Holloway, Jonathan Scott. Confronting the Veil: Abram 
Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 
1919-1941. 2002. 

Logan, Rayford. Howard University: The First Hundred 
Years, 1867-1967. 1967. 

Manning, Kenneth R. Black Apollo of Science: The Life of 
Ernest Everett Just. 1983. 

McNeil, Genna Rae. Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Hous- 
ton and the Struggle for Civil Rights. 1983. 

Winston, Michael R. "Through the Back Door: Academic 
Racism and the Negro Scholar in Historical Perspec- 
tive." Daedelus 100, no. 3 (1971): 678-719. 

Jonathan Scott Holloway 



HOWE, LOUIS MCHENRY 

Louis McHenry Howe (1871-1936) was Franklin D. 
Roosevelt's close friend and chief political aide from 
1912 until his death at the end of the president's 
first term. Born in Indianapolis, Howe grew up in 
Saratoga Springs, New York. After high school he 
worked for his family's weekly newspaper and part- 
time for New York City papers during the Saratoga 
horse racing season and the Albany legislative ses- 
sion. He wrote speeches and ran campaigns for var- 
ious upstate Democratic politicians. When Roose- 
velt arrived in Albany as a state senator in 1911, 
both he and Howe were identified with the anti- 
Tammany Democratic League's commitment to 
conservation of resources and clean government. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



Ul 



OWE, LOUIS MCHENRY 




Louis McHenry Howe (seated second from left) with Franklin D. Roosevelt and others in Hyde Park, New York, in July 1932. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library 



Desperately ill during his 1912 state senate re- 
election bid, Roosevelt hired Howe to run his cam- 
paign. They won. Roosevelt soon learned that the 
country newsman was a skilled tactician, building 
networks, writing speeches, and planting favorable 
news stories. Roosevelt the public figure and Howe 
the private manipulator complemented each other. 
In 1913 Roosevelt became assistant secretary of the 
Navy and Howe became his chief aide. His princi- 
pal assignment was to manage patronage and in- 
fluence to make his boss the state's chief represen- 
tative in the Wilson administration. They never 
displaced Tammany, but in 1920 Roosevelt was 
nominated for vice president on a ticket headed by 
Ohio's Governor James Cox. They lost, and Roose- 
velt returned to a business career. 



When Roosevelt fell victim to polio in 1921 
Howe shared reponsibility for his care with Eleanor 
Roosevelt and moved into the Roosevelt's New 
York City house. While Roosevelt concentrated on 
regaining the use of his paralyzed legs, Howe fo- 
cused on rebuilding his boss's political strength in 
New York and reassuring Roosevelt that he could 
still be a major national figure. Roosevelt relied 
heavily on Howe, but made his own major deci- 
sions. In 1928, as Alfred E. Smith sought the presi- 
dency, he allowed himself to be drafted for gover- 
nor, a move that Howe strongly opposed. He won 
the governship; Smith lost the presidency. 

Roosevelt, Howe, and James A. Farley man- 
aged Roosevelt's successful 1932 campaign for the 



A 8 2 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



h y g 



E S 



A R L E S EVANS 



presidency, using a team of scholars — a brain trust 
they had assembled during Roosevelt's governor- 
ship — to develop issues and legislation. They were 
pioneering an approach that later, in Washington, 
would create a substantial network of staff and spe- 
cial offices — a fourth branch of government. Howe 
went to Washington as secretary to the president 
and lived in the White House with unlimited per- 
sonal access to his old friend. He had helped to 
build the brain trust, but he had to fight for power 
with its members. He died on April 16, 1936. Howe 
is buried in Fall River, Massachusetts, where his 
grave is marked by a monument that is a smaller 
copy of Roosevelt's at Hyde Park. 

See Also: DEMOCRATIC PARTY; ELECTION OF 1928; 
ELECTION OF 1932; ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR; 
ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Howe Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, 
N.Y. 

Rollins, Alfred B., Jr. Roosevelt and Howe. 1962. With a 
new introduction, 2001. 

Stiles, Lela. The Man behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis 
McHenry Howe. 1954. 

Alfred B. Rollins, Jr. 

HUAC. See HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES 
COMMITTEE. 

HUGHES, CHARLES EVANS 

Jurist and statesman Charles Evans Hughes (April 
11, 1862-August 27, 1948) was born in Glen Falls, 
New York, the only child of David Charles Hughes, 
an evangelical minister, and Mary Catherine Con- 
nelly, a schoolteacher. His father's calling carried 
the family to a number of New York and New Jer- 
sey communities during Charles's youth. A preco- 
cious child, he studied at home until age nine, at- 
tended three years of public school in Newark and 
another year in Manhattan before entering college 
at Colgate (then Madison University). After two 
years at Colgate, he transferred to Brown Universi- 
ty, finishing third in his class. 



After graduating first in his Columbia law class, 
Hughes passed the New York bar with a record 
high score and joined a New York firm in 1884. He 
became a partner three years later and married the 
daughter of the firm's senior partner the next year. 
Overcome by work and poor health, he left private 
practice briefly for a teaching position at Cornell 
Law School, but he soon returned to the firm, be- 
coming a prominent figure in commercial law. 

Hughes would also become active in public ser- 
vice and politics. As counsel to committees of the 
New York legislature, he led inquiries into corrup- 
tion and mismanagement of the state's gas, electric, 
and insurance industries. A reluctant but winning 
candidate for governor on the Republican ticket in 
1906 and 1908, he pushed successfully for creation 
of two utility regulatory commissions and the first 
significant workman's compensation program in 
the nation. 

Although Theodore Roosevelt had backed 
Hughes in his two gubernatorial races, the future 
justice's distaste for the give and take of politics 
caused strains in their relationship. In 1910, howev- 
er, President William Howard Taft appointed 
Hughes to a seat on the United States Supreme 
Court, where he served with distinction until re- 
signing in 1916 to make a losing bid for the White 
House against President Woodrow Wilson. Follow- 
ing the election, he returned to private practice in 
New York, then served as secretary of state in the 
Warren Harding administration. 

In 1930, President Herbert Hoover brought 
Hughes back to the Supreme Court, this time as 
chief justice. Hughes held the Court's center seat 
during one of the most tumultuous periods in 
its-and the nation's-history. Although never as 
committed to the laissez faire philosophy of the 
Court's "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," which 
critics had dubbed the most conservative justices of 
the period, Hughes wrote or joined a number of de- 
cisions rejecting New Deal programs and state leg- 
islation designed to pull the country out of the 
depths of the Depression. He spoke for the Court, 
for example, in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United 
States (1935), invalidating provisions of the Nation- 
al Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). But he also au- 
thored Home Building & Loan v. Blaisdell (1934), 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U3 



HUGHES 



L A N G S T N 



substantially narrowing the scope of the contract 
clause as a restriction on state power. And when 
the Court began dismantling its laissez faire prece- 
dents during the 1937 court-packing episode, 
Hughes wrote the first two opinions signaling an 
end to that era: West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), 
upholding a state minimum wage law for women 
virtually identical to one the Court had struck down 
the previous year; and National Labor Relations 
Board v. Jones & Laughlin (1937), upholding federal 
regulation of labor-management relations. Chief 
Justice Hughes retired from the Court in 1941 and 
died at age eight-six in 1948. 

See Also: BLACK, HUGO; DOUGLAS, WILLIAM O.; 
FRANKFURTER, FELIX; HOLMES, OLIVER 
WENDELL, JR.; SUPREME COURT; SUPREME 
COURT "PACKING" CONTROVERSY. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Danelski, David J., and J. S. Tulchin, eds. The Autobio- 
graphical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes. 1973. 

Glad, Betty. Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Inno- 
cence: A Study in American Diplomacy. 1966. 

Hendel, Samuel. Charles Evans Hughes and the Supreme 
Court. 1951. 

Pusey, Merlo. Charles Evans Hughes. 1951. 

TlNSLEY E. YARBROUGH 



HUGHES, LANGSTON 

Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902-May 22, 1967), 
poet, dramatist, fiction writer, journalist, and lyri- 
cist, was perhaps the most versatile of African- 
American writers and, especially as a poet, the most 
beloved. Born in Joplin, Missouri, he grew up in 
Lawrence, Kansas, and Cleveland, Ohio, where he 
attended high school from 1916 to 1920. In Kansas, 
his maternal grandmother, an ardent abolitionist 
whose first husband had died at Harpers Ferry in 
1859 as a member of John Brown's band, taught 
Hughes to revere the cause of social justice. In high 
school, Hughes was further influenced by his class- 
mates, many of whom were the children of immi- 
grants from eastern Europe. His first books, The 
Weary Blues (1926) and Tine Clothes to the few 



(1927), were volumes of poetry that reflected both 
his lively social conscience and his commitment to 
the vernacular culture of black America, especially 
its music. A landmark essay, "The Negro Artist and 
the Racial Mountain" (published in the June 23, 
1926, issue of The Nation), in which Hughes called 
on younger blacks to be proud of their ethnic heri- 
tage even as they insisted on artistic freedom, 
helped establish him as a key figure of the flourish- 
ing Harlem Renaissance. By 1930, however, 
Hughes began to sense the coming economic disas- 
ter. "New York began to be not so pleasant that 
winter," he would write in his 1940 autobiography, 
The Big Sea. "People were sleeping in subways or 
on newspapers in office doors, because they had no 
homes. And in every block a beggar appeared." 

In 1931 and 1932 Hughes toured the South and 
the West by car, consciously trying to take his poet- 
ry to the people; he also publicly protested the 
treatment of the Scottsboro Boys. In 1932, he went 
to the Soviet Union to help make a film about race 
relations in the United States; when that venture 
collapsed, he stayed on for a year. About this time, 
Hughes, although never a Communist, wrote his 
most radical poems, including "Good Morning 
Revolution," "Goodbye Christ," and "One more 'S' 
in the U.S.A." (to make it Soviet). In 1933 and 1934, 
living in Carmel, California, he wrote the often bit- 
ter short stories that comprise The Ways of White 
Tolks (1934). While there, he also worked on a play 
(never produced) about labor unrest in agricultural 
California. In 1935, his tragedy Mulatto opened on 
Broadway, but Hughes saw little of its profits be- 
cause of the hostility of its producer, a white man. 
Disillusioned, he wrote "Let America Be America 
Again," a long poem intended as an anthem for the 
nation during the Depression. 

In 1937, he spent three months in Spain as a 
war correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American 
newspaper. Returning to America, he founded the 
Harlem Suitcase Theatre. Its first production, Don't 
You Want to Be Tree? (1938), was a loosely con- 
structed play-with-music that culminates in a rous- 
ing call for the unity of black and white workers. 
That year, 1938, the Communist International 
Workers Order published A New Song, a collection 
of Hughes's radical poems. However, he soon an- 



<.U 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



HULL 



C R D L L L 



gered the left by working on a Hollywood film, Way 
Down South (1939), that employed many movie ste- 
reotypes about black folk in Dixie. Although 
Hughes pleaded truthfully that he was destitute, 
certain critics lambasted him. A greater threat came 
from the right. In 1940, just before a gala book lun- 
cheon in California to mark the appearance of The 
Big Sea, supporters of an evangelist attacked in 
Hughes's "Goodbye Christ" forced its organizers to 
cancel the event. Retreating, Hughes issued a state- 
ment renouncing the poem. His role as a major lit- 
erary commentator on the ills of capitalism in 
America was over, just as the Depression itself ap- 
proached its end. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; LITERATURE; WRIGHT, 
RICHARD. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1: 
1902-1941: I Too Sing America. 1986. 

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 2: 
1941-1967: I Dream A World. 1988. 

Rampersad, Arnold, and David Roessel, eds. Collected 
Poems of Langston Hughes. 1994. 

Arnold Rampersad 




Langston Hughes, photographed by Gordon Parks in 1943. 
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI 
Collection 



HULL, CORDELL 



Cordell Hull (October 2, 1871-July 23, 1955) was 
the longest serving secretary of state in U.S. history. 
Hull was born in a rented log cabin in Overton 
County, Tennessee, in the foothills of the Cumber- 
land Mountains. He was the third of five sons born 
to William and Elizabeth Riley Hull. Of humble 
background, Hull was educated by his mother and 
by an itinerate tutor who would spend two to three 
months during the winter teaching Hull and other 
neighborhood children. At fourteen, Hull enrolled 
at the Montvale Institute in Celina, Tennessee. This 
was followed by a stint in university and eventually 
law school, which Hull finished in 1891. 

Hull's association with politics began at the age 
of nineteen when he was elected chairman of the 



Democratic Party for his county. At twenty-one, 
Hull entered the state legislature. He then served 
for a time as a judge, and in 1906 was elected to the 
U.S. House of Representatives. Hull kept this seat 
until 1920, when, along with many of his fellow 
Democrats, he fell victim to the anti-Wilsonian sen- 
timent that followed World War I and Wilson's 
drive to involve the United States in the League of 
Nations. Without a place in Congress, Hull took up 
the chairmanship of the Democratic National Com- 
mittee, a post that he kept until 1924. This gave 
Hull his first real national exposure, which he used 
to regain his congressional seat in the 1922 election. 
For a time, Hull entertained the hope that he might 
become his party's nominee for president in the 
1928 election, but he eventually dropped the idea, 
resolving instead to run successfully for the Senate 
two years later. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



us 



U M R 



Hull enjoyed a good reputation among his con- 
gressional colleagues, and was widely regarded as 
a moderate, cautious, and hardworking Democrat 
who had a knack for bringing antagonists together 
in a spirit of cooperation. With the exception of his 
persistent advocacy of free trade, Hull rarely took a 
stand on controversial issues and in general sought 
to avoid confrontation. Hull's critics have argued 
that these characteristics meant that Hull left no 
real mark as a legislator, and much the same charge 
was laid against him as secretary of state. But Hull's 
moderation (particularly his moderate internation- 
alism) and the broad public and party support he 
enjoyed made him a political asset. Franklin D. 
Roosevelt recognized this, and when he decided to 
run for president in 1932, he sought Hull's support. 
Hull campaigned vigorously for Roosevelt, and was 
rewarded for his loyalty with a seat in the cabinet 
as secretary of state, a post he would retain until 
November 1944. 

Hull's memoirs, published in 1948, are littered 
with references to his frustration over Roosevelt's 
tendency to act as his own secretary of state, and 
there is no question that on a wide range of issues, 
Roosevelt often chose to ignore or bypass Hull. This 
tendency became even more pronounced during 
World War II. Hull played little role, for example, 
in the intimate and almost continuous communica- 
tion between British Prime Minister Winston Chur- 
chill and Roosevelt. Hull also remained largely out- 
side the summit diplomacy that became the 
hallmark of the Grand Alliance led by Churchill, 
Roosevelt, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. But in 
other areas, Hull did have an impact. During the 
1930s, for example, Hull played a significant role in 
the development of the Good Neighbor Policy, and 
he is largely responsible for the passage of the 1934 
Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which led to a 
significant expansion of U.S. trade in the mid to late 
1930s. During the war, Hull also became intimately 
involved in the negotiation of the 1942 Lend-Lease 
Consideration Agreement, which was designed to 
obtain trade and other economic concessions from 
the British as a quid pro quo for Lend-Lease aide, 
and later he was involved in postwar planning and 
preparation. With Roosevelt's encouragement, Hull 
helped engineer U.S. commitment to postwar in- 
ternationalism and the establishment of the United 



Nations through his effective involvement in the 

1943 Foreign Ministers Conference in Moscow, the 

1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, 
and the 1945 San Francisco Conference, where the 
United Nations was officially born. In recognition 
of his key role in the establishment of the UN, Hull 
was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 1945. 

See Also: GOOD NEIGHBOR POLICY; 
ISOLATIONISM. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dallek, Robert. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign 
Policy, 1932-1945. 1979. 

Dobson, Alan. U.S. Wartime Aide to Britain, 1940-1946. 
1986. 

Gellman, Irwin F. Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell 
Hull, and Sumner Welles. 1995. 

Grabner, Norman A. American Values Projected Abroad. 
1985. 

Hull, Cordell. The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. 1955. 

Kimball, Warren F. The Most Unsordid Act: Lend Lease 
1939-1941. 1969. 

Kimball, Warren F., ed. America Unbound: World War II 
and the Making of a Superpower. 1992. 

Langer, William L., and S. Everett Gleason. The Challenge 
to Isolation, 1937-1940. 1952. 

Pratt, Julius W. Cordell Hull, 1933-44. 1964. 

Reynolds, David. The Creation of the Anglo-American Alli- 
ance, 1937-41: A Study in Competitive Co-operation. 
1981. 

David B. Woolner 



HUMOR 

Sigmund Freud's astute observation about the de- 
sign of humor broadly refracted the tone of laughter 
throughout the Great Depression: "Humour is not 
resigned, it is rebellious. It signifies the triumph not 
only of the ego, but also of the pleasure principle, 
which is strong enough to assert itself here in the 
face of the adverse real circumstances." 

From the earliest settlements in the seven- 
teenth century, humor has been axial in American 
culture, a rebellious, rallying, and ribald dynamic. 
Pinpointing its enduring relevance, Constance 



U6 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



HUMOR 



Rourke noted in American Humor: A Study of the Na- 
tional Character (1931) that "Humor has been a 
fashioning instrument in America, cleaving its way 
through the national life, holding tenaciously to the 
spread elements of that life. ..." Its ultimate ob- 
jective, Rourke asserted, was uniting "the uncon- 
scious objective of a disunited people . . . and the 
rounded completion of an American type." 

Salient motifs of humor, a melange of resis- 
tance and rebellion, irony and nonsense, coursed 
through the travails of the Great Depression, as 
they had during previous domestic crises. The artic- 
ulation of humor mirrored and uplifted people in 
their attempt to cope with events that were confus- 
ing, contradictory, and seemingly incessant: "We'll 
hold the distinction of being the only country in the 
history of the world that ever went to the poor 
house in an automobile," offered Will Rogers, the 
popular crackerbarrel wit in the early decades of the 
twentieth century. 

The comical is often a spirited interplay with in- 
congruity. Initially, the stock market convulsion 
and swift economic decline recorded instant disbe- 
lief. Theatrical comedian Ed Wynn, playing the 
classic fool in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's 
Simple Simon (1930), would lay flat on his back on 
the stage and insist that business was looking up. 
As financial adversity mounted, the urge to retaliate 
against the power elite, the Wall Street bankers, in- 
vestment brokers, and corporate managers, as- 
sumed robust comic proportions. Will Rogers 
cracked that "every international banker ought to 
have printed over his office door, 'Alive today by 
the grace of a nation that has a sense of humor.'" 

At the same time, distrust of political and eco- 
nomic institutions loomed large. The memorable 
song, "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It," rendered by 
Groucho Marx in Horsefeathers (1932), summed up 
the pervasive, anarchistic feeling that nothing was 
going right and everything deserved condemna- 
tion. Several films spoofed the state outright. The 
public's rebellious resentments could be scene in 
the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933) and W. C. 
Fields's Million Dollar Legs (1932), both set in ficti- 
tious countries beset with chaotic economic condi- 
tions and corrupt politicians. As the president of 
"Freedonia," Groucho Marx sings "If you think this 



country's bad off now, wait till I get through with 
it," while W. C. Fields, head of "Klopstockia," man- 
ages to remain in office as long as he triumphs at 
arm wrestling. 

Virtually every major segment of media, includ- 
ing the stage, novels, magazines, cinema, and 
radio, sought in humor a means of expressing peo- 
ple's desire to escape from the economic distress 
while grappling with its tangled meaning. Reaching 
the largest audience throughout the decade was the 
comic film. Across the regions, an astonishing sixty 
to seventy-five million persons, approximately 61 
percent of the population, went to the movie the- 
aters each week. 

Several themes infused the early films. The 
comedy of pathos, of irony and frustration, in the 
early years gave way to the humor of aggression 
and an expression of hope later in the decade. The 
major film figures of the 1920s were small, wiry, 
and resilient. Against the antagonistic environs of 
the modern city, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, 
Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langston survived with 
classical, comedic dignity. The Great Depression 
forced a shift from the comedy of individual poi- 
gnancy to the comedy of resilience and retaliation. 
W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Carol 
Lombard — as well as the radio comedians, Fred 
Allen, Jack Benny, George Burns, and Grade 
Allen — used their comedy as a buffer against the 
economic harshness. On occasion, their routines 
plunged deep into working-class hostility. 

A prominent cinematic take-off of the theatrical 
comedy of manners was the screwball comedy: In 
addition to Duck Soup, Horse Feathers, and Million 
Dollar Legs, these include Bringing up Baby (1938), 
It Happened One Night (1934), My Man Godfrey 
(1936), and You Can't Take It with You (1938). This 
farcical leitmotif satirized the harsh realities of eco- 
nomic plight and lampooned the upper class, their 
negative impact and banal life style. Invoking the 
homeless in My Man Godfrey (1936) — particularly 
"the forgotten man" emphasized in President 
Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech — was a scene of 
men in a Hooverville shelter by a city dump that 
dramatically contrasted the woeful condition of the 
unemployed against the asinine game of a scaven- 
ger hunt of the wealthy elite. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U7 



N D R E D 



DAYS 



Concomitantly, the application of the "Produc- 
tion Code" in 1934 that promulgated "the moral 
importance of entertainment" altered the language 
and plot of comedy films. Eschewing the amoral, 
dark, and surreal comedy that had formed the key- 
stone of farcical routines early in the 1930s, the Pro- 
duction Code led to a rollicking, subversive sexual 
humor, an imaginative comedy that suggested but 
never exposed sexual antics. Mae West, whose co- 
medic fare had incited the Code, wrote, directed, 
and starred in films where her sexual innuendoes 
became repeatable rejoinders: Night after Night 
(1932), She Done Him Wrong (1933), and My Little 
Chickadee (1940). Entering a speakeasy in Night after 
Night, for example, West replies to a hatcheck girl 
who exclaims, "Goodness, what lovely diamonds," 
that "Goodness had nothin' do with it, dearie." 

Additionally, radio comedy was a coalescing 
comedic force that extended through the difficult 
times of World War II. The most popular shows fea- 
tured Jack Benny, Amos 'n Andy (Freeman Gosden 
and Charles Correll), Fred Allen, George Burns and 
Grade Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly (Jim and Mar- 
ian Jordan), Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope, and Edgar 
Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, plus a comedy 
panel, audience-participation program, Can You 
Top This? 

Writers, poets, novelists, and essayists fash- 
ioned comic plots that directly or obliquely spanned 
the economic rupturing: James Thurber, E. B. 
White, S. J. Perelman, Langston Hughes, H. L. 
Mencken, and Stephen Leacock. Cartoonists in the 
preeminent literary magazine, The New Yorker, of- 
fered sharp social criticism together with a sardonic 
look at the crumbling conditions, as well as changes 
in social mores shaped by the Depression. 

In sum, the vast resource of rebellious humor 
was in full play as the populace confronted the 
enormous distress and mystery engendered by the 
Great Depression. 

See Also: COMMUNICATIONS AND THE PRESS; 
HOLLYWOOD AND THE FILM INDUSTRY; 
LEISURE; MARX BROTHERS; RADIO; ROGERS, 
WILL; WEST, MAE. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bier, Jesse. "Interwar Humor." In The Rise and Tall of 
American Humor. 1968. 

Gates, Robert A. American Literary Humor during the 
Great Depression. 1999. 

Hausdorff, Don Mark. "Magazine Humor and the De- 
pression." New York Tolklore Quarterly 20 (1964): 
199-214. 

MacDonald, Dwight. "Laugh and Lie Down." Partisan 
Review 4 (1937): 44-53. 

Martin, Jay, ed. Humor in Economic Depressions (issue 
title). Studies in American Humor 3, nos. 2 and 3 
(Summer/Fall 1984). 

Robbins, L. H. "American Humorists." New York Times 
Magazine 8 (September 1935): 8-9. 

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. "The Great American Joke." The 
South Atlantic quarterly 70 (Winter, 1973): 82-94. 

Wertheim, Arthur Frank. Radio Comedy. 1979. 

Joseph Boskin 



HUNDRED DAYS 

On March 4, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt returned to 
the White House after his inaugural, and Mrs. Roo- 
sevelt served hot dogs for the lunch guests. The 
president then reviewed the inauguration parade, 
giving pride of place on the stand to Mrs. Woodrow 
Wilson and the surviving members of the Wilson 
administration. While the band played the "Frank- 
lin D. Roosevelt Inauguration March," composed 
by the new secretary of the treasury, William 
Woodin, the incoming attorney general, Homer 
Cummings, studied the Trading with the Enemy 
Act of 1917. He decided that it could be used to 
close the banks and to halt the shipment of gold out 
of the country. Holdover Republican officials clos- 
eted with Roosevelt's advisers worked round the 
clock to find some method of reopening the na- 
tion's banks. The country's banking system had 
come to a halt when the governors of New York 
and Illinois had bowed to the inevitable and closed 
their state's banks in the early morning of inaugu- 
ration day. On Sunday evening, Roosevelt signed 
proclamations closing the banks and called Con- 
gress into special session. By early Tuesday morn- 
ing Woodin and Ray Moley had agreed that they 



U8 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



N D R E D 



DAYS 



should implement the plans outlined by departing 
Republican officials for reopening and reorganizing 
the banks, that they should make a "tremendous 
gesture" for economy in government, and that 
Roosevelt should make a "man to man appeal" for 
public confidence. 



REOPENING THE BANKS 

By the time Congress came into session on 
Thursday, March 9, the chairman of the House 
Banking Committee only had one copy of the bill 
that had finally been drafted at 3:00 that morning. 
He "came down the center aisle of the House wav- 
ing this thing. 'Here is this bill, let's pass it'." And 
the House passed it in forty minutes. The Senate 
was more deliberate but had still passed it by 8:30 
that evening. Two days later the House voted to 
give the president the power he asked for to cut and 
to reform veterans' benefits and to cut federal sala- 
ries. On Sunday Roosevelt gave his first fireside 
chat explaining the banking crisis and how banks 
would reopen. The next day the first ones did. 

Roosevelt had not originally intended that 
Congress should stay in session past the ten days 
that it took to reopen the banks. But by the time 
Congress assembled he had been persuaded to take 
advantage of Congress's presence and ask for farm 
legislation and unemployment relief. The opportu- 
nity to develop recovery and reform legislation as 
quickly as possible was irresistible. By the time 
Congress finally adjourned on June 16, the first one 
hundred days of the Roosevelt administration had 
produced sixteen major pieces of legislation. The 
cantankerous Congress, which had been gridlocked 
in bitter recrimination with the outgoing president, 
responded enthusiastically to the appeals of the 
new president. The politicians laid aside previous 
divisions, discarded long-held principles, and both 
grasped for themselves and gave to the executive 
vast, often unspecified powers, unheard of in 
peacetime. The federal government was given the 
power to decide which banks should reopen, to 
regulate the stock exchange, to determine the gold 
value of the dollar, to prescribe minimum wages 
and prices, to pay farmers not to produce, to pay 
money to the unemployed, to plan and regenerate 
a whole river basin across six states, to spend bil- 



lions of dollars on public works, and to underwrite 
credit for bankers, homeowners, and farmers. 

These first "Hundred Days" of the New Deal 
have served as a model for future presidents of bold 
leadership and executive legislative harmony. 
Jimmy Carter's adviser Stuart Eizenstat noted that 
since Roosevelt "the first hundred days of an ad- 
ministration have been closely watched as a sign of 
what can be expected over the course of the entire 
administration." Richard Nixon, conscious that the 
"dam against criticism" would come crashing down 
after a hundred days, created a "100 days group" 
that would push departments to bring in legislative 
proposals by the twelve-week deadline so that a 
"First Quarter Report" could be produced to show 
that the administration had met the hundred-day 
"test." But Arthur Schlesinger warned of the hun- 
dred-day "trap." "Roosevelt's 100 days was," he 
said "a unique episode which grew out of a unique 
crisis." What were the particular circumstances that 
enabled Roosevelt, but not subsequent presidents, 
to exercise such bold leadership and to command 
such congressional support? 



ECONOMIC CRISIS AND CONSTITUENCY 
PRESSURE 

The unprecedented scale of the economic ca- 
tastrophe faced by the United States led many to 
equate the position with war and to turn to the 
model of 1917, when the federal government had 
exercised vast emergency powers to mobilize men 
and resources to fight a European war. The passage 
in Roosevelt's inaugural address that drew the most 
sustained applause was his promise that if Con- 
gress did not act, he would ask Congress for "broad 
executive power to wage war against the emergen- 
cy, as great as the power that would be given to me 
if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." Roose- 
velt and his advisers turned to old wartime statutes 
to handle the new crisis. They consciously modeled 
new action agencies, such as the National Recovery 
Administration (NRA), on wartime predecessors. 
They used the emergency as the constitutional ra- 
tionale for bold new powers. Men and women who 
had had their first taste of public life running those 
wartime agencies returned to Washington in 1933 
from private life to sign on for the duration. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



U9 



N D R E D 



DAYS 



This need for action in an emergency and the 
willingness to contemplate dictatorial powers for a 
president certainly infused Congress in the first 
days of the Roosevelt administration. Republican 
minority leader Bertrand Snell said of the banking 
bill, "The house is burning down and the president 
of the United States says this is the way to put out 
the fire. And to me, at this time, there is only one 
way to answer that question and that is to give the 
president what he demands and says is necessary 
to meet the situation." 

But more conventional politics also assisted the 
president. The Democrats enjoyed healthy majori- 
ties in both houses of Congress: 311 to 116 in the 
House, 60 to 35 in the Senate. They also confronted 
a Republican opposition that was split between a 
progressive wing prepared to support many New 
Deal measures, particularly those assisting farmers, 
and a stand-pat conservative faction for whom the 
New Deal was anathema. Many members of Con- 
gress had been elected for the first time in 1932, but 
congressional leadership was in the hands of skilled 
and experienced southern Democrats. They were 
loyal party men, particularly comfortable with mea- 
sures, such as financial regulation, that they could 
interpret as the legacy of Wilsonian reform. They 
were anxious to build a legislative record, and they 
were personally friendly to Roosevelt, whose nomi- 
nation most of them had supported in opposition 
to the hated Al Smith. From his time in Washington 
under Wilson to his stays at Warm Springs, Roose- 
velt had, in turn, established a warm and personal 
rapport with these congressmen, and he never un- 
derestimated their almost limitless susceptibility to 
presidential flattery. In addition, the traditional pa- 
tronage available to any new administration was 
vastly increased by the proliferation of emergency 
agencies. The prospect of these jobs kept many 
congressmen in line, especially since most of them 
were not filled until the end of the Hundred Days. 

But constituency pressure pushed Congress 
into line with the legislation of the Hundred Days. 
The desperate unemployed and farmers and home- 
owners threatened with eviction demanded help. 
Roosevelt quickly demonstrated his ability to in- 
spire ordinary Americans. He cultivated the press. 
He held the first of 377 press conferences on March 



8. The relaxed and informal gathering in his office 
was in stark contrast to the suspicion and distance 
created by Herbert Hoover. As one journalist noted, 
"in that first sitting . . . the new president gave the 
correspondents more sensational news than some 
of his predecessors had handed out in four years." 
The hardboiled newsmen were bowled over and 
spontaneously applauded. Roosevelt's first fireside 
chat on March 12 even more effectively spoke over 
the heads of Washington politicians directly to the 
American people. The president took great care to 
make his case to an audience he envisaged sitting 
round the fireside. His preparations were meticu- 
lous: the right angle of the microphone, a false 
tooth to close a gap in his two lower front teeth, the 
speed of delivery (about one hundred words a min- 
ute), and the language (over three quarters of the 
words were among the thousand most commonly 
used). The people responded: Over 450,000 wrote 
to the White House in the first week. 

Congress however was not browbeaten into 
blanket submission to Roosevelt. In the first place, 
there was no presidential masterplan for the Hun- 
dred Days. Much was piecemeal and opportunistic: 
seeking the repeal of prohibition, for example, to 
soften the unpopularity of the Economy Act. Much 
was inserted by Congress: inflationary measures in 
the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the federal in- 
surance of bank deposits. The great National Indus- 
trial Recovery Act was prompted by the likely pas- 
sage of the Black thirty-hour bill, which Roosevelt 
considered unworkable. Roosevelt set his advisers 
on the task of pulling together existing recovery 
proposals into an administration proposal. The 
great recovery measures in agriculture and industry 
were largely enabling measures: The farm act and 
the recovery act laid out sometimes contradictory 
policy options. Which options would be adopted 
would depend on the administrators. Other more 
presidentially inspired measures, such as the Ten- 
nessee Valley Authority (TV A) and the Civilian 
Conservation Corps (CCC), were hurried onto the 
statute book to take advantage of the favorable po- 
litical climate. 

The passage of legislation was certainly helped 
by the relative weakness of organized interest 
groups. Labor was enfeebled, farmers were divided, 



i.90 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



N 6 E R MARCHES 



and businessmen, especially bankers, were discred- 
ited. Roosevelt faced down the veterans' lobby with 
Republican support. It is difficult to think that a re- 
gional authority like the TVA could have been cre- 
ated if the individual southern states had not been 
in such a weak position. Nevertheless, the vast 
powers given to the federal government were cir- 
cumscribed. The federal government simply lacked 
the "state capacity" to implement coercive central- 
ized measures; it lacked both the bureaucracy and 
the information to drive through top-down pro- 
grams. Bankers would have to provide advice on 
which banks could be reopened; farmers would 
have to administer the production control pro- 
grams; businessmen would have to staff the NRA 
code authorities; and the states would have to ad- 
minister the relief program. 

Some of the prominent figures in the Hundred 
Days — Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, and Harold 
Ickes — would still be central figures in the Roose- 
velt government when the president died in 1945. 
Others who survived, like Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 
and Frances Perkins, played a relatively minor role 
in the early months of the New Deal. By contrast, 
some key players in the Hundred Days would 
quickly pass from the stage or from the good graces 
of the administration: Brains Truster Ray Moley; the 
advocate of rigid economy Lewis Douglas; the pro- 
tege of Bernard Baruch Hugh Johnson; the Wilsoni- 
an warhorse Daniel Roper — all were influential in 
1933 but played little role afterwards. 

In a similar vein, the Hundred Days bought re- 
lief for the unemployed, the protection of labor 
standards, farm price supports, liberalized credit for 
homeowners and farmers, public works spending, 
securities regulation, and the TVA. But they also 
bought measures designed to slash government 
spending, to increase the tax burden through re- 
gressive excise taxes, and to foster business- 
government cooperation. It was unclear at the end 
of the Hundred Days whether the former or the lat- 
ter would be the force of the New Deal future. 

See Also: FIRESIDE CHATS; NEW DEAL; ROSSEVELT, 
FRANKLIN D. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Freidel, Frank B. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vol. 4: Launching 
the New Deal. 1973. 

Sargent, lames E. Roosevelt and the Hundred Days: Strug- 
gle for the Early New Deal 1981. 

Tony Badger 



HUNGER MARCHES 

When the Great Depression began, the Communist 
International called for unified protests by the un- 
employed on a single day. In the United States, the 
Communist Party and allied organizations publi- 
cized International Unemployment Day in their 
newspapers, in leaflets, and in preparatory demon- 
strations and meetings. Hundreds of thousands of 
unemployed people turned out in cities across the 
country on March 6, 1930, for militant protests for 
"Work or Wages," to which the police responded 
harshly. The Communist movement then orga- 
nized Unemployed Councils, neighborhood orga- 
nizations of the unemployed that fought evictions 
and put pressure on governmental authorities to 
provide assistance. Major protests were often 
dubbed "hunger marches." 

In 1931 there were local hunger marches and 
marches on state capitols in about a dozen states, 
often with marchers converging from different 
parts of the state to demand relief and unemploy- 
ment insurance. The first national hunger march 
took place on December 7, 1931, timed to coincide 
with the opening of Congress. The demands of the 
march included unemployment insurance and a so- 
cial insurance system to cover maternity care, ill- 
ness, accidents, and old age. There were local dem- 
onstrations and conferences to select 1,670 
delegates who converged on Washington from four 
separate columns. The marchers were unsuccessful 
in their attempts to address Congress or meet with 
the president, but they held mass meetings on their 
return homeward and brought public attention to 
the plight of the jobless. 

The most famous of the hunger marches was 
the March 7, 1932, Ford Hunger March. Three 
thousand marchers gathered in Detroit with the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



491 



N G E R MARC 



E S 



goal of presenting demands at the Ford employ- 
ment office in the suburb of Dearborn, a company 
town where Ford's main complex was located. Po- 
lice used tear gas to stop the marchers from enter- 
ing Dearborn. In response, some marchers threw 
stones. When the marchers reached the plant, the 
police opened fired, killing five. Authorities initially 
blamed Communists for what they called a riot, 
sought to arrest Communist leader William Z. Fos- 
ter, and launched raids against left-wing organiza- 
tions reminiscent of the hysteria following the Chi- 
cago Haymarket bombing of 1886. The massive 
funeral march of thirty thousand and the growth of 
left-wing organizations after the march indicated 
that repression would not break up the movement. 
Even within the company town of Dearborn, the 
Unemployed Council developed a significant base. 

The second national hunger march in Decem- 
ber 1932 had about twice as many delegates (3,200) 
as the first march. Delegations this time were able 
to meet with the presiding officers of the House and 
the Senate to present demands for cash winter re- 
lief, unemployment insurance, an end to military 
spending, and the taxing of corporations. Some 
members of Congress visited the hunger marchers' 
encampment. 

Three months later, Franklin Roosevelt's New 
Deal established federal support for state relief ef- 
forts and jobs programs for the unemployed, but 
the organizations of the unemployed continued 
their activity. They provided sustained grassroots 
and leftward pressure on the administration. The 
hunger march tactic was still employed and a com- 
bination of repressive measures against demonstra- 
tors, as well as concessions by the authorities, like- 
wise continued. 

Hunger marches were interracial events both in 
their composition and their attention to the issue of 
racial injustice. Marchers emphasized the higher 
rate of black unemployment, racial discrimination 
in relief programs, and the heavier repression of the 
African-American unemployed. Delegations of 
hunger marches conducted street meetings to ex- 
plain the Scottsboro case and marchers protested 
segregated eating and sleeping facilities on the 
route to the nation's capital. African Americans 
were prominent in the leadership of the movement. 



Although the Communist-led Unemployed 
Councils were the principal organizers of hunger 
marches, Socialists and followers of A. J. Muste also 
created substantial organizations of the unem- 
ployed. The Socialists emphasized lobbying, hear- 
ings, and conferences, while the Musteites focused 
on self-help groups, but both movements also con- 
ducted demonstrations and helped individuals with 
their grievances. The three unemployed move- 
ments united in 1935 into one organization, the 
Workers Alliance, which lobbied for relief funds 
and unemployment insurance, negotiated with re- 
lief agencies and the Works Progress Administra- 
tion on behalf of recipients and relief workers, con- 
ducted public demonstrations, and supported trade 
unions. 

In conducting hunger marches, fighting against 
evictions, helping to solve grievances, and speaking 
out for racial equality, activists in the unemployed 
movement developed as class-conscious workers 
while they helped to inspire a new moral vision of 
caring among a large section of the public. Many of 
these class-conscious workers went on to lead 
unionization campaigns, helped along by the sym- 
pathetic public opinion and worker hopefulness 
that the unemployed movement did so much to de- 
velop. 

See Also: COMMUNIST PARTY; UNEMPLOYED 
COUNCILS. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Fine, Sidney. Frank Murphy, Vol. 1: The Detroit Years. 
1975. 

Folsom, Franklin. Impatient Armies of the Poor: The Story 
of Collective Action of the Unemployed, 1808-1942. 
1991. 

Keeran, Roger. The Communist Party and the Auto Workers 
Unions. 1980. 

Lorence, James J. Organizing the Unemployed: Community 
and Union Activists in the Industrial Heartland. 1996. 

Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People's 
Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. 1977. 

Rosenzweig, Roy. "Organizing the Unemployed: The 
Early Years of the Great Depression." In Workers' 
Struggles, Past and Present: A "Radical America" Read- 
er, edited by lames R. Green. 1983. 

Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and Af- 
rican Americans, 1917-1936. 1998. 



Z.9Z 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



R S T N , Z R A N E A L E 



Sugar, Maurice. The Ford Hunger March. 1980. 

Martin Halpern 



HURSTON, ZORA NEALE 

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891-January 28, 
1960) was a folklorist, fiction writer, playwright, 
and essayist. She was a central figure in the Afri- 
can-American cultural movement known as the 
Harlem Renaissance. Her gravestone in Fort Pierce, 
Florida, bears an inscription coined by the writer 
Alice Walker, "A Genius of the South." The epitaph 
sums up not only the formidable nature of Hurs- 
ton's accomplishments, but also the symbolic im- 
portance that she and her work claim in the annals 
of African -American cultural history. 

More myths have circulated about Zora Neale 
Hurston than perhaps any other African-American 
woman writer. Recently, scholars have revealed her 
birthplace as Notasulga, Alabama, but for years his- 
torians and biographers believed that Hurston was 
born in Eatonville, Florida, the country's first incor- 
porated all-black town. Hurston spent most of her 
childhood in Eatonville, whence she drew much of 
her literary inspiration. Hurston contributed to the 
illusions that continue to dominate popular stories 
about her life by fabricating details of her personal 
history, such as her date of birth, which was misi- 
dentified for many years as 1901. In Wrapped in 
Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (2002), au- 
thor Valerie Boyd speculates that Hurston began 
revising her birth date in 1917, when she subtracted 
ten years in order to qualify for free schooling. 

Hurston attended Howard University in Wash- 
ington, D.C., sporadically between 1919 and 1925, 
and published her first short story, "John Redding 
Goes to Sea," in Stylus, the university literary mag- 
azine. By 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was in full 
swing, and Hurston moved to New York, where she 
collected prizes for her fiction and drama, and stud- 
ied anthropology with Franz Boas at Columbia Uni- 
versity. Hurston graduated from Barnard College 
with a bachelor's degree in 1928. 

The Great Depression was particularly disas- 
trous for African-Americans, and the economic 




Zora Neale Hurston, 1937. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and the Sun 
Newspaper Photograph Collection 



devastation caused by the Depression extinguished 
the better part of the Harlem Renaissance. Zora 
Neale Hurston thrived in the 1930s, however, find- 
ing success in the literary arena and beyond. During 
the 1930s, she did anthropological fieldwork in 
Haiti, Jamaica, the Bahamas, South Carolina, and 
the Florida Everglades. Her books on folklore, 
Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), re- 
flect the depth and breadth of her research. Hurs- 
ton's father inspired her first book, Jonah's Gourd 
Vine (1934), a novel. She wrote her second and 
most influential novel, Their Eyes Were Watching 
God (1937), in Haiti in seven weeks. The novel is a 
lyrical exploration of a black woman's search for ro- 
mantic love and self-definition. Her third novel, 
Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), is a retelling of 
the biblical story of Exodus. Hurston's final novel, 
Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), breaks convention 
with its focus on white characters. Her final pub- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



t93 



R S T N 



Z R A 



N E A L E 



lished work was Dust Tracks on the Road (1942), an 
autobiography whose inconsistencies have led 
many critics to treat it more like fiction than fact. 
Hurston's productivity did not result in financial se- 
curity, however, and she would always scramble for 
work to support her creative ambitions. She died in 
1960 of hypertensive heart disease in Fort Pierce, 
Florida. 

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON; LITERATURE. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence 
of the Afro -American Novelist. 1987. 

Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biog- 
raphy. 1977. 

Hurston, Zora Neale. I Love Myself When I am Laughing 
. . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and 
Lmpressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, edited by 
Alice Walker. 1979. 

Hurston, Zora Neale. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, 
edited by Carla Kaplan. 2002. 

Emily Bernard 



491. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 




I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN 
GANG 

The year 1932 was probably the most desperate 
faced by the American people since the end of the 
Civil War. With the nation mired in an economic 
depression for which there was no end in sight, un- 
employment growing to ever more unprecedented 
levels, and a government that seemed totally un- 
able to make any effective response to the disaster, 
it was a bleak time indeed. 

Rarely has the mood of a year been so accurate- 
ly reflected in a feature film as the hopelessness of 
1932 was in director Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive 
from a Chain Gang. Based on the story of a man, 
Robert Elliot Burns, who had escaped from a Geor- 
gia chain gang, the movie is a forceful expose of the 
brutal conditions on southern chain gangs. Screen- 
ings were banned in Georgia, and the state unsuc- 
cessfully sued Warner Brothers for libel. But this 
powerful film turned out to be much more: a mirror 
held up to a nation's outlook at the depth of the 
Great Depression. In it, a veteran of World War I 
with great ambition, James Allen (Paul Muni), re- 
turns from the war and finds an ungrateful nation 
and no suitable work. He drifts around the country 
and is wrongly arrested in a robbery in a southern 
state that is not named. Put on a chain gang, Allen 
is harshly treated. Eventually, with the assistance of 



a black prisoner, Allen escapes from the hell of 
lashings and total dehumanization. 

During the prosperous 1920s, Allen James, as 
he now calls himself, achieves great success as an 
architect — the sort of "man's job," building some- 
thing, that he had originally said he wanted. He be- 
comes a pillar of the community, but he is betrayed 
by an evil woman who learns his secret, blackmails 
him into marrying her, cheats on him, and finally 
exposes him. 

Jim voluntarily returns to the state where he ex- 
perienced a living hell because the authorities as- 
sure him he'll only have to do a few months of 
"easy time." Instead, the state authorities send him 
back to the chain gang. In a memorable statement 
reflective of widespread public attitudes toward 
government in the last year of the Herbert Hoover 
administration, Allen complains bitterly, "The 
state's promise didn't mean anything. It was all 
lies!" 

The protagonist escapes again, but this time, as 
a hunted man, he has to subsist in ways similar to 
those to which many Depression victims resorted. 
In the unforgettable closing scene, Muni's charac- 
ter, hovering in the shadows and seeming animalis- 
tic, answers the question "How do you live?" with 
a desperate, hopeless: "I steal!" Such a situation 
was all too understandable in much of America in 
1932. 



495 



I C K E S 



R L D 



See Also: GANGSTER FILMS; HOLLYWOOD AND 

THE FILM INDUSTRY; LAW ENFORCEMENT; 
VALUES, EFFECTS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 
ON. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Baxter, John. Hollywood in the Thirties. 1968. 

Bergman, Andrew. We're in the Money: Depression Ameri- 
ca and Its Films. 1971. 

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 
1929-1941. 1984, 1993. 

Pells, Richard H. Radical Visions and American Dreams: 
Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years. 
1973. 

Robert S. McElvaine 



ICKES, HAROLD 



Harold LeClaire Ickes (March 15, 1874-February 3, 
1952) was a political activist, social reformer, au- 
thor, and New Deal administrator who actively 
sought to help minorities, preserve America's natu- 
ral resources, use the federal government to pro- 
mote the general welfare, and loyally promoted and 
supported Franklin D. Roosevelt and what he stood 
for in his New Deal. 

EARLY LIFE AND CAREER 

Born on a farm in Frankstown Township near 
Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, Harold Ickes was the 
son of Jesse Boone Williams and Matilda McCune 
Ickes. Raised by his aunt and uncle after his moth- 
er's death when he was sixteen years old, Ickes 
graduated from Englewood high school at the top 
of his class. From there, he went to the University 
of Chicago, where he received his undergraduate 
degree in 1897. During his college days, Ickes made 
money teaching English to immigrants. 

Ickes started his career as a newspaper reporter 
in Chicago, where in 1900 he covered the Demo- 
cratic and Republican conventions for the Chicago 
Record. Never totally satisfied with this life, he re- 
turned to the University of Chicago in 1904, and in 
1907 he received his law degree. Even before com- 
pleting his legal studies, Ickes's political inclina- 



tions began to take shape. He started working in 
political campaigns, and managed John Harlan's 
1903 mayoralty race. Working with Donald Rich- 
berg as a partner in their Chicago law firm, Ickes 
became more and more involved in progressive 
politics. By 1911, Ickes was well-known in Chicago 
circles as a reformer. This reputation contributed to 
his marriage to a college classmate and the daugh- 
ter of a wealthy manufacturer of gas fixtures, Anna 
Wilmarth Thompson. Anna herself was politically 
active, eventually serving several terms in the Illi- 
nois General Assembly. She and Ickes had a son 
who would be raised by his father after Anna died 
in a car accident in 1935. Ickes later would remarry 
and have two more children. 

Ickes continued his political career by serving as 
the Cook County campaign manager for Theodore 
Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party in 1912. In 1916, Ickes 
supported Charles Evans Hughes for the presiden- 
cy. During World War I, Ickes went abroad and 
served in the YMCA. In 1920, he attended the Re- 
publican national convention as a delegate who 
worked against the nomination of Warren G. Har- 
ding. 

During the 1920s Ickes took on a number of 
legal cases (some gratis) involving civil liberties, 
anti-utility campaigns, and municipal reform. He 
also worked at Hull House, a Chicago settlement 
house run by Jane Addams, helping immigrants 
obtain citizenship. A reformer by nature, Ickes was 
appalled by the policies of Chicago mayor "Big" Bill 
Thompson, and consistently spoke out against him. 
He had a similar dislike for Samuel Insull, the mu- 
nicipal utilities emperor of the 1920s. 

NEW DEAL ADMINISTRATOR 

As the 1932 presidential election approached, 
Ickes became more interested in the reform pro- 
grams of New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. 
Heading a Western Independent Republican com- 
mittee for Roosevelt, Ickes worked to secure his vic- 
tory against Herbert Hoover. Having been a tireless 
reformer and a strong advocate for minorities, Ickes 
thought that the president-elect might reward him 
with a position in his administration, perhaps com- 
missioner of Indian affairs. 

Ickes openly campaigned for the secretaryship 
of the Department of the Interior after Roosevelt in- 



i.96 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



I C K E S , HAROLD 




Franklin D. Roosevelt (seated, third from right) in August 1933 with (left to right) Paul Malone, Louis McHenry Howe, Harold 
Ickes, Robert Fechner, Henry Wallace, and Rexford Tugwell at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the Shenandoah Valley in 
Virginia. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library 



vited him to attend a conference in February 1933 
to discuss general economic problems. Given 
Ickes's background, his commitment to conserva- 
tion, and his deep-seated feelings for Native Amer- 
icans and other minorities, his decision to seek the 
Interior position made sense. Roosevelt agreed and 
Ickes was appointed secretary of the Interior. Ickes 
would serve in this capacity throughout the entire 
Roosevelt presidency and into the administration of 
Harry Truman. 

In terms of personality, Ickes was a difficult in- 
dividual. Describing himself as a curmudgeon, he 
was moody, short-tempered, stubborn, and always 
concerned that people were trying to take things 



from him. But Ickes was also an emotionally driven 
man who wanted very much to help others and 
who believed that the federal government should 
do its part in promoting the welfare of Americans. 
Personally honest, Ickes took his Interior depart- 
ment responsibilities seriously. He spent taxpayers' 
monies wisely for projects benefiting the general 
welfare. Nicknamed Honest Harold, Irascible Har- 
old, and Harold the Curmudgeon, Ickes went to 
work in 1933 determined to make a difference. He 
took charge of a department that had more than 
thirty thousand employees and controlled the Na- 
tional Park Service, America's public lands and 
abundant natural resources, and all territories, in- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



1.97 



I C K E S 



R L D 



eluding Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska. In addi- 
tion, the secretary of the Interior was responsible 
for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Rec- 
lamation, and the U.S. Geological Survey. With all 
of this already on his plate, Ickes took on more. 

Working with Secretary of Agriculture Henry 
Wallace and other New Dealers, Ickes helped set 
up the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which 
was designed to put young men to work under the 
jurisdiction of the War Department. Ickes's most 
important appointment came when Roosevelt 
placed him in charge of the Public Works Adminis- 
tration (PWA). Created by the National Industrial 
Recovery Act in 1933, the PWA expended over $5 
billion on sewage systems, bridges, highways, 
dams, and other major projects. In projects involv- 
ing electrical power and dams, the PWA completed 
the Boulder Dam and built the Bonneville and 
Grand Coulee dams. Under Ickes's direction, the 
PWA also helped local governments develop their 
own utility systems, despite the protests of private 
utility companies. Ickes's PWA even delved into 
low-cost housing projects. All of the PWA's work 
was completed slowly and methodically, but it was 
also completed with a minimum of administrative 
costs and no corruption. "Honest Harold" proved 
himself a good agency administrator who got 
things done. 

Given Ickes's personality and Roosevelt's incli- 
nation to let subordinates step over one another, it 
was inevitable that conflicts would develop. Ickes 
clashed especially with Harry Hopkins, who head- 
ed the Civil Works Administration and the Works 
Progress Administration, as well as with Henry 
Wallace in the Department of Agriculture. Other 
conflicts arose, many of them stemming from 
Ickes's fear that people were encroaching on his 
turf, although in most cases, no such activity was 
occurring. 



CONTRIBUTIONS TO CIVIL RIGHTS AND 
CONSERVATION 

Other accomplishments by Ickes stand out. He 
was committed to helping black Americans by de- 
manding that they be given equal pay for govern- 
ment jobs and by permitting no discrimination in 
hiring. Working with the National Association for 



the Advancement of Colored People, Ickes tried 
hard to implement these policies in whatever agen- 
cy he directed. In 1939 he helped Eleanor Roosevelt 
arrange for the black contralto Marian Anderson to 
sing at the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of 
the American Revolution denied her the use of 
Constitution Hall. 

Ickes was also committed to helping Native 
Americans. Living in deplorable conditions on res- 
ervations, as evidenced by the Meriam Report of 
the 1920s, and disinherited of their lands under the 
assimilationist policies of the Dawes Act of 1887, 
Indians were burdened by many injustices, and 
Ickes worked to correct them. Fully supporting the 
Wheeler-Howard Act, which unraveled the Dawes 
allotment provisions, Ickes appointed John Collier 
to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Collier's com- 
mitment to the Indian New Deal was so strong that 
he worked hard to implement all the provisions of 
the Wheeler-Howard Act and, in so doing, he 
began to lay the groundwork for later Indian self- 
determination policies of the 1980s and 1990s. 

Finally, Ickes's commitment to conservation 
was genuine. During his tenure in the Department 
of the Interior, the Soil Conservation Service was 
set up, the idea of wilderness areas in the National 
Park System was developed, and several major na- 
tional parks were established. In some respects, 
Ickes's commitment to conservation explained his 
attacks on big business and the wealthy. He railed 
against businessmen and wealthy individuals for 
only thinking about themselves, for not caring 
about protecting and preserving America's natural 
wealth, and for refusing to help those in need. 

As World War II approached, Ickes turned his 
attention more and more to what was happening 
in the world. A midwestern isolationist almost by 
nature, Ickes underwent a transformation in the 
1930s. He was one of the first New Dealers to open- 
ly condemn Nazism and fascism. His attacks were 
so noteworthy that even Nazi leaders came to know 
who Ickes was. In addition, Ickes was the first New 
Dealer to realize the importance of maintaining 
presidential leadership as world politics became in- 
creasingly tense. He strongly supported Roosevelt's 
bid for a third term in 1940, while he himself con- 
sidered running for the mayoralty of Chicago. 



A9 8 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



INCOME D I S T R I 



T I N 



AFTER THE DEPRESSION 

As the United State was drawn into world con- 
flict, Ickes was named the head of the Petroleum 
Administration. During the war, Ickes held sixteen 
separate positions within the Roosevelt administra- 
tion. He was the virtual czar of the production and 
distribution of petroleum products in the United 
States. A pragmatist by nature, Ickes put aside his 
former ideas and hostilities towards petroleum in- 
dustry executives and worked so well with industry 
representatives that they tried to convince Roose- 
velt not to transfer Ickes to any other department 
or agency. 

With Roosevelt's death in April 1945, and the 
end of the war, Ickes stayed on as secretary of the 
Interior under President Harry Truman. Within one 
year, however, Ickes resigned in protest over what 
he considered to be a political appointment of 
Edwin Pauley as undersecretary of the Navy. Just as 
Ickes's personal views changed, his views on Amer- 
ica's relationships with its former allies trans- 
formed. By 1945 and 1946, the one-time friend and 
ally of the Soviet Union began to openly distrust 
and criticize Joseph Stalin and his policies. Ickes 
strongly supported the United Nations and stood 
solidly behind Truman during the Korean War. 

After his 1946 resignation, Ickes returned to 
journalism. He wrote columns for the New Republic 
and the New York Post, and even started publishing 
his memoirs in the Saturday Evening Post. Still 
working prodigiously, Ickes died on February 3, 
1952, in Washington, D.C. His massive three- 
volume Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes was published 
shortly after his death. 

Harold Ickes was probably the most accom- 
plished secretary of the Interior in American histo- 
ry. He was a reformer, a man of deep convictions, 
and a highly capable administrator. His honesty, 
hard work, and drivenness were reflected in every- 
thing he did. Given his irascible personality, it is not 
surprising that he frequently clashed with others. 
But this was a small issue when one considers the 
magnitude of his accomplishments in the PWA, 
conservation, civil liberties, World War II, and other 
areas of American life. 



See Also: CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS (CCC); 
INDIAN NEW DEAL; PUBLIC WORKS 
ADMINISTRATION (PWA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ickes, Harold L. The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, 3 vols. 
1953-1954. 



ssive Progressive, 



Lear, Linda. Harold L. Ickes: The 
1874-1933. 1981. 

Watkins, T. H. Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of 
Harold Ickes, 1974-1952. 1990. 

White, Graham, and John Maze. Harold Ickes of the New 
Deal: His Private Life and Public Career. 1985. 

Michael V. Namorato 



ILA. See INTERNATIONAL LONGSHOREMEN'S 
ASSOCIATION. 



ILD. See INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE. 



ILGWU. See INTERNATIONAL LADIES' GARMENT 
WORKERS' UNION. 



INCOME DISTRIBUTION 

The Great Depression and the New Deal had a par- 
adoxical effect on the distribution of income in the 
United States. On one level, even though the in- 
comes of the rich declined precipitously as the 
economy fell apart, the Depression exacerbated 
economic inequality by increasing the numbers of 
the poor; the New Deal and economic recovery in 
the late 1930s only slightly mitigated this rising in- 
equality. But although the reforms of the New Deal 
did not greatly reduce economic inequality — either 
by lowering unemployment or by creating a more 
progressive tax system — they did create the political 
architecture that would permit the reduction of 
economic inequality during World War II and the 
postwar era. In addition, the very wealthiest frac- 
tion of the American population lost their control 
over the national income during the Depression 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



t99 



INCOME D I S T R I 



T I N 



and World War II, a loss from which they never 
completely recovered. In 1915, the top .01 percent 
of the population earned incomes 400 times the na- 
tional average. In 1970, they earned 50 times the 
average income, and by 1998 they still had not re- 
gained the control of the pre-World War I era, 
earning "only" 250 times the average income. 

During World War II the United States saw 
truly progressive income taxes for the first time. 
This economic redistribution through the tax sys- 
tem was one feature among many (including steady 
increases in the minimum wage, high levels of 
unionization, and low unemployment) that would 
lead to the remarkably equal distribution of eco- 
nomic growth during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. 
While the New Deal did not directly create this pro- 
gressive tax system, the political and intellectual 
framework that was built during the 1930s made 
the progressive tax system and the liberal political 
economy of the postwar period possible. 

Income distribution in the United States was 
becoming steadily more unequal during the early 
years of the twentieth century. During the 1920s, 
income inequality widened rapidly, and during the 
early years of the Depression, the distribution of in- 
comes became more dispersed as poverty spread, 
reaching its peak for the century. But in the late 
1930s income inequality began to decline, and dur- 
ing World War II it narrowed rapidly. After the war, 
the distribution of incomes remained fairly stable, 
though it continued to narrow slightly throughout 
the postwar economic expansion. In the mid-1970s, 
income inequality began to expand once again, a 
trend that accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. 
Clearly, something happened during the 1930s and 
1940s that created a stable political economy of 
equally distributed economic growth. The ques- 
tions concern what and when these changes took 
place. 

Throughout the twentieth century, there have 
been two distinct tax systems in the United States. 
The first and older one is a regressive system of sales 
taxes (and, later, payroll taxes) that fall equally on 
everyone in society regardless of income, and thus 
penalize the poor more heavily. The second, newer 
system is progressive taxation that seeks to tax 
wealthier people at a higher rate than poor people 



in order to collect an adequate revenue base for the 
government. Prior to the New Deal, the federal tax- 
ation system was heavily skewed towards regres- 
sive taxes on "sin" or "luxury" products. This did 
not change in the early years of the New Deal, 
when early federal expenditures, such as the Feder- 
al Emergency Relief Administration, were funded 
out of sales taxes and deficit spending. 

Early in the Great Depression, populists and 
liberal reformers began to call for tax reform and a 
reduction of economic inequality. Louisiana gover- 
nor Huey Long started a network of "Share Our 
Wealth" clubs, which sought to tax the rich and re- 
distribute the income in a plan dubbed "Every Man 
a King." Long's staff claimed that there were 27,000 
such clubs in the South. The Townsend move- 
ment's calls for monthly old-age pensions, the radi- 
cal writer Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign against 
poverty in California, Father Charles Coughlin's 
National Union for Social Justice, and the new 
strength of the Farmer-Labor Party in the Midwest 
all created rising political pressure on Roosevelt for 
a program that seemed to address the maldistribu- 
tion of income. 

Historians and political writers, at the time and 
since, have pointed out that these various proposals 
lacked economic sense and wherewithal. Even if all 
of Long's proposed taxes were enacted, the income 
produced would not have been adequate to provide 
the riches he promised it would purchase for ordi- 
nary people. But the importance of these move- 
ments is not their blueprints for social policy. It was 
that they mobilized millions of people around the 
issue of income distribution, and so helped to bring 
about major changes in the tax system. 

In the Revenue Act of 1935 (otherwise known 
as the "wealth tax"), President Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt sought to meet these populist critics. The 
law boosted the top personal income tax rate from 
63 to 79 percent, expanded estate taxes, and in- 
creased the corporate income tax to fall more heavi- 
ly on large corporations. Even though the law in re- 
ality affected a very small number of people, and 
did not dramatically expand the federal govern- 
ment's revenues, the wealth tax generated tremen- 
dous opposition from business to Roosevelt and the 
New Deal. The law coincided with the Wagner Act 



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and the legislation creating Social Security and the 
Works Progress Administration. Taken together, 
even though the immediate fiscal effect of the tax 
law was small, it seemed to promise a new day in 
government, and businessmen were frightened. As 
one Congressman said of the Revenue Act of 1935, 
"This is a hell raiser, not a revenue raiser." In some 
ways, the anti-tax politics that would characterize 
so much business mobilization against liberalism 
throughout the rest of the twentieth century began 
in the crusade against the wealth tax of 1935. 

The question of economic distribution was also 
addressed in one of the great failed initiatives of the 
New Deal, the Temporary National Economic 
Committee (TNEC). This congressional committee 
was established late in the 1930s, purportedly to 
study issues of monopoly and economic power. The 
committee produced many excellent surveys of the 
state of industry in the late 1930s, a boon to later 
historians. However, whatever legislative impact 
the TNEC might have had was scuttled by the war, 
and the committee quietly fizzled to a close. 

During World War II, the personal income tax 
was applied to the general population for the first 
time, becoming, as historian Mark Leff puts it, no 
longer "an indicator of affluence" but instead "a 
token of citizenship." The withholding system was 
established during the war. Prior to the war, the in- 
come tax had affected at most 5 percent of the pop- 
ulation, but during the war, 74 percent of Ameri- 
cans began to pay tax. After the war, Congress 
brought back some exemptions and lowered tax 
rates slightly, but the basics of the system were in 
place. This system, along with the strength of labor 
unions, the full employment policies of the postwar 
period, and other interventions in social policy, 
such as increasing Social Security payments and 
steadily raising the minimum wage, contributed to 
the relatively more egalitarian — albeit still 
skewed — economic growth of the postwar period. 

The dramatic arguments over income distribu- 
tion and economic power during the 1930s cast a 
long symbolic shadow. The memory of the time 
when a president railed against "economic royal- 
ists" would long survive in the hearts and minds of 
businessmen, helping to fuel their ultimate reaction 
against liberalism and the New Deal. But the tax 



policies of the New Deal era are of more than sym- 
bolic importance. Although the postwar liberal sys- 
tem did not come about during the New Deal, the 
philosophy of the New Deal created its intellectual 
framework and political architecture. Roosevelt's 
willingness to change the tax system in response to 
mass political pressure and to levy taxes on the in- 
comes of the rich helped make it possible to use the 
progressive income tax more broadly as the basis 
for federal revenues and social wealth. 

See Also: TAXATION; TEMPORARY NATIONAL 
ECONOMIC COMMITTEE (TNEC). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father 
Coughlin & the Great Depression. 1982. 

Leff, Mark. The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal 
and Taxation, 1933-1939. 1984. 

Piketty, Thomas and Saez, Emmanuel. "Income Inequal- 
ity in the United States, 1913-1998." Working Paper 
8467, National Bureau of Economic Research. Sep- 
tember 2001. 

Wolff, Edward. Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of 
Wealth in America. 1994. 

Kim Phillips -Fein 



INDIAN NEW DEAL 

The Indian New Deal was preceded by over a de- 
cade of reform agitation, an important investigation 
of field administration from 1926 to 1927, and sev- 
eral moderate changes during the Herbert Hoover 
administration. Before Franklin D. Roosevelt was 
inaugurated in 1933, Harold L. Ickes, a Chicago at- 
torney, sought to become Indian commissioner, but 
the president-elect named Ickes secretary of the in- 
terior instead. This left John Collier, an Indian re- 
former, Nathan Margold, a New York attorney, and 
Lewis Meriam, an Institute for Government Re- 
search employee, as leading candidates for com- 
missioner. Margold became a solicitor in the De- 
partment of the Interior and Meriam withdrew. In 
a showdown meeting in April 1933, Roosevelt 
chose Collier over Edgar Meritt, former assistant 
Indian commissioner. 

The appointment was unorthodox, but promis- 
ing. Twelve years of Indian reform work gave Col- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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lier a deep understanding of Indian affairs, a strong 
belief in cultural pluralism, and a commitment to 
improve the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). In addi- 
tion, he hoped to achieve Indian self-support and 
self-government. 

The first months of the Collier commissioner- 
ship mostly dealt with organizing Indian Emergen- 
cy Conservation Work. This flexible program oper- 
ated as a special branch of the national emergency 
agency popularly known as the Civilian Conserva- 
tion Corps (CCC). The Indian CCC started field op- 
erations in July 1933, and for the next nine years it 
provided jobs for many enrollees and greatly im- 
proved reservation forests, grazing lands, and 
farms. One of the key factors in Collier's commis- 
sionership was his ability to supplement his regular 
OIA budget with money from the Indian CCC, the 
Public Works Administration (PWA), the Agricul- 
tural Adjustment Administration, the Federal 
Emergency Relief Administration, the Soil Conser- 
vation Service, the Works Progress Administration, 
and other New Deal programs. 

In late 1933, Collier turned to drafting legisla- 
tion for a complete overhaul of Indian administra- 
tion. The Indian Reorganization Bill, introduced in 
mid-February 1934, centered on restoring tribal 
governments, ending land allotment, consolidating 
checkerboard lands, protecting Indian cultural heri- 
tages, and creating a special Indian court. The Indi- 
an Reorganization Act of June 1934 did not contain 
an effective land program or a special Indian court, 
but it banned allotment, endorsed tribal govern- 
ments, and authorized revolving loan money and 
several other benefits. Laurence M. Hauptman con- 
siders the measure, "the most important and far- 
reaching . . . legislation affecting Native Ameri- 
cans in the twentieth century." 

With the passage of the Indian Reorganization 
Act, the OIA initiated a two-year campaign to per- 
suade Indian groups to approve it, a first step in cre- 
ating tribal governments and corporations. The 
canvassing tactics appeared more like "guided de- 
mocracy." Collier and his spokesmen often remind- 
ed Indians that without an Indian Reorganization 
Act government, they would never enjoy the eco- 
nomic benefits promised by the legislation. He also 
tried to create a bandwagon effect by scheduling 



early elections on those reservations believed to 
favor the Act. This partially worked, but in June 
1935 Collier experienced a crushing defeat when 
the large Navajo Nation rejected the Indian Reor- 
ganization Act despite an all-out effort to win ap- 
proval. J. C. Morgan, a bilingual mission worker 
and dedicated advocate of assimilation, took ad- 
vantage of the Navajos' hostility to recent livestock 
reductions to narrowly defeat the proposal. Accord- 
ing to historian Lawrence C. Kelly, 263 tribes and 
bands voted on the Indian Reorganization Act; 174 
approved it and 73 opposed it. 

For tribes that approved the Act, the OIA 
moved to form tribal governments by drafting con- 
stitutions, bylaws, and chartering corporations. In 
1935 Collier established the Indian Organization 
Division (IOD) to assist the process. The new agen- 
cy dispatched field workers to help superintendents 
and tribal leaders in forming the new governments. 
The IOD workers relied on a "model constitution" 
to serve as a guide. Although this could be modified 
to suit local needs and preferences, some observers 
have complained that the constitutions ignored In- 
dian traditions and imposed white forms of govern- 
ment, that the new governments too closely resem- 
bled the model constitution, and that the focus was 
always on creating tribal governments even if Indi- 
ans were accustomed to local units such as bands 
or communities. Once the tribes completed a con- 
stitution and it received the secretary of interior's 
endorsement, another referendum had to approve 
it. Out of the 174 tribes and bands that voted for the 
Indian Reorganization Act, 92 drafted constitutions, 
and 71 then formed business corporations that 
qualified them for revolving loans. Although a mi- 
nority of Indians came under the Indian Reorgani- 
zation Act, Collier tended to treat all as if they had 
come under it. 

The natives of Alaska and the Indians of Okla- 
homa had largely been excluded from the Indian 
Reorganization Act, but both areas later received 
their own legislation. The Alaskan Reorganization 
Act of May 1, 1936, and the Oklahoma Indian Wel- 
fare Act of June 26, 1936, resembled the Indian Re- 
organization Act, but each was designed to fit the 
situation in its area. 

In terms of improving the OIA's regular ser- 
vices, the Indian New Deal made some progress 



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but fell short of a major breakthrough. Health care 
offers one key example. Because of the Depression, 
Collier was able to hire younger and better trained 
doctors and nurses, and the emergency programs 
built eleven new and well-equipped hospitals. One 
major victory was the use of sulfanilamide against 
trachoma in 1939. The incidence of this dreaded eye 
disease dropped from 30 percent in 1939 to 5 per- 
cent by 1943. The OIA, however, never received the 
funds needed for a successful campaign against tu- 
berculosis, the Indians' most serious health prob- 
lem. 

Indian education also improved, but fell short 
of Collier's hopes. His basic goals included improv- 
ing existing schools, closing some boarding schools, 
developing day schools, and, above all, teaching In- 
dian children to appreciate their own tribal heri- 
tages. Unfortunately, virtually all the Indian Service 
teachers were white and had little understanding of 
such goals or a desire to learn. Indian students, 
however, benefited from nearly a hundred new day 
schools, mostly built with PWA funds, and these 
often doubled as community centers. 

White and Indian opposition to the Indian New 
Deal arose early and became serious by 1937. Sev- 
eral witnesses at the Indian Reorganization Bill 
hearings in 1934 charged that Collier's cultural plu- 
ralism was retrogressive and would isolate Indians 
from society. Others testified that his ideas were 
un-American and communistic. The Indian critics 
formed the American Indian Federation (AIF) in 
Gallup, New Mexico, in August 1934. Joseph 
Bruner, a Creek, headed the group, but Alice Lee 
Jemison, a Seneca, acted as the AIF's Washington 
lobbyist and most effective opponent of the Indian 
New Deal. The AIF membership was diverse, but all 
demanded Collier's resignation and the repeal of 
the Indian Reorganization Act. The AIF cooperated 
closely with the Indian Rights Association, an old- 
line and conservative reform organization in Phila- 
delphia. More importantly, members of the House 
and Senate Indian Affairs Committees welcomed 
Jemison and other AIF spokesmen to testify against 
the Collier administration after 1934. Bills were in- 
troduced in 1937 and 1939 to repeal the Indian Re- 
organization Act, the centerpiece of the Indian New 
Deal. Although these attempts failed, Collier's crit- 



ics forced him into a defensive posture. Only Secre- 
tary Ickes's support allowed Collier to continue. 

The economic revival around 1940 tended to 
offset the growing problems that the Indian New 
Deal faced. Initially, the economic upturn mainly 
benefited Indian CCC enrollees who found good 
jobs in the private sector. Special arrangements in 
1941 between the OIA, the states, and the U.S. De- 
partment of Education established national defense 
training programs for CCC workers. These included 
welding, sheet metal work, carpentry, radio opera- 
tion and repair, and other skills. Hundreds of en- 
rollees completed the training and found outside 
jobs. 

World War II brought major changes for Indi- 
ans and further weakened the Indian New Deal. 
The exodus of Indians from reservations greatly in- 
tensified. An OIA survey, for example, reported 
that 46,000 Indians found off-reservation employ- 
ment in 1943 and earned a total of over $40 million. 
The agency later estimated that 24,521 Indian men 
and women served in the military. The migration of 
Indians during the war unquestionably played a 
major role in the postwar movement to cities. 

The war, however, had devastating effects on 
the New Deal programs. Although Collier desper- 
ately tried and failed to make his agency relevant to 
the war, the OIA was moved to Chicago. Serious 
budget cuts, the disbanding of emergency pro- 
grams, and shortages of doctors, nurses, teachers, 
and other personnel hampered operations. Collier's 
problems with congressional opponents continued, 
and in June 1943 the Senate Indian Affairs Com- 
mittee released Partial Report 310, which contained 
a scathing attack on the Collier administration. 
Worn down and frustrated, Collier resigned on Jan- 
uary 19, 1945. 

Scholars have studied the Indian New Deal ex- 
tensively but thus far no real consensus has 
emerged. Clearly Collier's ability to secure emer- 
gency funds not only helped Indians survive the 
Depression, but government jobs provided many 
Indians with work skills that they used in outside 
employment during World War II. Accomplish- 
ments relating to gains in self-government, the 
preservation of Indian cultural heritages, and the 
achieving of self-support are less clear cut. Some 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



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N 



A C T 



F 



19 3/, 



Indians actively hated Collier. The Navajos, for ex- 
ample, never forgave him for livestock reductions 
aimed at checking overgrazing. Perhaps evaluation 
of the Indian New Deal requires looking at each 
reservation and evaluating such factors as the avail- 
ability of resources, the competence of tribal lead- 
ers, and the role played by the superintendent and 
his staff. 

See Also: COLLIER, JOHN; INDIAN 

REORGANIZATION ACT OF 1934; NATIVE 
AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Collier, lohn. From Every Zenith: A Memoir and Some Es- 
says on Eife and Thought. 1963. 

Kelly, Lawrence C. "The Indian Reorganization Act: The 
Dream and the Reality." Pacific Historical Review 44 
(1975): 291-312. 

Parman, Donald L. The Navajos and the New Deal. 1976. 

Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States 
Government and the American Indians, Vol. 2. 1984. 

Rusco, Elmer R. A Fateful Time: The Background and Legis- 
lative History of the Indian Reorganization Act. 2000. 

Donald L. Parman 



INDIAN REORGANIZATION ACT 
OF 1934 

The Indian Reorganization Act represented a basic 
shift in federal Indian policy. It overturned forced 
assimilation, revived tribal governance, and ended 
land allotment. The act grew out of a dozen years 
of criticism of federal Indian administration, espe- 
cially the agitation of reformer John Collier, who 
became Indian commissioner in 1933. 

Felix S. Cohen and Marvin Siegel, assistant so- 
licitors, and Ward Shepard, a land management ex- 
pert, started drafting the reorganization bill in late 
1933. Commissioner Collier and his top assistants 
oversaw the process. Indians played no role in writ- 
ing the measure. The lengthy draft bill contained 
four titles. The first permitted tribes to organize res- 
ervation governments and to form business corpo- 



rations. Title II called for educational loans and 
scholarships and strongly endorsed preservation of 
Indian heritages. Title III ended further allotment, 
outlined a complex program for land consolidation 
on checker-boarded reservations, gave the secre- 
tary of the interior extraordinary authority to imple- 
ment consolidation, and provided for some acquisi- 
tion. Title IV established a special Indian court with 
original jurisdiction over cases involving Indians or 
tribes. 

The bill faced serious opposition after congres- 
sional hearings opened in mid-February 1934. Op- 
ponents during House sessions complained it 
would isolate Indians and condemned the arbitrary 
powers associated with land consolidation. In the 
midst of the hearings, Collier conducted ten gener- 
ally successful Indian congresses to explain the bill 
to tribal representatives, answer questions, and 
gain delegates' support. When Collier returned to 
Washington, Burton K. Wheeler, chairman of the 
Senate Indian Affairs Committee, severely attacked 
the bill on various grounds and threatened to stall 
passage. Only the last minute intervention of Presi- 
dent Franklin D. Roosevelt and a "summit" be- 
tween Assistant Indian Commissioner William F. 
Zimmerman, Jr., and Wheeler overcame the latter's 
objections. Essentially, the Montana senator re- 
wrote the bill to suit his own beliefs. 

The final act of June 18, 1934, differed greatly 
from the original bill in substance and form. The 
special Indian court and involuntary land consoli- 
dation were entirely omitted. Provisions such as 
tribal governance, business corporations, a ban on 
further allotment, land acquisition, educational 
benefits, and Indian hiring preference remained, 
but in highly abbreviated form. Despite its major 
revisions, the Indian Reorganization Act became 
the centerpiece of Collier's administration. 

Subsequently, 174 tribes with an adult popula- 
tion of 132,425 approved the Indian Reorganization 
Act in referenda, but only 92 tribes later drafted 
constitutions. Seventy-three tribes with 78,415 
members rejected it. Approximately 103,000 Indi- 
ans came under the Act and 113,000 did not. De- 
spite this, after 1934 Collier habitually acted as if all 
tribes had approved the law. Some reservations 
later came under the Indian Reorganization Act by 



5(H 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



INDIVIDUALISM 



special legislation, but far more simply utilized gov- 
ernments that operated without a written constitu- 
tion. 

Placed in its best light, the Indian Reorganiza- 
tion Act strengthened tribal governments during 
the New Deal and helped preserve Indian cultures. 
It also served as an important model for Indians of 
the 1970s and 1980s who demanded stronger tribal 
sovereignty. In this sense, Collier planted the seeds 
that later generations of Indians harvested. 

See Also: COLLIER, JOHN; INDIAN NEW DEAL; 
NATIVE AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT 
DEPRESSION ON; WHEELER BURTON K. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Deloria, Vine, Jr. The Indian Reorganization Act: Congresses 
and Bills. 2002. 

Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle. The Nations 
Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sover- 
eignty. 1984. 

Kelly, Lawrence C. "The Indian Reorganization Act: The 
Dream and the Reality." Pacific Historical Review 44 
(1975): 291-312. 

Rusco, Elmer R. A Fateful Time: The Background and Legis- 
lative History of the Reorganization Act. 2000. 

Taylor, Graham D. The New Deal and American Indian 
Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorgani- 
zation Act, 1934-1945. 1980. 

Washborn, Wilcomb E. "Fifty-Year Perspective on the 
Indian Reorganization Act." American Anthropologist 
86 (1984): 279-289. 

Donald L. Parman 



INDIVIDUALISM 



Individualism as the free, unfettered expression and 
development of the self in life's social arenas — the 
political, cultural, and economic — is one of the few 
consistent American ideals, tracing a bright line 
through the course of the nation's history. Whereas 
European observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville 
tended to see American individualism as a danger- 
ous centrifugal social force, Americans have gener- 
ally embraced the individual as a self-contained, 
value -creating, contract-making actor whose pres- 



ervation and encouragement were consistent with 
the needs of society and the community. Disagree- 
ments have emerged primarily about how best the 
individual may be reconciled with and included in 
society. 

In the early part of the nation's history, a nar- 
row brand of communitarian Reformed Protestant- 
ism gave shape to American individualism. But 
during the twentieth century the reconciliation of 
the individual with the needs of the community was 
increasingly based on a vision of society as a volun- 
tary collection of individuals seeking their own ad- 
vantage in the marketplace, with government act- 
ing primarily as a guarantor of individual rights. 
Ideally, through the function of the free market, in- 
dividuals are automatically attracted to work that is 
useful, producing a product or service that others 
need. Acting through the free market individuals 
are able to find that work for which they are best 
suited, and which will provide the maximum op- 
portunity for individual self expression and devel- 
opment. Relying on their own efforts, individuals 
are free to improve their social and economic 
standing, improving the fortunes of the groups to 
which they belong in the process. 

Through work that is at once free and of service 
to others, society forms as a network of bridges of 
self-interest between individuals, creating intricate 
interdependencies. As Emile Durkheim famously 
observed, work may be the tie that binds societies 
together. Individualism has emerged as a public 
issue primarily when Americans have lost faith in 
the automatic function of the free market to support 
the individual, the Great Depression being a key 
example. 

The massive unemployment of the Great De- 
pression appeared to many to challenge the ideal of 
work-based free market individualism. However, 
unemployment compounded work and market- 
place failures that had been festering for decades. 
Since the turn of the century, modern jobs that re- 
quired little skill and offered few opportunities for 
creativity had eroded the hope that work could be 
the avenue for self expression and craftsmanship. 
The jobs that still existed offered little chance for 
pleasure and satisfaction. The rise of corporations, 
advertising, and mass society further complicated a 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



505 



INDIVIDUALISM 



simplistic faith in individualism. Concentrations of 
wealth and political power appeared to be limiting 
social mobility, casting serious doubts on one of the 
nation's other precious ideals: an egalitarian, class- 
less society of individuals. 

Even the strongest supporter of the traditional 
idea of American individualism, Herbert Hoover, 
saw the need to find new ways to preserve individ- 
ualism in an era of giant bureaucracies, corpora- 
tions, and standardization. Hoover sought to rede- 
ploy large-scale organization in the service of "self- 
help," "spiritual development," and the individual 
through "purposeful planning" and his "associa- 
tion idea," a strategy largely dependent on govern- 
ment encouragement of business voluntarism. 

Others, however, veering to the political left, 
sought to reenergize the Progressive movement's 
corporate ideal, emphasizing the need for commu- 
nity and the importance of solidarity and state ac- 
tion to assure the "public interest." Arguing for a 
planned society, such critics of excessive individual- 
ism as John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, Robert Lynd, 
and George Soule sought to counter the Depres- 
sion's threats to both the individual and the com- 
munity. Turning increasingly to the state to regulate 
the free market, leaders such as Henry Wallace 
(Roosevelt's secretary of agriculture and third-term 
vice president) emphasized "cooperative achieve- 
ment" and "organic" communities, and stressed 
the need for increasing cooperation in American 
life. 

Such critics hoped that by becoming more co- 
operative in its economic life, the United States 
could redeem the individual, establishing a new 
cultural and political foundation for free associa- 
tions, replacing the failing work-based free market 
individualism. Social scientists, socialists, and 
Marxists proposed to free Americans from excessive 
concerns about economic matters, liberating them 
in life's more important venues — the cultural, com- 
munal, and, as Hoover had hoped, the spiritual. 

Still others supported a more practical, tradi- 
tional remedy. One of the most important political 
issues of the Great Depression was legislated work- 
sharing. The Black-Connery bill of 1933, limiting 
hours of work to thirty a week, attracted critics of 
work-based free market individualism, who, stop- 



ping short of the cooperationists' remedy, saw in 
steadily increasing leisure the best way to reestab- 
lish individualism outside the economy. Seeking, in 
the words of Richard Pells in his Radical Visions and 
American Dreams, "to liberate the American people 
from the bondage of economic anxiety — to shift 
their attention from material to moral and existen- 
tial concerns" people such as William Green, presi- 
dent of the American Federation of Labor, "libera- 
tion capitalists" such as W. K. Kellogg, and 
progressive reformers such as Stuart Chase pro- 
posed that a shorter workweek would provide time 
for alternate, free forms of association. Through in- 
creased leisure, the family, the community, church- 
es, voluntary groups, and local governments would 
flourish as never before. These, instead of work and 
the market, would become the new media for indi- 
vidual growth and expression. 

Roosevelt was lukewarm to the new coopera- 
tionist schemes and to work-sharing. Such mea- 
sures as the National Recovery Administration and 
Social Security were primarily designed to provide 
industrial stabilization and a safety net for a free- 
swinging economy. Instead, Roosevelt attempted 
to redeem work-based free market individualism by 
marshaling government in support of perpetual 
economic growth and work-creation, employing 
the now familiar New Deal reform strategies: public 
works, liberal monetary policy, deficit spending, 
and direct expansion of government jobs. 

With Roosevelt, leaders of the women's move- 
ment and the emerging civil rights struggle reaf- 
firmed the importance of work-based free market 
individualism. The Harlem Renaissance matured 
and began to recognize the importance of the indi- 
vidual's struggle with society. Similarly, the nascent 
civil rights movement began to direct its efforts to- 
ward gaining equality through the marketplace, 
with jobs becoming a primary arena for struggle. 
Advancing beyond the suffrage victories of the pre- 
vious decade, American women also began to make 
inroads into the workforce, and, like African Ameri- 
cans, they began to look for independence and in- 
dividual liberation through work. African Ameri- 
cans and women turned to the government to open 
free and equal access to jobs, and thus extend the 
ideal of work-based individualism to previously ex- 
cluded groups. 



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E F F £ C T S 



F 



6 R E 



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N 



The rise of authoritarian, repressive regimes in 
Europe and the coming of World War II curtailed 
cooperationist talk in the United States. Work- 
based free market individualism entered the 1940s 
vigorous and growing, made stronger by the chal- 
lenges offered to it during the Great Depression. 

See Also: COLLECTIVE BARGAINING; ORGANIZED 
LABOR; WORK ETHIC. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Dewey, lohn. Individualism, Old and New. 1930. 

Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labour in Society, trans- 
lated by W. D. Halls. 1984. 

Hawley, Ellis Wayne. Herbert Hoover and the Crisis of 
American Capitalism. 1973. 

Hoover, Herbert. American Individualism. 1922. 

Pells, Richard H. Radical Visions and American Dreams: 
Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years. 
1973. 

Shain, Barry Alan. The Myth of American Individualism: 
The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought. 
1994. 

Shannon, Christopher. Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, 
the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, 
from Veblen to Mills. 1996. 

Thomson, Irene Taviss. In Conflict No Longer: Self and So- 
ciety in Contemporary America. 2000. 

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America 
(1835-1840), translated by George Lawrence, edited 
by ]. P. Mayer and Max Lerner. 1966. 

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt 



INDUSTRY, EFFECTS OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION ON 

From a low point of recession in 1921 to its cyclical 
peak in 1929, the index of U.S. manufacturing pro- 
duction increased from fifty-four to one hundred. 
Within the overall upswing, the main expansion oc- 
curred during the 1922 to 1923 and 1928 to 1929 pe- 
riods, and it was most pronounced in the automo- 
bile, electrical goods, and (to 1926) construction 
industries. Each of these sectors was associated 
with the expansion of "blocs" of interrelated activi- 
ties, such as the rubber, paint, glass, steel, lumber, 



and engineering firms that supported the growth of 
the automotive industry. The other aspect of struc- 
tural change in the 1920s was the performance of 
"sick" industries, notably cotton and woolen tex- 
tiles, coal mining, and railroads. Their mature status 
was reflected, respectively, in relocation to the 
South in search of cheaper labor, the exhaustion of 
mineral resources in older mining districts, and the 
competitive challenge from automobiles and 
trucks. Other notable features of American manu- 
facturing during the 1920s included relatively stable 
prices after 1922, modest wage increases, substan- 
tial growth in productivity, and rising levels of in- 
vestment. Consequently, the expansion of produc- 
tion was achieved with limited growth of the 
industrial workforce; new employment was gener- 
ated in the service sector. 

Although certain trends continued into the 
1930s, the favorable environment was transformed 
by the economic collapse of 1929 to 1932, which 
ushered in a difficult decade for manufacturers. The 
index of industrial production in the United States 
fell from one hundred in 1929 to fifty-five in 1932, 
a steeper contraction than in most other industrial 
economies, since elsewhere rates of growth had 
been modest during the 1920s. 

During 1930 President Herbert Hoover encour- 
aged industrialists to maintain wages and hours of 
work and to proceed with investment plans on the 
assumption that the recession would be brief. By 
mid-1931, however, retrenchment was gathering 
pace: consumers postponed the replacement of du- 
rable goods, such as automobiles, and, with the real 
value of debt increasing, they retreated from buying 
on credit. Simultaneously, the crisis of confidence 
in financial institutions and declining sales and 
profits undermined business confidence and new 
investment. Private investment fell from $16.2 bil- 
lion in 1929 to only $1.4 billion in 1933, a level that 
was not sufficient to maintain existing productive 
capacity as firms abandoned plans for new factories 
and had no reason to replace idle equipment. Prof- 
its, though difficult to chart fully, dwindled: net 
profits of 488 leading industrial corporations had 
fallen from $3,174 million in 1929 to $662.2 million 
by 1932. Many firms posted losses or were forced 
into closure. Employment in manufacturing de- 



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dined to 67 percent of its 1929 level by 1933. Such 
conditions broke the characteristic pattern of fre- 
quent bouts of short-term unemployment among 
industrial workers. Factory payrolls fell more than 
employment as employers and workers both ac- 
cepted the adoption of short-term work or "share- 
the-work" programs. Indeed, there was a vigorous 
public debate about the threat of technological un- 
employment, particularly automation, in the 1930s. 
Senator Robert Wagner, for instance, supported a 
"technotax" on innovations as a means to finance 
relief; unions advocated a thirty-hour workweek; 
and industrialists and scientists were forced to de- 
fend technology as a source of growth rather than 
instability. 

In this context of falling prices and profits, some 
industrialists and trade associations embraced no- 
tions of cooperation as a route to either higher 
prices or stability. The Cotton Textile Institute influ- 
enced the development in the National Recovery 
Administration (NRA) of codes that were designed 
to raise prices and wages and to standardize trade 
practices in order to end "destructive" competition. 
Although the scale of the crisis, plus New Deal 
pressure, resulted in the establishment of hundreds 
of NRA codes, many firms opposed such interven- 
tion, especially in industrial relations. Some ana- 
lysts attribute significant increases in wages and 
prices to NRA intervention, which, in effect, offset 
a potential stimulus to employment and production 
from an increase in the supply of money between 
1933 and 1935. If this was the case, the defensive 
strategy of the codes achieved its narrow aims for 
business and workers, but delayed the revival of 
output and employment. In some cases the price 
data underlying this analysis may overstate actual 
prices since competitive pressures ensured exten- 
sive discounting. When the NRA came to an end in 
1935, the oil and coal industries still sought federal 
backing for controls over their production, but most 
manufacturers welcomed the end of the codes. 

Although a brief revival of industrial production 
had occurred during the second quarter of 1933 as 
demand rose in anticipation of higher prices with 
the imminent introduction of the NRA, sustained 
expansion only came between 1934 and 1937 when 
U.S. growth compared favorably to other econo- 



mies. Real wages in manufacturing tended to rise, 
despite the persistence of high rates of unemploy- 
ment. To some degree, wage rates did not reflect 
the full impact of economic trends because fluctua- 
tions in the number of hours worked were a signifi- 
cant part of adjustments during the 1930s. Another 
possible influence was the effect of "internal" labor 
markets in which the wages of people who were 
working were set without full reference to the avail- 
ability of unemployed workers. The expansion of 
union organizing compelled some employers to 
concede higher wages after 1935, either in the hope 
of deterring the entry of unions or as a consequence 
of increased bargaining power, though the latter 
was achieved very unevenly in the face of aggres- 
sive resistance from many employers. 

Trends in industrial production after 1933 can, 
on one level, be explained in terms of the severity 
of the slump between 1929 and 1933. Following the 
expansion of industrial investment in the late 
1920s, the downturn left underutilized capacity 
during the 1930s that deterred new investment. 
Key growth industries, notably construction and 
automobile manufacturing, were particularly sus- 
ceptible to the declines in consumer confidence and 
incomes. The falls in profitability were especially 
marked in the steel, oil, machinery, and automobile 
sectors. Michael Bernstein's analysis of U.S. manu- 
facturing highlights the contrasting experiences of 
the different sectors. Cyclical trends are a central 
factor in the fluctuations of industrial output and 
employment: the steepest contractions in produc- 
tion in the early 1930s occurred in the iron and 
steel, coke, lumber, and cement industries, with a 
major factor being their dependence on the de- 
pressed construction industry. 

The automobile industry illustrates the difficul- 
ties faced by manufacturers of durable goods, espe- 
cially where production involved high capital costs. 
Given the geographical distribution of manufactur- 
ing activity, the loss of industrial jobs was concen- 
trated in the northeastern and midwestern states. 
The flip side was less steep falls in the production 
of the nondurable products that consumers pur- 
chased regularly, such as food, textiles, clothing, 
footwear, and tobacco. As a result, employment in 
these industries did not fall so dramatically. The 



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distinction should not be overstated since both tex- 
tiles and footwear, though large employers, were 
already less dynamic in the 1920s, and sales of radi- 
os, a recent addition to the list of consumer dura- 
bles, continued to expand throughout the 1930s. 
The contrasting fortunes of "heavy" industries, 
such as steelmaking, and "light" industries, such as 
food processing, were reflected in larger increases 
in rates of unemployment among men than among 
women in manufacturing. A further group of indus- 
tries achieved impressive increases in production 
during the 1930s, notably chemicals, tobacco prod- 
ucts, and paper products. The chemical and petro- 
leum manufacturers combined new product inno- 
vations, such as artificial fibres and improvements 
in the cracking of oil, with capital and labor-saving 
innovations in production. Firms in the paper busi- 
ness developed new applications in packaging, a 
successful strategy also adopted by the glass and 
canning industries. Although a growing demand 
for cigarettes enabled the tobacco industry to in- 
crease its output rapidly, sustained productivity 
growth ensured that its workforce changed little. 

A rise in the real incomes of employed people 
during the 1930s shifted effective demand for goods 
and services towards more affluent consumers, 
which may have delayed the recovery in terms of 
employment. This trend was reflected in an in- 
crease in sales of luxury goods, such as high-priced 
cars, refrigerators, and fashionable clothing, as well 
as in an increase in the purchases of services. More 
broadly, the largest industries in terms of employ- 
ment, such as textiles and leatherworking, were in 
long-term decline, creating structural employment 
as their workers struggled to find alternative jobs. 
Durable goods producers, such as automotive man- 
ufacturers and steelmakers, remained depressed 
and offered few employment opportunities until 
the impact of rearmament and war could be felt. Fi- 
nally, the most innovative sectors, including chemi- 
cals and petroleum, accounted for a relatively small 
share of the workforce. This, combined with their 
increasing labor productivity, prevented these more 
vigorous industries from providing sufficient new 
employment to counter the loss of dynamism else- 
where. 

When recovery stalled during the 1937 to 1938 
recession, New Deal liberals came to regard the 



weakness of investment, the persistence of high 
rates of unemployment, and rising prices as symp- 
toms of monopolistic practices or even of a politi- 
cally-motivated investment strike by corporate in- 
terests. As a result, the NRA phase of support for 
regulating prices and trade practices was replaced 
beginning in 1938 with an antitrust campaign, led 
by Thurman Arnold at the Department of Justice, 
that was intended to promote more competitive be- 
havior as a route to recovery. 

Manufacturing output and employment were 
transformed by rearmament and the switch to a war 
economy from 1941. Military demands stimulated 
the metalworking trades, vehicle production, air- 
craft manufacturing, and the chemical and petrole- 
um industries, and also supplied a general stimulus 
to the production of raw materials. Although civil- 
ian consumption was restricted during the war, 
pent-up demand and increased savings were the 
foundations for renewed prosperity during the 
1950s based on automobiles, electrical goods, and 
housing, as in the 1920s. In the longer run, industri- 
al restructuring gained momentum, but from the 
mid-1950s services displaced manufacturing as the 
largest source of employment. 

See Also: NATIONAL RECOVERY ADMINISTRATION 
(NRA). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bernanke, Ben S. "Employment, Hours, and Earnings in 
the Depression: An Analysis of Eight Manufacturing 
Industries." American Economic Review 73 (1983): 
82-109. 

Bernstein, Michael A. The Great Depression: Delayed Re- 
covery and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939. 
1987. 

Bix, Amy Sue. Inventing Ourselves out of jobs? America's 
Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981. 
2000. 

Fabricant, Solomon. The Output of Manufacturing Indus- 
tries, 1899-1937. 1940. 

Fearon, Peter. War, Prosperity, and Depression: The U.S. 
Economy, 1917-45. 1987.' 

Weinstein, Michael M. Recovery and Redistribution under 
the NIRA. 1980. 

Wells, Wyatt. Antitrust and the Formation of the Postwar 
World. 2002. 

Michael French 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE 6 R E A F DEPRESSION 



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SAMUEL 



INSULL, SAMUEL 



Both before and after the stock market crash in 
1929, Wall Street had no more potent symbol than 
Samuel Insull (November 11, 1859-July 16, 1938). 
He was the utilities magnate who either made for- 
tunes or stole them. By the time of Insult's death on 
a Paris subway platform in 1938, most Americans 
had come to see him only as a thief. 

Before October 1929, few American business- 
men were more respected than Insull, who had a 
bit of Horatio Alger about him. Born in 1859 to 
a London family of modest means, Insull was 
twenty-one years old when he left England for a job 
in America. He came to work as Thomas Edison's 
personal secretary, a position that led him to a ca- 
reer in generating and selling electricity. In 1891, 
Edison's electrical holdings were folded into a new 
company, General Electric, with Insull named as a 
vice president. Soon dissatisfied with his position, 
Insull left the company to try his hand at running 
an electrical utility in Chicago. His efforts led to the 
creation of Commonwealth Edison, a model utility 
that quickly won over commercial and residential 
customers. 

Insull preached what historian Harold Piatt has 
called the "gospel of consumption," spreading the 
virtues of Commonwealth Edison through aggres- 
sive advertising and promotion. "Give Something 
Electrical," urged one Christmas ad campaign. Cu- 
rious shoppers could visit a Commonwealth Edison 
"Electric Shop" to behold new appliances, or they 
could travel to the suburb of River Forest and see 
a model electric home. Samuel Insull had seen the 
future, and it was electric. Insult's ambition was to 
wire the entire United States. By late 1929, the com- 
panies he controlled generated one-eighth of all the 
electricity consumed nationwide. It was an activity 
that affected one million investors and forty-one 
million customers. 

Insull raised money through the creation of 
holding companies. These were, in effect, corporate 
shells that allowed Insull to issue ever more stock. 
Investors bought the stock on Insull's reputation, 
and Insull used the proceeds to buy more utilities. 
The strategy worked until the great bear market of 
October 1929. Stock in four Insull holding compa- 



nies declined $150 million in value by 1931. Small 
investors were especially hurt, and anyone who lost 
heavily in the crash was likely to hold Insull respon- 
sible for chasing the bull out of the market. The 
worsening Depression only furthered that view. 
Newspapers that had once viewed Insull as a ge- 
nius now portrayed him as a pariah. During the 
1932 presidential election, Democratic candidate 
Franklin Roosevelt lashed out at "the lone wolf, the 
unethical competitor, the reckless promoter, the 
Ishmael or Insull." In response, Insull fled the 
country, a move that only guaranteed more bad 
publicity. When he was extradited from Turkey two 
years later, Insull became a page-one story that 
simply would not go away. 

The onetime protege of Edison was indicted for 
embezzlement, larceny, and mail fraud. Despite 
three separate trials Insull was never convicted, 
perhaps because Americans realized no one person 
could have caused such an economic calamity. Now 
stripped of one reputation and saddled with anoth- 
er, Insull retired to Paris, where he died in July 
1938. 

See Also: STOCK MARKET CRASH (1929). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 
New Deal: 1932-1940. 1963. 

McDonald, Forrest. Insull 1962. 

Piatt, Harold L. The Electric City: Energy and the Growth 
of the Chicago Area, 1880-1930. 1991. 

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Crisis of the Old Order, 



1919-1933. 1957. 



Douglas Bukowski 



INTERNATIONAL IMPACT OF THE 
GREAT DEPRESSION 

Any analysis of the Great Depression must start 
with World War I. This conflict had a dramatic eco- 
nomic impact, which went far beyond the massive 
military casualties. It embraced non-belligerents as 
well as those directly involved in the conflict. The 
war encouraged but also grossly distorted economic 
effort. 



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DEPRESSION 



WORLD WAR I: THE PROBLEM OF 
INDEBTEDNESS 

All wars are inflationary and World War I was 
no exception. Everywhere farm and factory prices 
rose inexorably and continued their upward course 
even after the conflict ended in 1918. For most 
countries the postwar depression of 1920 and 1921 
was the sharp deflationary shock, which brought to 
an end war-induced price increases. In Germany, 
however, hyperinflation continued and currency 
stability was not achieved until 1924, and then only 
with the assistance of U.S. bankers. 

War needs radically altered international in- 
debtedness. In order to pursue the conflict with full 
vigor, the British and French governments bor- 
rowed extensively from U.S. private lenders and 
also, after America had joined the conflict in April 

1917, from the federal government. Once the war 
was over, Washington insisted upon repayment of 
the debt even though the economies of both Allied 
nations had been seriously weakened by four years 
of conflict. For other stricken European countries, 
international indebtedness continued to rise after 

1918. Desperately short of foodstuffs and raw mate- 
rials, these countries had to contract postwar relief 
loans from the U.S. government and use the dollars 
they received to purchase American products. 

The British and the French did not worry undu- 
ly as they ran up a large war debt bill because they 
assumed that a vanquished Germany would meet 
the costs of the war. In 1921 a reparations total was 
agreed upon by the non-U. S. allies and imposed 
upon Germany. The Germans viewed the repara- 
tions bill as outrageous and the sum far too large for 
them to pay. The victors were convinced that Ger- 
many could pay if its exports were competitive and 
the foreign currency they earned was transferred to 
the Allies. However, the prospect of maintaining a 
low-wage, high-tax economy for many decades 
after the hardships of war and postwar turmoil had 
no appeal to Germans. 

The United States did not take part in the repa- 
rations negotiations and did not seek payment from 
Germany. Reparations were paid principally to Brit- 
ain and France, which had begun payment of their 
war debts to the United States. One problem was 
that neither of the two recipients could be confident 



of regular payments while hyperinflation consumed 
Germany. Eventually the fear of mounting eco- 
nomic instability became so great that American in- 
tervention to stabilize the German currency was 
proposed. The intervention was not governmental 
because Washington did not want to enter any ne- 
gotiations in which concessions on war debts might 
be demanded. American bankers produced the 
Dawes Plan, which in 1924 brought the frightening 
hyperinflation to an end and gave a New World 
stamp of approval to Germany. To support the 
Dawes Plan, the Federal Reserve (Fed) resolved to 
keep U.S. interest rates low, thus making Germany, 
where rates were high, attractive to the American 
investor. Soon Germany became the world's lead- 
ing international borrower and American citizens 
very willing lenders. 

The war created a new group of indebted na- 
tions and transformed the United States, the 
world's leading debtor nation in 1914, into the sta- 
tus of leading creditor nation four years later. Dur- 
ing the 1920s the United States assumed the role of 
leading international lender. 



WORLD WAR I: PRIMARY PRODUCTS 

High war prices encouraged the producers of 
foodstuffs and raw materials to expand output. In- 
deed, many countries were prepared to go into debt 
to fund roads, which would open up new areas of 
production, and docks that were vital to an expand- 
ed export trade. The United States was the only 
source of funds for virtually all borrowers. Howev- 
er, the depression of 1920-1921, which reduced 
prices savagely and suddenly, had a devastating ef- 
fect on primary producers, virtually all of whom 
were in debt. Moreover, once European agriculture 
recovered from the war, surpluses in internationally 
traded commodities such as wheat began to appear. 
European countries, with the exception of the Unit- 
ed Kingdom, protected their exposed farmers with 
high import duties. As stocks of coffee, cotton, and 
sugar mounted, exporters of these products found 
it difficult to pay for the imports of manufactured 
goods they wished to consume. Indeed, some 
found it difficult to fund the interest on the debt 
that they had run up when times were good and 
prices high. It was tempting, but not realistic, to 



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view such problems as temporary and to borrow, 
usually from the United States, to meet bills and 
pay for imports. There is some evidence to suggest 
that American international lending, which was 
poorly regulated, became more unsound as the 
twenties progressed. Many U.S. banks, new and 
enthusiastic entrants to this profitable business, 
were as devoid of good judgement as were the 
eager borrowers. By 1928 many primary product 
producers had become dependent upon a steady 
stream of American funding. 



THE GOLD STANDARD 

Many countries had temporarily abandoned 
the gold standard during the war, and there was a 
widespread conviction that this discipline should be 
embraced again as soon as possible. In part this be- 
lief was connected to the pre-1914 era view that the 
gold standard had ensured stability. Moreover, the 
devastating hyperinflations in central Europe 
seemed to indicate that a rigid discipline was need- 
ed if the worst excesses of economic mismanage- 
ment were to be avoided. Indeed the return to gold 
was seen as an essential prerequisite for the resto- 
ration of normality to war devastated economies. 

Contemporaries debated about how soon their 
economies could return to gold and at what ex- 
change rate, but never questioned if this move was 
wise in a world so different from the one before Au- 
gust 1914. The choice of exchange rate was crucial. 
The wrong rate would lead to formidable problems 
if it proved difficult to defend during an economic 
crisis, as devaluation was not an option. Gold stan- 
dard countries that came under pressure had to de- 
flate in order to make their exports more competi- 
tive through cost reductions, which inevitably 
caused rising unemployment and wage cuts. 

Nations returned to gold not in an orderly, but 
in a piecemeal, fashion and many had slender gold 
reserves. Moreover they returned at different ex- 
change rates. For example, Britain returned in 1925 
at the exchange rate that had been in force in 1914: 
£1 = $4.86. This rate would be difficult to defend 
given Britain's reduced economic circumstances. 
On the other hand, the French franc that went back 
on gold in 1926 was worth only one-fifth of the 
1914 franc. Thus the low value franc made it far eas- 



ier for the French to penetrate export markets than 
British business, which was handicapped by an 
overvalued currency. Far from being a source of 
strength, the gold standard during the twenties did 
not provide the means to avoid economic catastro- 
phe; it gave weaker economies no protection once 
crisis came 



THE FIRST SHOCK: 1928-1930 

In early 1928 the Fed moved to curb growing 
stock market speculation by introducing a tight 
money policy. As interest rates rose, Fed officials 
believed that borrowing for speculative purposes 
would become too expensive and the furious buy- 
ing would fade away. This strategy was a complete 
failure. It did, however, have serious repercussions 
for international lending because it altered the rela- 
tionship between U.S. interest rates and those in 
the rest of the world. Since 1924 the Fed had kept 
rates low in order to encourage U.S. money to flow 
overseas, and many economies had become highly 
dependent on the continuation of the flow. Howev- 
er, borrowers began to see that much of the inter- 
national capital was short term and highly volatile. 
Indeed the term "hot money" had been coined to 
describe its chief characteristic. Responding to 
higher interest rates, U.S. savers decided that the 
domestic opportunities had become so attractive 
that money which previously would have been sent 
overseas remained at home. But the United States 
was the world's leading international investor dur- 
ing the 1920s, with central Europe and Latin Amer- 
ica being especially favored. How could interna- 
tional borrowers entice Americans to send more 
capital to them? 

An obvious response for the borrowing coun- 
tries was to raise interest rates themselves and pre- 
serve their relative appeal to the international in- 
vestor. Many did just that, but the imposition of 
even higher rates of interest was not without its 
cost. For countries moving into recession, the im- 
position of a restrictive monetary policy would ac- 
celerate the economic decline. For example, in Ger- 
many the economy had reached a peak in 1927 and 
had already begun to contract when the supply of 
U.S. capital, on which rising German living stan- 
dards relied, became less certain. All countries try- 



512 



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DEPRESSION 



ing to attract international capital had to reject eco- 
nomic plans that would cause a budget deficit. 
International lenders became alarmed when poli- 
cies they judged imprudent were introduced, but 
with tax receipts falling and legitimate claims for re- 
lief rising, maintaining a balanced budget was very 
difficult. Unfortunately, the gold standard restricted 
the freedom of nations to implement expansive 
economic policies that might counteract the effect 
of severe depressions. 

After the Stock Market Crash in October 1929, 
the Fed reduced interest rates, and for a short while 
international lending recovered. However, this re- 
vival was a false dawn. In the middle of 1929 the 
U.S. economy had reached a cyclical peak and 
began to contract rapidly. At the same time there 
was a sharp fall in international foodstuff and raw 
material prices, which was serious for primary 
product nations as it lowered the value of their ex- 
ports relative to imports and quickly led to balance 
of payments deficits. Most primary producing 
countries were in debt and deflation increased the 
real burden. In other words, more pounds of coffee 
or tons of copper had to be exported to pay off in- 
terest charges on the debts already accumulated. 
Nor was there any easy way to check falling prices. 
In fact, sometimes the response of producers to de- 
flation was to produce more, which only com- 
pounded the problem. 

As the economies of major industrial powers, 
such as Germany, Great Britain and the United 
States, deteriorated, their purchases of imports de- 
clined. Primary product countries now faced a two- 
fold problem. First their exports could not find mar- 
kets even at very low prices; second, it was 
becoming increasingly difficult to attract foreign 
capital. In these circumstances nations were forced 
to cut imports. Countries reacted by increasingly 
desperate measures, such as the introduction of tar- 
iffs and quotas and the production of import substi- 
tutes. As one country's imports are another's ex- 
ports, this move only shifted the problem and 
invited retaliatory action. 

The use of tariff increases was not confined to 
debtor nations. In 1930 Congress approved and, in 
spite of the appeals of hundreds of economists, 
President Hoover refused to veto the Hawley- 



Smoot tariff. The decision to raise duties on U.S. 
imports was one of narrow self-interest; policy 
makers failed to understand the need for debtor 
countries to earn dollars by selling goods to the 
United States. Although Hawley-Smoot invited 
and received retaliation, it would be a mistake to 
view this legislation as playing more than a minor 
role in reducing international trade. Growing de- 
pression and contracting income explain the de- 
cline in the purchase of internationally traded 
goods. 



THE EUROPEAN FINANCIAL CRISIS: 1931 

After two years of depression, financial institu- 
tions in many countries were in a highly vulnerable 
position. Moreover, such was the intensity of the 
economic collapse that new international lending 
had virtually ceased. 

The failure of Austria's largest bank, the Credit 
Anstalt, in the spring of 1931, rang alarm bells. The 
Austrian government had conscientiously followed 
the rules of the gold standard but had not been able 
to fight off the crisis. Calls for help to the interna- 
tional financial community had generated only 
modest assistance. In July 1931, a crisis of confi- 
dence enveloped the German banking system. 
Since the first signs of depression, the German gov- 
ernment had been rigorously deflating the econo- 
my, doing so at enormous social cost as unemploy- 
ment mounted and serious political unrest began to 
attract international attention. German banks had 
a large amount of foreign debt, about forty percent 
of which was American. To ease the strain on Ger- 
man banks, President Hoover unilaterally proposed 
a moratorium on all inter-governmental debts. 

The Hoover Moratorium suspended war debts 
and reparations payments for one year but expected 
the repayment of private debts to U.S. citizens to 
continue. The Germans were delighted with this 
initiative, but the French, who had not been con- 
sulted, were furious, suspecting that this action 
spelled the end of reparations payments. Unfortu- 
nately the Moratorium did not halt the assault on 
the banking system. As the uncertainty increased, 
those Germans and Americans who could shift 
their money out of marks into gold or currencies 
less at risk of devaluation did so quickly, thus mak- 



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ing the threat of devaluation even more likely. Who 
could help Germany? 

The United States felt that with the Hoover 
Moratorium it had done enough. Great Britain, low 
on gold reserves, could offer no more than minor 
assistance. France had accumulated a massive gold 
stock but insisted on attaching political conditions 
to assistance that Germany found unacceptable. In 
the summer of 1931, Germany introduced ex- 
change controls and froze foreign-owned credits, 
making it impossible for U.S. citizens to withdraw 
their capital. This action was a stark warning to 
holders of foreign currency everywhere. The mark 
was not devalued, but severe deflation and import 
controls became even more draconian. As a result, 
unemployment rose, farm income plummeted, and 
Communists battled for political control with fas- 
cists. 

As the crisis gathered pace in Germany, inves- 
tors became increasingly anxious about sterling, 
widely considered overvalued. Britain's highly pub- 
licized budget and balance of payments deficits in- 
tensified anxieties, as did the presence of a new La- 
bour government. The orthodox deflationary 
policies imposed by the country's first socialist gov- 
ernment were in vain. The Bank of England did not 
have sufficient reserves to withstand the persistent 
selling of sterling, and in September 1931 Britain 
devalued the pound and became the first major 
country to leave the gold standard. Virtually all the 
countries that had strong trading links with Britain 
quickly followed London's example and cut their 
links with gold. Investors everywhere saw this ac- 
tion as a warning that no currency was safe from 
devaluation. It is important to remember that Brit- 
ain was forced to abandon gold and did not take 
this action as part of a measured policy initiative. It 
is also significant that Britain, and the other econo- 
mies that cut themselves free from the shackles of 
the gold standard, soon showed signs of a rapid re- 
covery from the Depression. 

The reaction of many countries that had close 
trading links with Britain was to abandon gold and 
devalue their currencies, too. However, once deval- 
ued, sterling was considered safe. Speculators 
turned away from London and made an assessment 
of the next most vulnerable currency. They quickly 
concluded that it was the U.S. dollar. 



Once the speculators began to attack the dollar, 
the Fed moved quickly to protect the external value 
of the currency by instituting a tight money policy. 
Raising interest rates was the appropriate course of 
action for a defense of the currency, but unfortu- 
nately it was exactly the wrong policy for the belea- 
guered banking system. However, the Fed wanted 
to send a strong signal to speculators that defend- 
ing the dollar was a priority. Sadly, at the same time 
an already serious depression was made even 
worse by a cluster of bank failures which required 
an easy money policy if the Fed was to render cen- 
tral bank assistance to distressed bankers and de- 
positors. After a while speculation eased but re- 
turned with a vengeance during the winter of 1932 
and 1933. Again the Fed raised interest rates to de- 
fend the dollar, and by March 1933 virtually every 
state had closed its banks. 



THE GOLD STANDARD AND THE 
TRANSMISSION OF THE DEPRESSION 

The gold standard, which was held in awe, was 
supposed to guarantee stability. It imposed a set of 
rules on participating economies, and the adjust- 
ments required to maintain equilibrium were sup- 
posed to minimize economic fluctuations. But the 
gold standard did not work in that way. During the 
1920s, France and the United States acquired the 
bulk of the world's gold stock but chose to sterilize 
it rather than let it increase the money supply. The 
latter course of action would have introduced infla- 
tionary pressures, made their exports more expen- 
sive, and eventually have led to a loss of gold that 
would have benefitted the nations which received 
it. Apart from France and the United States, many 
gold standard countries lived on the margin with 
inadequate reserves. Once these countries began 
losing gold they had limited choices. They were 
forced to deflate their economies, so that their ex- 
ports became more competitive, and cut back on 
imports in order to reduce gold losses. But defla- 
tionary policies raised unemployment, increased 
business failures, and lessened the demand for 
someone else's exports. International borrowing, 
which had been a useful way of avoiding the full 
rigors of deflation in the past, was not a possibility 
after the middle of 1930 when nervous investors 
began to repatriate their funds — and with great 



5H 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TUT GREAT D T P R T S S I N 



I N T E R N A T I N 



L IMPACT 



F 



GREAT 



DEPRESSION 



speed once the first payment defaults added to the 
anxiety. Even in robust democracies such as Great 
Britain, deflation imposed evident strains. In other 
nations, breaking the backs of the people was even- 
tually viewed as a cure worse than the disease. De- 
fault, or devaluation, seemed preferable. Even dur- 
ing this deflationary spiral, many policy makers and 
members of the public associated devaluation with 
damaging inflation. Reducing the external value of 
the currency was a weapon of last resort in societies 
with recent experience of destabilizing price rises. 
Devaluation had also the disadvantage of antago- 
nizing international investors, but this disincentive 
was no longer powerful once there was no interna- 
tional capital to attract. Countries that devalued 
gained a competitive advantage for their exports, 
but in doing so they put an even greater strain on 
nations that strove to maintain the external value 
of their currencies. Sometimes competitive, or 
"beggar-thy-neighbor," devaluations took place 
with countries striving to stay ahead of the game. 
Those who declined to devalue, responded with in- 
creased tariffs and quotas or the imposition of ex- 
change controls. 

The depression was transmitted through for- 
eign trade, and the United States was at the heart 
of the contraction. The supply of dollars to the rest 
of the world, which resulted both from American 
overseas lending and payment for U.S. imports, fell 
drastically from $7.4 billion in 1929 to $2.4 billion 
in 1932. The growing shortage of dollars became a 
serious problem. Once Debtor countries used up 
their meagre reserves, they had to take steps to cut 
their imports. Unfortunately, in doing so they 
helped to export the Depression. Primary produc- 
ing nations found that the prices of their exports fell 
far more steeply than the prices of the manufac- 
tured goods that they wished to import. In Europe, 
the inter-related war debts and reparations were 
fundamentally destabilizing. Unfortunately, the 
gold standard functioned as a mechanism for 
spreading the Depression rather than containing it. 

In April 1933, Roosevelt, who was less commit- 
ted to orthodoxy than Hoover, devalued the dollar 
and the U.S. abandoned the gold standard. The 
president was clearly signalling his intention to put 
domestic recovery to the fore. The aim of devalua- 



tion was to stimulate the U.S. economy and it was 
an essential prerequisite for New Deal policies de- 
signed to raise export-oriented farm prices. Indeed, 
the devaluation of the dollar was welcomed by 
farmers who also hoped that some beneficial infla- 
tion of farm prices would follow. 

In 1931, forty-seven countries embraced the 
gold standard. By late 1933 only a small rump com- 
prising, principally, Belgium, France, the Nether- 
lands and Switzerland still clung to the old ortho- 
doxy. To remain competitive the "gold bloc" 
nations had to resort to savage deflation, which im- 
posed serious social costs on their populations. As 
their economies declined their currencies came 
under severe speculative pressure, to which the or- 
thodox solution was even more deflation and pro- 
tection. However, raising tariff barriers was not a 
solution since countries that had already devalued 
their currencies also used tariffs as a retaliatory de- 
vice. 

By 1936, Germany no longer paid reparations, 
and Britain and France ignored their war debt pay- 
ments to the United States. In that year, 77 percent 
of Latin American loans were in default — for Chile 
and Peru the figure was 100 percent. September 
1936 also marked the demise of the gold standard 
as France, the Netherlands and Swizerland were 
forced to concede that the cost of staying on gold 
far outweighed any possible advantages. With this 
round of devaluations, the governments of these 
countries had more freedom to address the formi- 
dable economic problems that loyalty to the gold 
standard had intensified. 

As Eichengreen shows, the countries that fol- 
lowed Britain off gold in 1931 managed to avoid the 
worst effects of the Depression. However, although 
devaluation presented policy makers with the op- 
portunity to implement vigorous recovery policies, 
few nations embraced expansionary fiscal and 
monetary initiatives. Caution prevailed, and al- 
though the abandonment of the gold standard, to- 
gether with devaluation, was essential for economic 
recovery, the subsequent expansion was often dis- 
appointingly weak. 

During World War II, commentators became 
convinced that the selfish economic nationalism 
that characterized the 1930s had played a key role 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



515 



INTERNATIONAL LABOR D E T E N S E ( I L D ) 



in exacerbating the international tensions that ulti- 
mately led to armed conflict. War debts and repara- 
tions, inadequate international co-operation and 
the absence of international institutions that could 
assist economies in trouble all helped to make the 
prewar decade so troubled. The Bretton Woods 
Agreement (1944) sought to correct the deficiencies 
of the 1930s by setting up two new institutions. 
They were the International Monetary Fund (IMF) 
and the International Bank for Reconstruction and 
Development, which became known as the World 
Bank. These institutions were designed to provide 
an effective structure for international co-operation 
and to render unnecessary the "beggar-thy- 
neighbor" policies that proved so destabilizing be- 
fore 1939. 

See Also: AFRICA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; ASIA, 
GREAT DEPRESSION IN; AUSTRALIA AND NEW 
ZEALAND, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; CANADA, 
GREAT DEPRESSION IN; EUROPE, GREAT 
DEPRESSION IN; GOLD STANDARD; LATIN 
AMERICA, GREAT DEPRESSION IN; MEXICO, 
GREAT DEPRESSION IN. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Eichengreen, Barry. Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and 
the Great Depression, 1919-1939. 1992. 

Eichengreen, Barry. "Twentieth-Century U.S. Foreign 
Financial Relations." In The Cambridge Economic His- 
tory of the United States, Vol. Ill: The Twentieth Cen- 
tury, edited by Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. 
Gallman. 2000. 

Foreman-Peck, lames. A History of the World Economy. 
International Economic Relations since 1850. 1983. 

lames, Harold. The German Slump: Politics and Economics, 
1924-1936. 1985. 

Kindleberger, Charles P. The World in Depression, 
1929-1939. 1973. 

McNeil, William, C. American Money and the Weimar Re- 
public. 1986. 

Schuker, Stephen A. American "Reparations" to Germany, 
1919-1933: Implications for the Third-World Debt Cri- 
sis. 1988. 

Temin, Peter. Lessons from the Great Depression. 1989. 

Peter Fearon 



INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE 
OLD) 

The International Labor Defense (ILD), founded in 
1925 for the purpose of providing free legal services 
and support for "labor and political prisoners" and 
their families, was the legal arm of the Communist 
Party and was closely associated with the Interna- 
tional Red Aid (an organization founded by Comin- 
tern in Moscow in 1922 to provide relief for martyrs 
of the revolution). The ILD attracted a significant 
following during the 1930s due to its spirited de- 
fense of numerous poor and working-class defen- 
dants, immigrants, and blacks, contributing consid- 
erably to the Communist Party's reputation as a 
militant proponent of workers' rights and a cham- 
pion of oppressed black Americans. 

James P. Cannon, an influential Communist 
Party member, led the drive to create the ILD, and 
was at its helm until he was expelled from the Com- 
munist Party in 1928. Membership in the ILD was 
open, but Communists generally held positions of 
leadership. National directors during the 1930s in- 
cluded J. Louis Engdahl, who succeeded Cannon; 
William L. Patterson, a prominent African- 
American party member; and Anna Damon. 

Shortly after its founding the organization be- 
came engaged in the failed campaign to save the 
lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two 
Italian immigrants and anarchists convicted and 
sentenced to die for a 1927 robbery and murder. 
The ILD went on to agitate for the release of labor 
activists Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, who 
were unjustly confined for a 1916 bombing in San 
Francisco. 

During the 1930s the ILD began to direct more 
of its activities toward African Americans. As part 
of its constitution, the ILD made special conces- 
sions to "the defense of the Negro people;" howev- 
er, it was subsequent to 1928 and the mandates of 
the Sixth Congress of the Comintern (the interna- 
tional Communist body headquartered in Moscow) 
that it began to concentrate on cases of racial injus- 
tice. Its efforts included the successful nationwide 
campaign to free Angelo Herndon, a young black 
organizer imprisoned in Georgia for leading a hun- 



516 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



INTERNATIONAL 



LADIES 



GARMENT WORKERS 



UNION 



I L 6 W II 



ger march in Atlanta in 1932, and numerous other 
less celebrated cases of southern racial repression. 

Unquestionably, it was the struggle surround- 
ing the "Scottsboro Boys," nine black youths 
wrongfully condemned for the rape of two white 
women on an Alabama freight car in 1931, that pro- 
pelled the ILD and the Communist Party into the 
forefront of American consciousness. The organiza- 
tion mounted an aggressive legal defense bolstered 
by its hallmark strategy of "mass pressure": massive 
publicity, demonstrations, rallies, and speaking 
tours. Largely through its efforts, the ILD trans- 
formed a local miscarriage of justice into a national 
and international indictment of racism. 

In 1937, the ILD selected its first non- 
Communist head, Vito Marcantonio. Under his 
leadership, the organization continued its vigorous 
defense of targeted groups and initiated an attack 
on debt peonage in the South. The ILD began to 
lose momentum in the next decade and merged 
with the Civil Rights Congress in 1946. 

See Also: COMMUNIST PARTY; HERNDON, ANGELO, 
CASE; SCOTTSBORO CASE. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. 
1969. 

Home, Gerald. Communist Front? The Civil Rights Con- 
gress, 1946-1956. 1987. 

Martin, Charles H. The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern 
justice. 1976. 

Martin, Charles H. "The International Labor Defense 
and Black America." Labor History 26 (1985): 
165-194. 

Gwen Moore 



INTERNATIONAL LADIES' 
GARMENT WORKERS' UNION 
(ILGWU) 

Two dramatic strikes in the pre-World War I period 
contributed to making the International Ladies' 
Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) one of the larg- 



est and most successful unions in the nation at the 
end of the war. The famous 1909 "uprising of the 
20,000" New York City shirtwaist makers and the 
1910 cloakmakers' strike that established the "Pro- 
tocol of Peace" gave the ILGWU a solid base and 
stable membership through the teens. The Protocol 
limited homework and inside subcontracting or 
sweating, and established a six-day, 54-hour work- 
week. During this period of strength the union also 
developed an extensive education program, health 
insurance, and unemployment insurance for its 
members. 

Following World War I, conflict broke out be- 
tween radicals and moderates within the ILGWU. 
The union was wracked with dissention and fac- 
tionalism for the first half of the 1920s. In 1926, 
some 35,000 cloakmakers led by the Communist 
faction went on strike over the issue of job security. 
The strikers lost; manufacturers would not negoti- 
ate with the radicals, while the radicals were ac- 
cused of refusing to support compromise agree- 
ments that would have ended the strike. As a result 
of the defeat, most of the Communists were driven 
out of the union by the end of the decade. By then 
the Depression was settling into the garment 
trades. By 1933 union membership had dropped to 
40,000, down from almost 100,000 in 1920. The 
ILGWU lost over 3,300 members in 1930 alone. 

Benjamin Schlesinger, a moderate, was elected 
ILGWU president in 1928 on a campaign to stabi- 
lize the union's finances and increase membership. 
David Dubinsky followed Schlesinger into the pres- 
idency with the latter's death in 1932. Meanwhile, 
shifts were also occurring within the industry. With 
the growth of the readymade dress industry in the 
1920s, female dressmakers were replacing male 
cloakmakers. With the coming of the Depression 
employers began replacing male workers with fe- 
male workers. The percentage of women workers 
in the garment trades increased from 64 percent in 
1925 to 74 percent in 1935. 

Confronted with a growing number of female 
workers in the garment trades, the ILGWU began 
aggressively organizing women, often taking ad- 
vantage of campaigns initiated by the women 
themselves. The success of female dressmakers in 
their strike against the nonunion dress industry in 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



517 



INTERNATIONAL LADIES' GARMENT WORKERS' UNION (ILGWU 




Members of Local 89 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union in New York make uniforms for the Women's Army 
Auxiliary Corps in 1943. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection 



518 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



INTERNATIONAL 



LADIES 



GARMENT WORKERS 



UNION 



I L 6 W II 



Philadelphia spurred on organizing efforts, and 
membership began to climb after 1933. Even 
though many of the union's social programs had 
been cut back (financial difficulties even led to the 
suspension of the union newspaper Justice), the 
ILGWU continued to maintain its Education De- 
partment, the Union Health Center in New York, 
and its unemployment insurance services in Cleve- 
land, Ohio. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt's election and the pas- 
sage of the National Industrial Recovery Act offered 
new opportunities for the ILGWU. The National 
Recovery Administration (NRA) established codes 
for each industry and gave the workers the right to 
organize under Section 7a. Although workers in 
many of the heavily industrialized occupations 
found the NRA to be of limited value, garment 
workers were well positioned to take advantage of 
the new law. Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated 
Clothing Workers union was on the NRA board to 
set codes, and Dubinsky served as a labor advisor 
to the NRA. Using Section 7a the ILGWU extended 
its organizing efforts. In the summer of 1933 the 
ILGWU called a general strike of dressmakers in 
the Northeast; 60,000 workers walked out. The 
union won the strike and enforced the new NRA 
code. By the end of 1934 union membership had 
climbed to over 200,000. The ILGWU also cam- 
paigned for shorter hours and a voice in setting job 
conditions. The union had fought against the piece 
rate system in the prewar years, but with the com- 
ing of the Depression, manufacturers began using 
hourly rates and firing slower workers. Piecework 
allowed for more widely distributed work and em- 
ployers were less likely to lay off older and less effi- 
cient workers, but the concern was the rates. The 
union won a voice in setting standard piece rates. 
The national codes established a 35-hour work- 
week. 

Although Dubinsky was loyal to the American 
Federation of Labor (AFL) and close to its presi- 
dent, William Green, most ILGWU officials sup- 
ported industrial organizing. In 1935 Dubinsky 
served on the AFL Committee for Industrial Orga- 
nizations (CIO). When the CIO unions were sus- 
pended from the AFL, Dubinsky resigned from the 
AFL executive committee and withdrew his union 



from the AFL. The ILGWU did not join the CIO, 
but remained independent until 1940, when it re- 
joined the AFL. 

While the union retained its membership base 
and won a voice in setting rates and hours, it faced 
the continuing challenge of runaway shops. For 
many years, New York had been the center of the 
trade. For manufacturers the city offered a huge 
pool of capable labor, was close to the fashion in- 
dustry, and had extensive networks of external 
economies. Yet New York was also the center of 
union activity and had extensive radical networks 
and reinforcing institutions. In the pre-Depression 
years, moving a shop entailed the necessity of lo- 
cating new space and a willing and capable labor 
force. With the coming of the Depression manufac- 
turers could move at significantly less cost. Empty 
factories begged for occupation, particularly in the 
depressed old textile centers, such as Fall River or 
New Bedford, Massachusetts. These were places 
with an abundance of unemployed women familiar 
with industrial work and piece work, and city lead- 
ers were more than willing to encourage the move- 
ment of manufacturers into their empty textile 
mills. Garments were a low capital-intensive indus- 
try. Manufacturers could load bolts of cloth and 
sewing machines in trucks and drive into New En- 
gland, unload them into an abandoned textile mill, 
hire workers as learners, and begin work. The 
union tried to follow these plants but it was a diffi- 
cult and frustrating task at best. The ILGWU ap- 
proached the problem of runaway shops with a 
dual campaign of publicizing the union label and 
the urging of the passage of a minimum wage. The 
industry was also expanding on the West Coast. In 
the 1920s Jewish and Italian women made up the 
heart of the West Coast garment workers, but with 
the coming of the Depression, employers turned 
more and more to the larger pool of Hispanic and 
Asian women who were desperate to find work at 
any wage. Although the ILGWU maintained a non- 
discrimination policy, the new, more conservative, 
leadership that had taken over following the purge 
of radicals in the late 1920s held tight control over 
the union. This discouraged more aggressive orga- 
nizing of minority women. 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



519 



INTERNATIONAL L N 6 S H R T M T N ' S ASSOCIATION ( I L A ) 



See Also: AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); 
CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS 
(CIO); ORGANIZED LABOR. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Leeder, Elaine J. The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anar- 
chist and Labor Organizer. 1993. 

Levine, Louis. The Women's Garment Workers: A History 
of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. 
1924. 

McCreesh, Carolyn D. Women in the Campaign to Orga- 
nize Garment Workers, 1880-1917. 1985. 

Stein, Leon. Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Indus- 
trial Democracy. 1977. 

John T. Cumbler 



INTERNATIONAL 

LONGSHOREMEN'S ASSOCIATION 
(ILA) 

For several decades after its founding in 1895, the 
International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) 
functioned mainly as a collection of local unions 
and regional federations. The ILA faced a sharp 
challenge from One Big Union advocates during 
the era of World War I; it suffered major losses dur- 
ing the "lean years" of the 1920s; and in 1937 the 
union's rebellious Pacific Coast District split off to 
form the International Longshoremen's and Ware- 
housemen's Union (ILWU). But in the face of per- 
sistent charges that it was corrupt, undemocratic, 
and "in no real sense of the word a labor union at 
all," the ILA survived and in some locations thrived. 

The ILA's origins can be traced to the founding 
of local unions of lumber handlers and tugboatmen 
on the Great Lakes in the 1870s. A number of these 
unions combined to form the National Longshore- 
men's Association of the United States in 1892. Fol- 
lowing the affiliation of Canadian locals, the orga- 
nization changed its name to the International 
Longshoremen's Association, and it received a 
charter from the American Federation of Labor in 
1896. 

By the turn of the century, the ILA had thou- 
sands of members on the Great Lakes. But New 



York, home to one third of the nation's longshore- 
men, remained the key to the union's future. The 
ILA signed its first port-wide agreement in New 
York in 1916. Although union members were 
granted preference in employment, the contract did 
not address the vast surplus of labor that was the 
hallmark of the port. 

Between 1916 and 1945, the hourly wage on the 
New York waterfront increased from 40 cents to 
$1.45. But there were no authorized strikes until 
1948. There was also no democratic procedure 
within the union and no effective advocacy of the 
members' interests. To many observers, it appeared 
that the ILA's principal function was to "keep the 
lid on." 

The man who warmed to that task was the col- 
orful Joseph P. Ryan, who emerged as the union's 
central figure during the 1920s and eventually be- 
came its "president for life." On his watch the ILA 
began the rapid descent into "gangsterism" that 
was so vividly portrayed in Elia Kazan's film On the 
Waterfront (1954). New York's longshoremen re- 
mained more or less quiescent in the 1930s, in part 
because of organized crime's ominous presence in 
and around the union, but also because the dock- 
workers were enmeshed in a cultural network that 
offered few openings to the forces of change. In 
Irish-American neighborhoods such as Chelsea, 
family, ethnicity, and faith were the foundation 
stones of daily life, and outsiders were unwelcome. 

But it was different on the West Coast, where 
the union's Pacific Coast District called a walkout 
in May 1934 that mobilized longshoremen from 
San Diego in the south to Vancouver, British Co- 
lumbia, in the north. The legendary "Big Strike," 
which lasted for eighty-three days, spread to other 
seafaring crafts and eventually triggered a four-day 
general strike in the San Francisco Bay area. The 
walkout also ushered in a "Pentecostal" era of 
union militancy among West Coast dockworkers 
that eventually propelled them out of the ILA and 
the AFL and into the welcoming arms of the Com- 
mittee for Industrial Organization (later called the 
Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO). Led 
by Australian immigrant Harry Bridges — "Red 
Harry" to his friends, as well as his enemies — the 
ILWU confidently set out to topple the ILA by at- 



520 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ISOLATIONISM 



tacking its New York stronghold and the strategic 
southern port of New Orleans. 

Joe Ryan's "goons" easily repelled Bridges's 
men in New York, making New Orleans all the 
more important to the ILWU's, and the ILA's, fu- 
ture. In the Crescent City, race would play a critical 
role, because black longshoremen outnumbered 
whites by a three-to-one margin and were deter- 
mined to defend their turf against white encroach- 
ment. In an election conducted by the National 
Labor Relations Board in 1938, New Orleans long- 
shoremen voted overwhelmingly for the ILA in a 
bitter contest with the ILWU. In a competitive labor 
market, they believed that racially separate union- 
ism would serve their interests better than the racial 
egalitarianism of the ILWU. Even in the midst of 
the post-World War II civil rights revolution that 
demolished de jure segregation, black longshore- 
men in New Orleans and other southern ports 
clung to their "separate but equal" organizations, 
until a federal court compelled them to merge with 
white ILA locals in the early 1980s. 

Meanwhile, in New York, Catholic "labor 
priests" developed close ties with rank-and-file in- 
surgents at the end of World War II, and for the 
next decade the waterfront became a hotbed of 
conflict. A wave of wildcat strikes helped bring 
down the Ryan regime and nearly destroyed the 
union in the nation's largest port. But the ILA sur- 
vived and adapted — unevenly — to the new rights- 
conscious environment and to the mechanization 
of cargo handling. 

See Also: AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); 
BRIDGES, HARRY; CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL 
ORGANIZATIONS (CIO); ORGANIZED LABOR; 
SAN FRANCISCO GENERAL STRIKE (1934). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Kimeldorf, Howard. Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radi- 
cal and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. 1988. 

Markholt, Ottilie. Maritime Solidarity: Pacific Coast 
Unionism, 1929-1938. 1998. 

Mers, Gilbert. Working the Waterfront: The Ups and Downs 
of a Rebel Longshoreman. 1988. 

Nelson, Bruce. Divided We Stand: American Workers and 
the Struggle for Black Equality. 2001. 

Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Long- 
shoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. 1988. 



Russell, Maud. Men along the Shore. 1966. 



Bruce Nelson 



ISOLATIONISM 



U.S. isolationism has traditionally involved opposi- 
tion to participation in war outside the Western 
Hemisphere, particularly in Europe; avoidance of 
binding military alliances; and refusal to participate 
in organizations of collective security. Above all, the 
isolationist desires to maintain the United States's 
freedom of action. Such people differ from pacifists, 
who withhold support for any conflict and re- 
nounce any war. Proponents of the isolationist po- 
sition usually consider the label perjorative: As 
most oppose isolating the United States from either 
the world's culture or its commerce, they have long 
preferred such terms as "neutralist," "nationalist," 
"non-interventionist," or "anti-interventionist." 

By the above definition, U. S. foreign policy was 
isolationist until the twentieth century. Only when 
President Woodrow Wilson sought entry into the 
League of Nations in 1919 did isolationism emerge 
as a distinctive political position. Moreover, only in 
the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt 
sought discretionary power to aid victims of aggres- 
sion, was the general isolationist consensus threat- 
ened. Opponents of Roosevelt's policies fought so 
successfully that the years 1934 to 1937 marked the 
high tide of isolationist legislation. 

In April 1934 Roosevelt signed the Johnson 
Debt Default Act, introduced by Senator Hiram 
Johnson (R-Calif.), who had been prominent in the 
fight against the League of Nations. The Senate 
passed the measure without a recorded vote, the 
House without dissent. The bill prohibited private 
loans to nations in default of obligations contracted 
during World War I to the U.S. Government. 

In January 1935 the Senate turned down Roo- 
sevelt's bid for U.S. entry into the World Court by 
seven votes. Founded in 1921, the Permanent Court 
of International Justice (as the court was formally 
called) was closely tied to the League of Nations. 
The League Assembly and Council had to approve 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



521 



ISOLATIONISM 



all nominations; the World Court's budget was un- 
derwritten by the League; the League Covenant re- 
quired the court to give "an advisory opinion upon 
any dispute or question referred to it by the Coun- 
cilor by the Assembly." Contrary to myth, Roose- 
velt's defeat did not result from unscrupulous pro- 
paganda fostered by publisher William Randolph 
Hearst and radio priest Charles E. Coughlin. Rather 
it was due to Congress's hostile predisposition and 
Roosevelt's own lack of leadership. 

In the spring of 1935, however, investigators for 
the Senate's Special Committee Investigating the 
Munitions Industry began to collect material con- 
cerning U.S. entry into World War I. During this 
time such revisionist works as journalist Walter 
Millis's Road to War: America, 1914-1917 (1935) 
portrayed the Great War as a futile crusade. Muni- 
tions committee chairman Gerald P. Nye (R- 
N.Dak.), together with his committee colleague 
Senator Bennett Champ Clark (D-Mo.), introduced 
bills for an impartial arms embargo against belliger- 
ents, a prohibition on loans to belligerents, and de- 
nial of passports to Americans wishing to enter war 
zones. When the Roosevelt administration, which 
was opposed to mandatory isolation, countered 
with a bill that would permit discriminatory embar- 
goes, its proposal found little response. 

In August 19, 1935, as Italy was poised to in- 
vade Ethiopia, members of the Senate Foreign Re- 
lations Committee reported a joint resolution. 
"Arms, ammunition and implements of war" could 
not be sent to belligerents once the president de- 
clared that a state of war existed. (Roosevelt later 
defined "implements of war" to include airplanes, 
various chemicals, and armored vehicles, but not 
such items as cotton, oil, scrap iron, and trucks). 
Submarines of belligerent nations could not use 
U.S. ports. The president possessed discretionary 
authority to proclaim that Americans traveling on 
ships registered in belligerent nations did so at their 
own risk. Though the administration deplored the 
fact that its hands were being tied, it permitted the 
bill to pass, although it did secure an amendment 
limiting its term to six months. The legislation 
passed the Senate 77 to 2 and the House without 
a recorded vote. 

When Roosevelt signed the bill on August 31, 
he warned that "the inflexible provisions might 



drag us into war instead of keeping us out" (Cole 
1983, p. 178). He did not, however, want to jeopar- 
dize pending New Deal legislation, such as the reg- 
ulation of the coal industry, over foreign policy 
matters. In addition, he thought the bill would 
probably injure the aggressor Italy far more than it 
would injure its victim. On October 6, three days 
after fighting broke out in East Africa, Roosevelt in- 
voked the new bill. No munitions could be sold to 
either side. 

Because the neutrality law was due to expire in 
February 1936, that month Congress passed the 
Neutrality Act of 1936. The House voted 353 to 27; 
the Senate took no roll call. The act was almost 
identical to the 1935 law, with the addition of one 
feature: it forbade the United States to lend money 
to belligerent nations, though exceptions were 
made for wars in Latin America. It did not, as Roo- 
sevelt had hoped, prohibit any trade with the bel- 
ligerents beyond peacetime levels. Like the previ- 
ous act, the new one was temporary, scheduled to 
expire on May 1, 1937. 

This measure imposed more restrictions upon 
a president already opposed to mandatory legisla- 
tion. Yet the president signed it without comment. 
Roosevelt feared that a fight would risk further 
stripping of his power, produce debate that could 
only comfort Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and 
risk votes in the impending presidential race. 

In July 1936 rebel forces in Spanish Morocco led 
by General Francisco Franco attacked the Spanish 
Republic, triggering a civil war that would last al- 
most three years. Within a month the U.S. govern- 
ment announced a "moral embargo" on arms ship- 
ments to either side, but not until January 1937, on 
Roosevelt's recommendation, did Congress pass a 
nondiscriminatory arms embargo, with the Senate 
voting 81 to and the House 406 to 1. 

On May 1, 1937, the Neutrality Act of 1936 
would expire. In return for sections forbidding 
Americans to travel on belligerent ships and pro- 
hibiting the arming of U.S. merchantmen, anti- 
interventionists accepted discretionary authority on 
cash-and-carry, a scheme by which nations at war 
could collect goods in U.S. ports and pay for them 
on the spot. The cash-and-carry provision would 
remain in force until May 1, 1939. The president 



522 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ISOLATIONISM 



could also ban shipment on U.S. vessels of com- 
modities that he might specify, close U.S. ports to 
belligerent warships, and declare U.S. territorial 
waters off-limits to belligerent submarines and 
merchantmen. The measure kept the arms embar- 
go and loan prohibition of the old law, and it ap- 
plied to civil wars as well as international ones. On 
April 29, 1937, the new bill was passed, and was 
signed by the president a day later. Roosevelt of- 
fered no objection, undoubtedly because he real- 
ized that cash-and-carry favored Britain and 
France, two major sea powers, rather than the in- 
land nations of Germany and Italy. Engaged in a 
dispute over enlarging the Supreme Court, which 
had struck down much New Deal legislation, Roo- 
sevelt sought no additional conflict. By remaining 
aloof from debate while quietly backing the con- 
gressional moderates, he was able to maintain 
some flexibility. 

In January 1938, in the wake of a crisis in which 
Japanese forces in China sunk a gunboat, the 
Panay, the House considered the Ludlow Amend- 
ment. Congressman Louis Ludlow (D-Ind.) sought 
an amendment to the U.S. Constitution by which 
Congress's power to declare war would be restrict- 
ed to cases of actual or imminent invasion of the 
United States or its territories or attack by a non- 
American nation on a state in the Western Hemi- 
sphere. In any other case, Congress must allow vot- 
ers to choose, by means of a national referendum, 
whether they wished to go to war. On January 10, 
1938, the House voted 209 to 188 to return the pro- 
posed amendment to committee. Just before the 
vote, House Speaker William Bankhead (D-Ala.) 
read a public letter from Roosevelt that claimed that 
the amendment would "cripple" the president's 
ability to conduct foreign policy and encourage 
other nations to "violate American rights with im- 
punity." 

Meanwhile, Roosevelt sought to revise the 1937 
Neutrality Act. As the cash-and-carry provision of 
this law was scheduled to expire on May 1, 1939, 



the administration sought a new bill that would re- 
tain cash-and-carry while repealing the arms em- 
bargo. At the end of June the House, by a vote of 
200 to 188, passed an amended bill that included 
cash-and-carry but also added an arms embargo 
introduced by Congressman John Vorys (R-Ohio). 
Because the Senate did not act, most of the 1937 
law, including the arms embargo, remained in ef- 
fect. 

Once Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 
1939, isolationism declined. As the United States 
emerged from the Depression, Roosevelt defeated 
his foes on one issue after another. In November 

1939 Congress voted for military sales to Britain and 
France on a cash-and-carry basis. In September 

1940 it adopted military conscription, and sup- 
ported extending the terms of army draftees less 
than a year later. In November 1941 it authorized 
the arming of U.S. merchant vessels and permitted 
them to carry cargoes to belligerent ports. Acting on 
his own authority, Roosevelt occupied Greenland 
and Iceland, froze Japanese asserts, issued a set of 
war aims with Britain, and entered into an unde- 
clared naval war with Germany. Isolationism was 
over well before Pearl Harbor. 

See Also: ETHIOPIAN WAR; HULL, CORDELL; 
SPANISH CIVIL WAR; WORLD COURT. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cole, Wayne S. Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-1945. 
1983. 

Dallek, Robert. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign 
Policy, 1932-1945. 1979. 

Divine, Robert A. The Illusion of Neutrality. 1962. 

Doenecke, Justus D. Anti-Intervention: A Bibliographical 
Introduction to Isolationism and Pacifism from World 
War I to the Early Cold War. 1987. 

Dunne, Michael. The United States and the World Court, 
1920-1935. 1988. 

Jonas, Manfred. Isolationism in America, 1939-1941. 1966. 

Justus D. Doenecke 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



523 




JACKSON, ROBERT 



Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954) served as U.S. solic- 
itor general from 1938 to 1940, as attorney general 
in 1940 and 1941, and as associate justice of the Su- 
preme Court from 1941 to 1954. Raised in upstate 
New York, Jackson studied law with a local attorney 
active in the Democratic Party. While developing a 
successful law practice, Jackson advised Franklin 
Roosevelt during his service as New York's gover- 
nor. 

Jackson came to Washington with the Roose- 
velt administration, working first as general counsel 
to the Internal Revenue Service and then in the De- 
partment of Justice, where he helped develop the 
legal arguments used to defend the Public Utilities 
Holding Company Act, regarded by many as one of 
the New Deal's key statutes. Jackson's foremost 
contribution was as Roosevelt's legal adviser; in 
that capacity he made a major speech describing 
the obstacle the Supreme Court posed to the New 
Deal, and he drafted the legal opinion defending 
the president's power to lend U.S. ships to Great 
Britain early in World War II when the United 
States was still technically a neutral party. 

As associate justice, Jackson wrote opinions 
that defined one part of the New Deal's constitu- 
tional revolution. Wickard v. Filburn (1942) crystal- 



lized the new doctrine that the Constitution's grant 
of power to regulate interstate commerce allowed 
Congress to regulate seemingly local activities 
(such as raising wheat for consumption on the 
farm) . 

Jackson's nationalism led him to support civil 
liberties, as in Edwards v. California (1941), where 
the majority struck down as interfering with inter- 
state commerce a California law barring "Okies" 
(poor emigrants from Oklahoma) from entering the 
state. His affirmation of principles of free expres- 
sion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Bar- 
nette (1943) remains one of the most eloquent in the 
reports: "If there is any fixed star in our constitu- 
tional constellation, it is that no official, high or 
petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in poli- 
tics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opin- 
ion." Later in his career on the Court, Jackson, who 
also served as chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg 
war crimes trials, became skeptical about toleration 
of subversive speech. 

Jackson believed that Roosevelt had promised 
to make him chief justice of the Supreme Court 
when the position became available, but the ap- 
pointment fell instead to President Harry Truman, 
who did not feel obliged to honor Roosevelt's 
promise. Jackson suspected that Justice Hugo Black 
had poisoned Truman's mind against the appoint- 
ment, and relations between the two New Dealers 



525 



JAZZ 



on the Court were permanently soured. Having re- 
jected his doctor's advice that he should retire after 
his first heart attack in early 1954, Jackson returned 
to the bench and suffered a fatal heart attack in the 
fall. He died on October 9, 1954. 

See Also: SUPREME COURT. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Gerhart, Eugene. America's Advocate: Robert H. Jackson. 
1958. 

White, G. Edward. The American Judicial Tradition: Pro- 
files of Leading American Judges. 1976. 

Mark Tushnet 



JAZZ 



When Joseph "King" Oliver died in the spring of 
1938, his protege, Louis Armstrong, and other 
bandleaders, such as Cab Calloway and Earl Hines, 
claimed at his funeral that Oliver was the true "king 
of swing." Others who wore the title, and swing 
musicians in general, they insinuated, owed a great 
debt to the leader of the Creole Jazz Band. This was 
a way of suggesting that the music of the big band 
era, known as swing since the 1930s, was an out- 
growth of early forms of jazz. This idea contrasts 
with the fans' notion that swing music, like New 
Orleans jazz or Dixieland, is a discrete and separate 
entity from bebop. 

Scholars disagree on how to define jazz and 
swing, but many assert that the earlier bands of 
James Reese Europe, Fletcher Henderson, and 
Duke Ellington, as well as Oliver, were fundamen- 
tal to swing's evolution. On the eve of World War 
I, James Europe's orchestra performed at New York 
City's Carnegie Hall — one full decade before Paul 
Whiteman and a generation before the jazz con- 
certs of the late 1930s were staged in this hall. 
James Europe's music grew out of ragtime and pop- 
ular dance music, as did Henderson's and Elling- 
ton's. Don Redman, Henderson's arranger, is often 
credited with having the reed or brass sections per- 
form passages in call-and-response sequences, but 
Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton also used this dis- 



tinctive voicing and organization. Besides employ- 
ing the rhythms of ragtime and the harmonies of 
blues and popular dance music, Ellington's compo- 
sitions and arrangements contained unusual har- 
monies and unique combinations of instruments. 

These outfits, and southwestern orchestras 
such as those of Alphonso Trent, Bennie Moten, 
and the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, grew in size 
from six to eight to twelve and thirteen or more mu- 
sicians in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the 
rhythm section, the string bass replaced the tuba 
and the guitar was used instead of banjo, and light- 
er more flexible rhythms were played in 4/4 instead 
of 2/4. Swing bands also alternated ensemble pas- 
sages with improvised sections by "hot" soloists, 
while other band members "riffed" or played highly 
rhythmic motifs in the background. These exciting 
new sounds buoyed dancers and musicians alike, 
sending them into climactic moments when music, 
musicians, and dancers melded for an evening into 
a symphony of sound and movement. New jitter- 
bug dances, such as the Lindy Hop and the Big 
Apple, illustrated these distinctive rhythms with 
not only new steps, but also highly acrobatic moves 
in which one partner propelled the other up and 
away from the floor in what were known as air 
steps. 

These changes occurred gradually, however, 
and in the 1930s, there were still many bands, 
African-American and white swing orchestras, that 
included New Orleans styles, songs, and collective 
improvisation. Nonetheless, as evident from the 
1932 recordings by Fletcher Henderson and Bennie 
Moten, as well as others, musicians perfected the 
swing idiom and arrangements in songs such as 
"King Porter Stomp" and "Moten Swing." By the 
mid and late 1930s, bands led by Benny Goodman, 
Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and the Dorsey brothers 
also thrilled jitterbug dancers, as well as radio lis- 
teners from coast to coast. The white bands often 
utilized African-American arrangers — Fletcher 
Henderson, Sy Oliver, and Eddie Durham — to 
write the more soulful aspects of swing arrange- 
ments. 

In several respects, swing bands contained 
within them the seeds of future developments in 
music and culture for decades to come. Most if not 



526 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



A Z Z 




One of the most popular jazz musicians of the Depression era was Louis Armstrong (front right), shown with his band in 1937. 

Library of Congress. Prints & Photographs Division. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection 



all of the contemporary dance music in the United 
States stemmed from this tradition. The enhanced 
role of the drummers, of long drum solos, of melo- 
dies that were basically riffs, and of the incessant 
dance beat foreshadowed the rhythm and blues of 
the 1940s, which came to be known as rock and roll 
in the 1950s. Drummers who were leaders also con- 
tributed to these developments; Chick Webb in the 
1930s was one of the first to bring drums front and 
center, a role popularized by Gene Krupa and lead- 
ing to Max Roach and Art Blakey, among others. In 
another respect, the small combos within the big 
bands, Count Basie's Kansas City combos, for ex- 
ample, or Goodman's Quartet, presaged bebop 
bands, such as those led by Charlie "Bird" Parker 



and Dizzy Gillespie, and progressive jazz ensem- 
bles, such as the Modern Jazz Quartet. Even the fu- 
sion of European classical music with jazz, as in the 
compositions, arrangements, and playing of band 
leaders Artie Shaw and Eddie South, were compa- 
rable to Third Stream developments in the 1950s. 

In the midst of the Depression, U.S. workers 
and unemployed men and women danced, social- 
ized, and wooed to hits of the swing era — "One 
O'Clock Jump," "Mood Indigo," and "In the 
Mood." Notably during the swing decade, blues 
moved to the forefront — not the country blues of 
Blind Lemon Johnson or city blues of Ma Rainey, 
but the urban versions of this music played by El- 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



527 



JAZZ 




Fats Waller, a popular Depression-era jazz pianist and 
songwriter, in 1938. Library of Congress, Prints & 
Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and the Sun 
Newspaper Photograph Collection 



lington, Henderson, Basie, and Jimmy Lunceford. 
By the late 1930s, guitarists Eddie Durham, Charlie 
Christian, and T-Bone Walker electrified the instru- 
ment and amplified the sound, integrating the gui- 
tar with large orchestras and using it to solo like a 
saxophone or trumpet. Their efforts and the com- 
bos of Nat "King" Cole, Slim Gaillard and Slam 
Stewart, Stuff Smith, and Louis Jordan led to rock 
and roll and the music of Muddy Waters, Chuck 
Berry, and eventually Elvis Presley and the British 
rock bands. Electrification of the guitar in the 1930s 
also presaged fusion with the electric piano, bass, 
and other instruments in the 1970s. 

Along with blues and jazz dancing, a distinctive 
way of speaking, swing slang or jive talk, accompa- 
nied the music and was even adopted in articles 
about the music and musicians. Some attributed 
this slang to Louis Armstrong's influence, but the 



jazz world, the underworld, and entertainment cir- 
cles have always had their distinctive argots. These 
merged in the swing band milieu, and expressions 
such as "Hit that jive, jack" and "Let's get racy with 
Count Basie" punctuated the repartee and banter of 
not only musicians, but dancers, listeners, writers, 
and others in the "hip" crowd and became part of 
common parlance. Even the humor of, for example, 
"Nagasaki," "Flat Foot Floogie," and "Is You Is or 
Is You Ain't My Baby?" was to be found in rock and 
roll songs of subsequent decades. 

The social aspects of swing bands were as im- 
portant as the music, as they provided staging 
grounds for assaults on racial segregation. In jam 
sessions, white musicians and black musicians per- 
formed together on the bandstand, a practice that 
was illegal in the South because it meant racial inte- 
gration. Bandleaders such as Benny Carter hired 
white musicians, and Benny Goodman and Artie 
Shaw hired black musicians, a practice that was a 
frontal assault on segregation. Integrated bands 
traveling in the South encountered threats of arrest 
or violence when they defied the law by demanding 
equal rights for all band members. Up north, Billie 
Holiday, Oran "Hot Lips" Page, and others fought 
back in nightclubs and bars when whites attacked 
them. Thus, in a social sense as well as in the music, 
dance, and language, swing prepared the ground 
for future developments in subsequent decades of 
the twentieth century. 

See Also: ARMSTRONG, LOUIS; BIG BAND MUSIC; 
ELLINGTON, DUKE; GOODMAN, BENNY; 
HOLIDAY, BILLIE; MUSIC. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Allen, Walter C. Hendersonia: The Music of Fletcher Hen- 
derson and His Musicians. 1973. 

Bryant, Clora, et al., eds. Central Avenue Sounds: jazz in 
Los Angeles. 1998. 

Dahl, Linda. Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou 
Williams. 1999. 

Dance, Stanley. The World of Count Basie. 1980. 
Dance, Stanley. The World of Earl Hines. 1977. 
Daniels, Douglas Henry. Lester Leaps In: The Life and 
Times of Lester 'Pres' Young. 2002. 

Ellington, Edward Kennedy. Music Is My Mistress. 1973. 

Margolick, David. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Soci- 
ety, and An Early Cry for Civil Rights. 2000. 



528 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



H N S N 



H U 6 



O'Meally, Robert G. Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie 
Holiday. 1991. 

Murray, Albert. Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of 
Count Basic. 1985. 

Pearson, Nathan W., Jr. Goin' to Kansas City. 1987. 

Russell, Ross. ]azz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest. 
1971. 

Shaw, Artie. The Trouble with Cinderella: An Outline of 
Identity. 1952. 

Douglas Henry Daniels 



JCNR. See JOINT COMMITTEE FOR NATIONAL 
RECOVERY. 



JOHNSON, HUGH 



Hugh Johnson (August 5, 1882-April 15, 1942), 
head of the New Deal's National Recovery Admin- 
istration (NRA), was born in Kansas and raised in 
Kansas and Oklahoma. He graduated from the U.S. 
Military Academy at West Point in 1903 and was 
commissioned in the cavalry. In the early stage of 
his military career, Johnson served with the First 
Cavalry Regiment in Texas, the Philippines, and 
California. During these years the essential ele- 
ments of his personality emerged. A heavy drinker, 
he was pugnacious and ready to harshly criticize 
the transgressor of even the most minor army regu- 
lation. This gruff side later led a pundit to dub him 
"Old Iron Pants." Yet Johnson also had a sentimen- 
tal side, and his quick mind for wisecracks and abil- 
ity to tell good stories made him popular with 
messmates. From 1914 to 1916 he attended the 
University of California Law School, and immedi- 
ately upon graduation he joined the Punitive Expe- 
dition in Mexico that was chasing Pancho Villa, 
serving as judge advocate. 

During World War I, Johnson rose to the tem- 
porary rank of brigadier general while playing a 
major role in the mobilization of the nation's man- 
power and industry. Initially he was the principal 
assistant for Major General Enoch H. Crowder, 
head of the Judge Advocate General's Department 
and the Provost Marshal General's Office. In this 



capacity Johnson helped formulate and implement 
the selective service system. Transferred to the War 
Department General Staff in 1918, Johnson spear- 
headed the restructuring of the army supply organi- 
zation to end the inter-bureau competition that had 
made a mess of procurement. He also represented 
the army on the War Industries Board (WIB), which 
was mobilizing the nation's industries for war 
through a program of industrial self-government. 
Through his stint with the WIB, Johnson acquired 
considerable knowledge of American industry and 
became good friends with many of the business- 
men serving with the WIB, including Bernard M. 
Baruch, its chairman, and George N. Peek. 

Disappointed by his failure to serve in France 
and anxious to make some "real" money, Johnson 
resigned his commission in 1919 and joined with 
Peek to take over the management of the struggling 
Moline Plow Company. Their efforts to turn Moline 
Plow into a profitable concern failed, and after an 
acrimonious break with Peek, Johnson supervised 
the company's liquidation during the late 1920s. In 
the meantime, Johnson became an associate of Ba- 
ruch, a figure of great influence as a result of his 
success on Wall Street and his twin roles as a politi- 
cal strategist and publicist on national issues. 
Among other things, Johnson helped Baruch publi- 
cize the need for ongoing planning for economic 
mobilization and was an investigator on business 
and economic conditions. At Baruch's request, fu- 
eled by a sizable campaign contribution, Johnson 
was admitted to Franklin D. Roosevelt's "brains 
trust," an informal group of academicians who 
served as speechwriters and thinkers in his 1932 
presidential race. As Baruch's man, Johnson saw 
that Baruch's views on recovery from the Depres- 
sion were heard. 

In 1933 Johnson emerged as a key figure in 
Roosevelt's New Deal. During the spring he partici- 
pated in the drafting of the National Industrial Re- 
covery Act (NIRA), an ambitious attempt to stimu- 
late recovery through industrial self-government 
and public works spending that Roosevelt ap- 
proved on June 16. Impressed with his vigor, 
knowledge of the industrial sector, and experience 
with the WIB, Roosevelt wanted Johnson to admin- 
ister the act. However, after hearing from Baruch 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



529 



JOHNSON 



U G H 



that Johnson was too impulsive to be "a number- 
one man," Roosevelt restricted him to the adminis- 
tration of the agency to implement industrial self- 
government, the NRA, and the president placed 
public works in a separate agency, the Public Works 
Administration. 

Johnson's initial task was the drafting of the 
"fair codes of competition" that were at the heart 
of industrial self-government. Designed to mini- 
mize the cutthroat competition that many argued 
had weakened American industry and to bring a 
degree of social justice to labor, the codes were to 
include provisions for production, price, and mar- 
keting agreements; minimum wages; maximum 
hours; and the right of workers to organize and bar- 
gain collectively. In each of the nation's industries, 
businessmen and labor representatives would draft 
a code that had the force of law once it received the 
president's signature. Through the codes, predatory 
practices would be extinguished and labor stan- 
dards improved, increasing stability, employment, 
and investor confidence, and encouraging general 
economic progress and social harmony. 

At the outset, Johnson concentrated on codes 
for the nation's largest industries, such as cotton 
textiles, steel, petroleum, automobiles, and coal. 
Fearing constitutional problems, Johnson es- 
chewed the coercive features of NIRA, which in- 
cluded federal licensing of business and presiden- 
tial authority to impose codes. Moreover, convinced 
that NRA could succeed only if he worked with 
business, Johnson generally relied on the voluntary 
cooperation of business and regularly made con- 
cessions to the dominant elements in an industry to 
get it codified. These actions often led to codes that 
included restrictive economic policies and gave 
short shrift to the aspirations of workers. When 
code drafting stalled, Johnson instituted a voluntary 
blanket code for all industries covering minimum 
wages and maximum hours that was to be in effect 
until the end of 1933 or until an employer's specific 
industry was codified. Employers who abided by 
the code would display the emblem of the NRA, the 
"Blue Eagle," in their windows or on their products. 

Through the fall of 1933 Johnson presided over 
a massive publicity campaign to enlist public sup- 
port for NRA. Marked by giant rallies and parades, 



the campaign made Johnson the nation's number- 
one Depression fighter, a status Time magazine 
confirmed by naming him its "Man of the Year" for 
1933. Next to Roosevelt, he was the most talked- 
about man in Washington. His pithy quotes, tough 
talk, gravel voice, rugged looks, and military de- 
meanor made him good copy for reporters. For 
weeks Johnson worked at a non-stop pace, at one 
moment bargaining with business and labor leaders 
to finalize a code and the next moment flying across 
the country to give a speech. Through a mixture of 
cajolery, pleas to patriotism, bluster, and horse- 
trading, he broke the logjam in code drafting. Even- 
tually more than five hundred codes, covering 
twenty-two million workers, were implemented. 

By 1934 Johnson and NRA were engulfed in 
controversy. Many complained that price-control 
devices in codes were hindering recovery by raising 
prices faster than wages. Labor leaders argued that 
business was undermining the right of workers to 
form unions by herding them into company unions. 
"Chiseling," or the refusal to abide by code provi- 
sions, was widespread. In response Johnson agreed 
to limit price-fixing arrangements, rushed into 
labor disputes to avert or end strikes, and threat- 
ened to "crack down" on "chiselers." 

Under the stress of running NRA, Johnson 
made contradictory statements, lost his temper, 
branded criticism of NRA as "treason," and feuded 
with detractors. His self-control sapped by over- 
work, he drank too much, slept too little, and at 
times appeared on the verge of exhaustion. He per- 
mitted his secretary to become a power in NRA, 
and many speculated that there was something im- 
proper about their relationship because she always 
seemed to be at his side. Unwilling to delegate au- 
thority, he tended to run a one-man show and put 
off bureau cratizing the organization of NRA, result- 
ing in low morale and administrative chaos. By the 
late summer of 1934 Roosevelt concluded that 
Johnson had outlasted his usefulness, and at the 
president's request Johnson resigned in September. 
Eight months later the U.S. Supreme Court de- 
clared NRA unconstitutional. 

In March 1935 Johnson became a syndicated 
columnist for the Scipps-Howard newspaper chain. 
Still loyal to the president, he spoke out against Fa- 



530 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



JOHNSON 



LYNDON 



ther Charles Coughlin and Senator Huey P. Long, 
two of Roosevelt's most vocal critics, and in June he 
became temporary director of the newly created 
Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in 
New York City. A massive federal public works pro- 
gram, WPA was intended to provide emergency 
public employment, and in his brief tenure as its 
head Johnson got WPA off to a flying start in New 
York City, hiring more than two hundred thousand 
people before he left the position in October 1935. 

Over the next years Johnson turned against 
Roosevelt and the New Deal. In his columns and 
speeches he questioned the failure to balance the 
budget, charged that anti-business elements had 
too much influence on policy, and warned that 
Roosevelt was concentrating too much power in the 
White House. As war loomed in the late 1930s 
Johnson became an outspoken isolationist, and in 
1940 he supported Wendell Willikie, the Republi- 
can Party candidate for the presidency. Johnson's 
isolationism and attacks on Roosevelt soured his 
relationship with the White House and cost him 
many readers, prompting Scripps-Howard to drop 
his column in 1941. After his column was picked up 
by King Features Syndicate, Johnson continued to 
be unrelenting in his criticism of Roosevelt and his 
policies until the United States entered World War 
II in December 1941. Despite failing health brought 
on by his drinking, Johnson continued with his col- 
umn until his death. 

Johnson's place in history rests on his leader- 
ship of NRA. Under his direction it provided a tem- 
porary psychological stimulus and brought several 
social innovations, like labor's right to organize, to 
the national scene. But ultimately NRA failed to 
spur recovery, floundering on its inability to get the 
various segments of the economy to look beyond 
self-interest and exhibit a concern for the national 
welfare. Johnson contributed to the failure of NRA. 
He was a poor administrator, was too pro-business, 
and let code-making become an end in itself. His 
personal excesses compounded these weaknesses. 
Yet for all of his failings, Johnson's frenzied direc- 
tion of NRA and colorful style made him one of the 
most influential and memorable figures of the early 
New Deal era. 



See Also: NATIONAL RECOVERY ADMINISTRATION 
(NRA); NEW DEAL. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Bellush, Bernard. The Failure of the NRA. 1975. 

Johnson, Hugh S. The Blue Eagle from Egg to Earth. 1935. 

Johnson, Hugh S. Hell-Bent for War. 1941. 

Johnson Papers. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde 
Park, NY. 

Josephson, Matthew. "The General." New Yorker (18 Au- 
gust 1934): 21-25; (25 August 1934): 23-28; and (1 
September 1934): 22-28. 

Martin, George. Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins. 1976. 

Ohl, lohn Kennedy. Hugh S. fohnson and the New Deal. 
1985. 

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. 2: The 
Coming of the New Deal. 1958. 

Schwarz, Jordan A. The New Dealers: Power Politics in the 
Age of Roosevelt. 1993. 

Schwarz, Jordan A. The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in 
Washington, 1917-1965. 1981. 

Vadney, Thomas E. The Wayward Liberal: A Political Biog- 
raphy of Donald Richberg. 1970. 

John Kennedy Ohl 



JOHNSON, LYNDON B. 

Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973) was a con- 
gressional aide, director of the Texas National 
Youth Administration, U.S. congressman, U.S. sen- 
ator, vice president, and president of the United 
States. Reared by his politically active parents for a 
career of public service, Johnson learned early the 
importance of choosing powerful mentors such as 
Sam Rayburn and Franklin Roosevelt. His political 
legacy is mixed: as president, Johnson enacted far- 
reaching civil rights legislation while also further 
miring the nation in the Vietnam War. Johnson's 
political style was pragmatic and activist, for he was 
committed to a reform agenda rooted in New Deal 
economic liberalism. 

After graduating from college, Johnson taught 
briefly in a Mexican-American school in Cotulla, 
Texas, where he observed firsthand the viciousness 
of poverty and segregation. In 1931 his father 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



531 



JOINT COMMITTEE FOR NATIONAL RECOVERY ( J C N R ) 



helped him gain a post as secretary to Congress- 
man Richard Kleberg, a Democrat from south 
Texas. Since Kleberg cared little about the daily du- 
ties of his office, many of the responsibilities of 
managing legislation and constituent concerns fell 
to Johnson, who handled them with aplomb. Fur- 
ther recognition of his political acumen came with 
his leadership of the "little congress," an important 
behind-the-scenes organization of congressional 
aides and Johnson's growing list of older, more 
powerful political confidants. In 1935 he was a ris- 
ing star in the Democratic Party and was tapped by 
President Roosevelt to become the director of the 
National Youth Administration in Texas. In that po- 
sition, Johnson oversaw a successful jobs program 
that included the construction of countless state 
roadside parks; a student aid program that funded 
high school, college, and graduate students; and an 
employment referral service. During his tenure, 
Johnson ensured that African-American and Mexi- 
can-American students received equitable treat- 
ment. 

In 1937, the congressman from Texas's tenth 
district died, opening a seat to be filled in a special 
election. Johnson, a virtual unknown in the district, 
bested a field of nine candidates. His campaign slo- 
gan was "Franklin D. and Lyndon B.," and he pres- 
ented himself as the consummate New Dealer, 
even endorsing Roosevelt's Supreme Court packing 
plan. Once in Congress, Johnson worked hard for 
New Deal issues such as rural electrification. He 
helped bring a series of dams and water projects to 
the lower Colorado River in Texas, completely re- 
making the economics of the Texas Hill Country. 
Johnson's eleven years in Congress were successful, 
and his ambitions and his political talent ultimately 
took him to the White House. 

See Also: DEMOCRATIC PARTY; ELECTION OF 1938; 
NATIONAL YOUTH ADMINISTRATION (NYA). 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Conkin, Paul. Big Daddy from the Pedernales: Lyndon 
Baines Johnson. 1986. 

Dallek, Robert. Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His 
Times, 1908-1960. 1991. 

Lyndon Baines lohnson Papers. Lyndon Baines Johnson 
Presidential Library, Austin, Tex. 



Schwarz, lordan A. The New Dealers: Power Politics in the 
of Roosevelt. 1993. 

Nancy Beck Young 



JOINT COMMITTEE FOR 
NATIONAL RECOVERY (JCNR) 

The Joint Committee for National Recovery (JCNR) 
was the mechanism by which some black activists 
sought to represent a collective black voice on polit- 
ical, economic, and social policies in the New Deal 
era. The JCNR was the brainchild of John P. Davis, 
a graduate of Harvard Law School. 

In 1933 Congress began debating the imple- 
mentation of the National Recovery Administration 
(NRA), one of Franklin Roosevelt's key New Deal 
agencies. The NRA was created to establish codes 
that would promote fair competition and standard- 
ize wages and hours. Davis, along with fellow Har- 
vard graduate student of economics Robert C. Wea- 
ver, noticed that during code hearings Congress 
devoted very little attention to blacks in the work- 
place. Davis and Weaver decided to represent 
blacks' interest on Capitol Hill and formed the 
Negro Industrial League (NIL) in order to highlight 
racial discrimination in the NRA's wage codes. 

The NIL only existed for the summer of 1933 — 
it collapsed when Weaver was recruited into Roose- 
velt's administration as an assistant to Clark Fore- 
man, the race advisor to the Department of the In- 
terior. Many hailed Weaver's appointment as a 
great step forward for black Americans, but Davis 
felt that Foreman had co-opted the work of the 
NIL. Davis remained convinced of the need for a 
group that represented black organizations on Cap- 
itol Hill. By the end of 1933, Davis persuaded the 
National Association for the Advancement of Col- 
ored People (NAACP) to support his plan for the 
JCNR. By December 1933 the JCNR represented 
eighteen organizations. A year later, twenty-four 
organizations considered the JCNR their voice on 
Capitol Hill. Of these twenty-four, however, the 
only major group was the NAACP. The NAACP felt 
that the JCNR could not survive without its support 
and therefore tried to control the group. When 



532 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



ONES 



ESSE 



Davis rejected the NAACP's directives, the NAACP 
withdrew its support, effectively ending the JCNR. 

Before the JCNR disappeared at the end of 
1935, however, it organized a major conference at 
Howard University — "The Position of the Negro in 
Our National Economic Crisis." This conference, in 
the spring of 1935, attracted New Deal administra- 
tors, labor activists, academics, political party lead- 
ers, and laborers from around the country. It re- 
ceived negative press from those who alleged that 
conference organizers promoted communism. In 
truth, many of the conference speakers were highly 
critical of the New Deal's treatment of black Ameri- 
ca, claiming that racial discrimination undercut the 
support that the New Deal policies promised, but 
a congressional investigation after the conference 
found no evidence that attendees advocated a turn 
to communism. Several conference leaders, howev- 
er, did call for a new political organization. Less 
than a year after the JCNR collapsed and the con- 
ference ended, this new organization, the National 
Negro Congress, held its first meeting in Chicago. 
Labor leader A. Philip Randolph was its first presi- 
dent and John P. Davis, still committed to the idea 
of a national umbrella organization dedicated to ar- 
ticulating blacks' collective voice, ran the organiza- 
tion on a day-to-day basis. 

See Also: FOREMAN, CLARK; RACE AND ETHNIC 
RELATIONS; WEAVER ROBERT CLIFTON. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Holloway, lonathan Scott. Confronting the Veil: Abram 
Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 
1919-1941. 2002. 

Kirby, lohn. Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberal- 
ism and Race. 1980. 

Wolters, Raymond. Negroes and the Great Depression: Fhe 
Problem of Economic Recovery. 1970. 



Jonathan Scott Holloway 



JONES, JESSE 



Jesse Holman Jones (April 22, 1874-June 1, 1956) 
was born to a farming family in Robertson County, 
Tennessee. Like so many Tennesseans seeking eco- 



nomic opportunity in the nineteenth century, the 
Jones family headed for Texas, settling in Dallas. 
Blessed with a keen eye for good business deals, 
Jesse Jones attended Hill's Business College in 
order to secure at least a rudimentary knowledge of 
accounting and marketing, and he graduated there 
in 1891. He accepted a job in his uncle's local lum- 
ber business, learning all he could about construc- 
tion and real-estate development. But Jones want- 
ed to be his own boss. Deciding that Houston 
offered a more fertile business climate, he invested 
in real estate and oil and gas properties there. With- 
in a decade he had become one of the city's most 
influential developers, responsible for founding 
Texas Commerce Bank, what later became Exxon, 
and the Houston Chronicle. As chairman of the 
Houston Harbor Board, Jones built the Houston 
Ship Channel, which eventually made the city one 
of the country's busiest ports. 

Jesse Jones also became the most powerful man 
in the state's Democratic Party. During World War 
I, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the 
American Red Cross, and there he became a close 
friend of President Woodrow Wilson. In 1928, 
Jones managed to bring the Democratic national 
convention to Houston. When the nation's banking 
system disintegrated in 1932, President Herbert 
Hoover needed a Democrat on the board of the 
newly-created Reconstruction Finance Corporation 
(RFC), and Jones accepted the appointment. The 
RFC made loans to troubled financial institutions, 
and in 1933 newly-elected President Franklin D. 
Roosevelt selected Jones to chair the RFC. 

During the next twelve years, the RFC became 
the most powerful agency in the federal govern- 
ment, dispensing tens of thousands of loans to 
banks, railroads, savings and loan associations, in- 
surance companies, and private businesses. Be- 
cause Jones was so well connected with the Texas 
congressional delegation and such influential Tex- 
ans as Sam Rayburn, Tom Connally, John Nance 
Garner, and Marvin Jones, and because he could 
deliver so many perquisites to their constituents, he 
became one of the most powerful men in the coun- 
try. And because the RFC operated on a revolving 
loan basis, it always had hundreds of millions of 
dollars in its accounts, money that could be used to 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



533 



ONES 



JESSE 



fund other federal agencies. Between 1932 and 
1940, the RFC dispensed more than $10 billion in 
federal assistance to tens of thousands of business- 
es, prompting one historian to label its work as 
"saving capitalism." At one point during the Great 
Depression years, Jesse Jones, by presiding over the 
RFC and the money it tunneled to other agencies, 
had substantial influence on numerous federal 
agencies, including the Federal Relief Administra- 
tion, the Public Works Administration, the Works 
Progress Administration, the Federal Deposit In- 
surance Corporation, the Tennessee Valley Author- 
ity, and the Rural Electrification Administration. 

When World War II erupted, and the federal 
budget grew geometrically, Jones, as the man who 
headed the RFC, the so-called "Fourth Branch of 
Government," virtually presided over the econo- 
my's shift to wartime production. Congress created 
and placed under RFC control the Rubber Reserve 
Company, the Metals Reserve Company, the Unit- 
ed States Commercial Company, the Petroleum 
Reserve Company, the Defense Plant Corporation, 



the Defense Supplies Corporation, and the Smaller 
War Plants Corporation. More than $40 billion 
passed through Jones's hands during World War II. 
It's no wonder that journalists often referred to 
Roosevelt as "Mr. President" and Jesse Jones as 
"The Czar." When the war ended, Jones retired to 
Houston to manage his real-estate empire and to 
engage in philanthropic activities. He died there in 
1956. 

See Also: RECONSTRUCTION FINANCE 
CORPORATION (RFC). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Jones, lesse H. Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with 
the RFC (1932-1945). 1951. 

Olson, lames S. Herbert Hoover and the Reconstruction Fi- 
nance Corporation, 1931-1933. 1977. 

Olson, James S. Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Fi- 
nance Corporation and the New Deal, 1933-1940. 
1988. 

Timmons, Bascom. Jesse H. Jones: The Man and the States- 
man. 1956. 

James S. Olson 



534 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 




KAISER, HENRY 



Henry John Kaiser (May 9, 1882-August 24, 1967) 
became a national figure through involvement in 
New Deal public-works projects and wartime de- 
fense contracts. Initially a salesman in New York 
and Spokane, Washington, Kaiser was a small- 
scale contractor on highway projects in western 
Canada and then California during the 1920s. Kai- 
ser's business was transformed by major public- 
works contracts, beginning with the Six Companies 
consortium of western construction firms that won 
the Hoover (Boulder) Dam contract in 1931. The 
immense project required effective coordination of 
a large workforce in hazardous conditions, major 
investments in raw material supplies, and the con- 
struction of Boulder City. Kaiser was the consor- 
tium's key link to politicians, officials, and insiders 
in Washington, D.C., during the bidding phase, and 
he later maintained support and confidence during 
the lengthy construction phase. Kaiser was a prime 
example of a "government entrepreneur" and a 
model for positive working relationships between 
business and the government during the New Deal 
era. Further public-works contracts followed the 
Hoover Dam. When unsuccessful in bidding for the 
prime contract for the Shasta Dam in northern Cali- 
fornia in 1938, Kaiser won contracts to supply ce- 



ment for the project, establishing Permanente Ce- 
ment. 

During World War II, Kaiser's contacts and am- 
bition resulted in spectacular diversification into 
shipbuilding, steel manufacturing, and the produc- 
tion of magnesium and aluminium. All were major 
elements in western economic development, in 
which federal support and contacts, including Re- 
construction Finance Corporation loans, were fun- 
damental. Kaiser's public profile attained great 
heights, aided by his own attention to public rela- 
tions and by regular and favorable coverage in 
Henry Luce's Time/Life media during the 1940s. In 
1944 Roosevelt even considered Kaiser as a poten- 
tial vice-presidential running mate. Kaiser's con- 
struction companies maintained a tough relation- 
ship with workers and unions, but beginning with 
the Grand Coulee contract in 1938 Kaiser adopted 
more liberal views on collective bargaining. The 
Grand Coulee project included a medical-care plan, 
and similar provisions were made for Kaiser's ship- 
yard workers during the war. After 1945 the health- 
care plan developed into the Kaiser Permanente 
Medical Care Program, which proved his most du- 
rable business. By contrast, a postwar venture into 
car manufacturing via the Kaiser-Frazer company 
was short-lived. 

Kaiser's achievements depended on effective 
networking to negotiate the complex but lucrative 



535 



KENNEDY 



S E P H 



challenges of federal contracting. Moreover, his 
greatest achievements were in projects that fulfilled 
the goals of key New Deal policymakers, whether 
in public works, defence contracts, or efforts to in- 
crease competition in monopolistic industries. 

See Also: GRAND COULEE PROJECT. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Adams, Stephen B. Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The 
Rise of a Government Entrepreneur. 1997. 

Foster, Mark S. "Giant of the West: Henry J. Kaiser and 
Regional Industrialization, 1930-1950." Business 
History Review 59 (1985): 1-23. 

Foster, Mark S. "Prosperity's Prophet: Henry J. Kaiser 
and the Consumer/Suburban Culture, 1930-1950." 
Western Historical Quarterly 17 (1986): 165-184. 

Foster, Mark S. Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern 
American West. 1989. 

Kaiser, Henry J. Papers. Bancroft Library, University of 
California, Berkeley. 

Michael French 



KENNEDY, JOSEPH P. 

Joseph Patrick Kennedy (September 6, 1888- 
November 19, 1969) amassed enormous personal 
wealth as a businessman and became both the first 
chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commis- 
sion (SEC) and the first Irish-American Catholic to 
be U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. 

Kennedy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, 
into an Irish-American family active in the local 
Democratic Party. After an education at Boston 
Latin School and Harvard University, he began a 
successful business career. In 1914, at age twenty- 
five, he became the country's youngest bank presi- 
dent, heading the Columbia Trust Company. After 
a brief period in shipbuilding during World War I, 
he joined Hayden, Stone and Company, where he 
developed expertise in stock dealing. In 1922, he 
began to speculate in the stock market full-time, 
quickly proving himself an exceptional corporate 
predator and a skilled manipulator of Wall Street. 
Kennedy portrayed himself as both talented and 
lucky, but questionable ethics assisted his progress. 



The Bostonian mastered the use of inside informa- 
tion, participated in stock pools, and often sold 
short, earning money from falls in stock prices. 
Kennedy also invested in the film industry, creating 
the famous Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) corpora- 
tion. Most accept that Kennedy also gleaned sub- 
stantial profits from liquor trading during the prohi- 
bition years, a process that demanded dealings with 
organized crime syndicates. By the mid-1920s, 
Kennedy's fortune was estimated at $2 million. This 
wealth not only survived the Wall Street crash, as 
Kennedy sold long-term holdings beforehand, but 
was enhanced as he sold short to profit from the 
crisis. 

By 1931, Kennedy had entered politics by con- 
tributing to Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign cof- 
fers and collecting donations from businessmen 
who wished to remain anonymous. Arguably, Ken- 
nedy also helped Roosevelt secure the 1932 Demo- 
cratic Party nomination; by scaring his friend, 
William Randolph Hearst, with tales that interna- 
tionalist Newton D. Baker might be nominated, 
Kennedy persuaded the influential Hearst to sup- 
port Roosevelt. 

In 1934, Roosevelt appointed Kennedy to the 
SEC. The new commission was designed to regu- 
late the worst corporate excesses, but conservatives 
feared development of an anti-business agency. 
Kennedy's appointment proved a masterstroke. 
Portraying the SEC as improving conditions for 
business, Kennedy bolstered investor confidence, 
particularly by emphasizing negotiation and self- 
enforcement over federal coercion. He established 
an effective administrative system, with excellent 
staff, and won respect from all quarters. Quickly 
bored, Kennedy resigned in 1935. Roosevelt, 
though, retained his ally, appointing Kennedy the 
first chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission 
in 1936. 

Kennedy assisted the president beyond fund- 
raising and winning business support for New Deal 
measures. His friendship with Hearst proved use- 
ful, and Kennedy also managed to temper the anti- 
Roosevelt rhetoric of radio demagogue Father 
Charles Coughlin. Yet, tensions developed between 
Roosevelt and Kennedy. Kennedy's successes, 
helped by his penchant for self-publicity, won press 



536 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



KERR 



FLORENCE 



attention. Reflecting Kennedy's own ambitions, 
coverage emphasized Kennedy's presidential po- 
tential. When Kennedy resigned from the Maritime 
Commission in 1937, and pressured Roosevelt to 
appoint him ambassador to Great Britain, the presi- 
dent obliged. Roosevelt took the opportunity to 
maneuver a rival out of Washington before the 1940 
election. 

Kennedy's tenure as ambassador earned him 
notoriety. In 1938, the threat of Adolf Hitler's Ger- 
many loomed large. Kennedy worried that war 
would jeopardize economic progress. Overlooking 
the moral issues, he searched for accommodation 
with the Nazis. Even as appeasement failed, Ken- 
nedy made pro-German statements and advocated 
U.S. neutrality. His claim that Britain lacked the will 
and weaponry to resist German power upset his 
hosts. Furthermore, Kennedy's position contrasted 
with Roosevelt's growing internationalism. The 
ambassador appeared ready to endorse isolationist 
Republican Wendell Willkie in the 1940 presiden- 
tial election. However, on returning to the United 
States, Kennedy met with Roosevelt. While histori- 
ans debate the deal agreed to, or blackmail em- 
ployed, Kennedy endorsed Roosevelt's candidacy 
two days later. 

Shortly after the election, Kennedy blundered. 
His statement that "democracy is all finished in En- 
gland ... it may be here" drew overwhelmingly 
negative public reaction. Amid the subsequent 
furor, Kennedy and Roosevelt met again. No record 
of the ten-minute meeting remains, but it left Roo- 
sevelt furious. Kennedy resigned the ambassador- 
ship in early 1941. Loathed for his defeatism and 
estranged from his former ally, Kennedy never held 
political office again. Instead, he groomed his sons 
for political success, seeing his son, John F. Kenne- 
dy, become president in 1961. 

See Also: HEARST, WILLIAM RANDOLPH; 
PROHIBITION. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Beschloss, Michael R. Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy 
Alliance. 1980. 

De Bedts, Ralph F. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, 
1938-1940: An Anatomy of Appeasement. 1985. 

Kennedy, loseph P. Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Jo- 
seph P. Kennedy, edited by Amanda Smith. 2001. 



Kessler, Ronald. The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy 
and the Dynasty He Founded. 1996. 

Whalen, Richard J. The Founding Father: The Story of Jo- 
seph P. Kennedy. 1964. 

Ion Herbert 



KERR, FLORENCE 

Florence Stewart Kerr (June 30, 1890-July 29, 1974), 
women's relief work administrator, was born in 
Harriman, Tennessee, but was early moved to Mar- 
shalltown, Iowa. She graduated in 1913 from Grin- 
nell College where both she and her classmate 
Harry Hopkins were students of George Herron, a 
teacher of Applied Christianity. She was teaching 
English at Grinnell in 1930 when she was named a 
member of Iowa's Unemployment Relief Council. 
At the creation of the Works Progress Administra- 
tion (WPA) Hopkins had her appointed as one of 
five (later seven) regional directors of the WPA 
Women's and Professional Division with head- 
quarters in Chicago from which she supervised re- 
lief work activities in thirteen midwestern states. 
The most extensive of the projects she supervised 
were sewing and library projects for women, but 
she also oversaw work by men and women em- 
ployed by the white-collar Federal Art, Music, The- 
ater, and Writers' Projects. 

Kerr was viewed as the strongest of the regional 
supervisors and, as a longtime associate of Hop- 
kins, she was named in December 1938 to replace 
Ellen S. Woodward as WPA assistant administrator 
for the Women's and Professional Projects (WPP). 
She assumed those duties early in 1939 at a time 
when executive reorganization reconstituted the 
WPA as the Work Projects Administration under 
the new Federal Security Agency. She faced diffi- 
culties stemming from successive budget cuts and 
the necessity to adapt toward defense preparedness 
almost all of the work projects within her division. 
For example, library programs were created for the 
armed forces and defense-impacted area, and sew- 
ing projects produced parachutes and sandbags. 
She managed to retain most of the community- 
centered and institutional service aspects of the 



ENCYCLOPEDIA 01 THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



537 



KEYNES 



JOHN 



M A Y N A R D 



women's program that were showcased in 1940 in 
a nationwide "This Work Pays Your Community" 
promotion touted by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. 
Kerr especially defended before congressional com- 
mittees nursery and daycare centers as vital for 
mothers engaged in defense work. Many of the 
women's projects remained until final liquidation of 
the WPA in 1943. 

From 1944 until her resignation from govern- 
ment at the war's end, Kerr directed the war service 
program of the Federal Works Agency. She then 
became an executive with Northwest Airlines, 
based in Minneapolis. In the mid-1950s she re- 
signed and returned to Washington where she 
died. 

See Also: ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR; WOMEN, IMPACT 
OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Florence Kerr interview (July 29, 1974), Columbia Oral 
History Collection, New York. 

Obituary, Washington Post, July 10, 1975. 

Record Group 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 

Swain, Martha H. Ellen S. Woodward; New Deal Advocate 
for Women.1995. 

Martha H. Swain 



KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD 

John Maynard Keynes (June 5, 1883-April 21, 1946) 
was a brilliant, colorful, and outspoken English 
economist whose General Theory of Employment, In- 
terest, and Money (1936) provided the academic ra- 
tionale for governmental use of a compensatory fis- 
cal policy in countering the peaks and valleys of 
economic cycles. Keynes was born in Cambridge; 
his father, John Neville Keynes, was a noted philos- 
opher and economist, and his mother, Florence 
Ada Keynes, was mayor of the city. 

John Maynard Keynes was educated at the fin- 
est British schools, Eton and then King's College, 
Cambridge, becoming in his youth a part of the 
Bloomsbury Group, which consisted of a dozen 
privileged aesthetes, including Virginia Woolf, Lyt- 



ton Strachey, and Clive Bell. Unsettled as to metier, 
Keynes took a position with the Foreign Service, 
but soon tired of his assignment at the India desk. 

In 1915 Keynes joined the British Treasury staff, 
distinguishing himself in the effort to manage na- 
tional financing of World War I. He gained interna- 
tional fame as a key member of the British delega- 
tion to the Paris Peace Conference during the 
drafting of the Versailles treaty in 1918 and 1919. 
Deeply concerned about the vindictive peace treaty 
and the impossible level of reparations imposed on 
Germany, he published in 1919 The Economic Con- 
sequences of the Peace, a book sharply critical of the 
treaty and the heads of state who drafted it. 

Keynes continued to write and offer advice on 
public economic issues during the 1920s, publish- 
ing at the end of the decade what he considered to 
be his magnum opus, the two-volume A Treatise on 
Money (1930). Critics noted that it failed to address 
adequately key economic issues of the time, includ- 
ing especially the relationship between production, 
employment, and money. Keynes immediately 
began to address the criticism through another 
project, which became his General Theory. 

Deeply concerned about the economic crisis of 
the 1930s, Keynes quickly became persuaded of the 
wrong-headedness of the widely held business 
cycle theory of the time that advised policy makers 
to let "natural" adjustment of money supply and 
interest rates ameliorate the crisis without govern- 
mental intervention. In Keynes's view, when times 
were so bad that potential investors were unwilling 
to borrow and initiate new enterprises, even with 
interest rates near zero, the government should 
step in and stimulate demand by borrowing and in- 
vesting. Keynes advocated these views in an open 
letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt published in the New 
York Times on December 31, 1933, and in a meeting 
with the president in June 1934. Yet, neither the let- 
ter, the meeting with the president, nor the publica- 
tion of the General Theory were significant in shap- 
ing New Deal economic policy. When, during the 
recession of 1937 to 1938, Roosevelt's advisors 
moved him toward acceptance of a rationale for a 
compensatory fiscal policy, they did so principally 
on the basis of their independently-derived obser- 
vations and experience. 



538 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



KEYNES 



A N 



ECONOMICS 



Though Keynes had little direct influence upon 
New Deal policy formation, his General Theory pro- 
vided the most coherent after-the-fact academic 
explanation for the crisis and recovery of the 1930s 
and 1940s, and it became the foundation of postwar 
economic policies and perspectives. In 1944 Keynes 
was the chief British Treasury representative at the 
Bretton Woods Conference held in New Hamp- 
shire to provide a foundation for the postwar world 
economy. His influence there helped in the design 
and establishment of the World Bank and the Inter- 
national Monetary Fund. 

Keynes was knighted in 1942; his ideas, as in- 
terpreted against the backdrop of the Great De- 
pression, informed a generation of economic think- 
ers and made him the best-known economist of the 
twentieth century. 

See Also: ECONOMISTS; KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Keynes, lohn Maynard. Essays in Persuasion. 1932. 

Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as 



Savior 1920-1937. 1992. 



Dean L. May 



KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS 

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was a brilliant, 
well-born British economist who during the Great 
Depression laid the foundations for an alternative 
to classical economics, which dominated economic 
thought and policy in the Western democracies 
from the late 1930s through the end of the century. 
In the public mind, Keynes is most commonly 
thought of as offering the rationale for a compensa- 
tory fiscal policy to regulate the swings of economic 
cycles. The centrality of his thought is underscored 
by the efforts of scholars only in the last decade of 
the twentieth century to evolve what they call a 
post-Keynesian economics. 

In the conclusion to his General Theory of Em- 
ployment, Interest, and Money (1936) Keynes main- 
tained that "the ideas of economists and political 
philosophers, both when they are right and when 



they are wrong, are more powerful than is com- 
monly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by lit- 
tle else." The twists and turns in the story of the role 
of Keynesian economics during the Great Depres- 
sion and its enduring connection to that crisis in the 
public mind are fascinating and revealing. 

Though he became well-known early in the 
century through his critique of the Treaty of Ver- 
sailles and considered his major work to be his two 
volume A Treatise on Money (1930), Keynes is best 
known for his General Theory, an uncharacteristical- 
ly turgid and poorly organized tome that explained 
in highly theoretical language how a calamity such 
as the Great Depression could have happened and 
what policies governments might employ in coun- 
tering the extremes of business cycles. 

From the beginning of his career Keynes was 
keenly interested in the practical world and quick 
to offer advice to politicians and public officials. He 
did so frequently and eloquently during the 1920s 
and the Great Depression. He was particularly con- 
cerned about the state of the American economy, 
which seemed more fragile than the British econo- 
my and which was more sharply affected by the 
stock market crash of 1929. 

In April 1931 Keynes made a radio address to 
the people of the United States, warning that busi- 
nessmen and financiers were too optimistic and 
that the Depression could easily last another five 
years. A month later he came to the United States 
to deliver a lecture at the University of Chicago in 
which he argued that in the United States regula- 
tion of credit would be more effective than public 
works spending in countering the Depression. In 
December 1933 Keynes wrote for the New York 
Times a somewhat condescending open letter to 
President Franklin Roosevelt, warning him to avoid 
such reform measures as those undertaken by the 
National Recovery Administration, that, as Keynes 
saw it, were shaking business confidence and thus 
impeding recovery. In June 1934 Keynes came to 
the United States again, this time meeting person- 
ally with Roosevelt, presenting calculations on the 
level of spending needed to achieve recovery. Ac- 
counts of the meeting suggest that the two were 
mutually unimpressed. 

Clearly, advice from Keynes was abundant. Yet 
hardly anyone formulating policy at the time was 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



539 



K E Y N E S I A N 



ECONOMICS 



listening. Nevertheless, the essential components 
of both his analytical framework and policy recom- 
mendations were developed independently by ad- 
ministration officials, especially presidential advi- 
sors Stuart Chase and Harry L. Hopkins, several of 
their staff, and Reserve Board Chairman Marriner 
S. Eccles. All drew from their practical experience, 
the work of a broad range of economists and advi- 
sors, and most importantly, all were pressed by an 
imperative to respond to the obvious human needs 
that the crisis engendered. As Eccles later put it, 
"we came out at about the same place in economic 
thought and policy by very different roads." Thus, 
one might be understandably suspicious of 
Keynes's conclusion concerning the ideas of aca- 
demics that "the world is ruled by little else." 

Nonetheless, Keynesian economics ultimately 
became, in the minds of some, almost synonymous 
with the New Deal. Why so? Because Keynes of- 
fered a powerful theoretical analysis of the eco- 
nomic conditions underlying the crisis of the 1930s 
at precisely the moment when Western democra- 
cies were desperately in need of an authoritative 
and coherent explanation of the Depression, and of 
hope that there was a way out consistent with their 
ideology. 

Of initial concern was the duration and depth 
of the Depression. Prevailing business cycle theory, 
offered by eminent scholars such as Jacob Viner and 
Wesley C. Mitchell, proposed that cycles were an 
inevitable, even necessary, part of the progression 
of capitalist economies. During downturns the de- 
cline in prices, wages, and interest rates would 
reach a point where investors could not resist the 
potential profits these conditions offered and would 
start borrowing, investing, and propelling the econ- 
omy back onto an upward trajectory. Similarly, in 
upturns, high prices, wages, and interest rates 
would restrict investment and lead to a downturn. 
The implication for policy was that governments 
should intervene as little as possible and let "natu- 
ral" forces right the economy in their own due time. 
Yet during the Great Depression the downturn 
went deeper and lasted longer than anyone had 
imagined, and still no "natural" forces were leading 
to recovery. It seemed that the economy might not 
be self-correcting and could reach equilibrium at le- 



vels far below full employment and adequate living 
standards. 

The use of public works to offer jobs to the un- 
employed and build public infrastructures at mini- 
mal cost had become legitimized during the 1920s. 
Herbert Hoover had implemented such programs 
before leaving office and the policy was continued 
in the New Deal under Harold Ickes's Public Works 
Administration. Yet federal spending for relief was 
regarded by both Hoover and Roosevelt as an expe- 
dient to mitigate suffering, a galling necessity (and 
hence a symbol) of bad times. It was difficult for 
them to accept spending, other than on well- 
planned and needed public works, as a deliberate 
and continuing instrument of economic policy. 
Moreover, how could one reasonably argue that tax 
money given back to taxpayers, who would have 
spent it had the government not taken it in taxes, 
could provide a stimulus to the economy? 

These concerns could be pushed to the back- 
ground as long as there seemed to be progress, 
however halting, towards recovery. But when the 
recession of 1937 struck, the nation was faced with 
not a Hoover but a "Roosevelt Recession," which 
had to be addressed. The domestic political impli- 
cations were clear to New Dealers, but so also were 
the implications for the worldwide ideological 
struggle among fascism, communism, and liberal 
democracy. 

As the recession deepened during the winter of 
1937 and 1938 there were widespread complaints 
in the press that the administration was adrift and 
had no coherent policy, a criticism that could justly 
be applied to the various pragmatic, need-driven 
programs of the early New Deal. Secretary of the 
Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., urged a return to 
a balanced budget. Eccles, Hopkins, and others 
urged a resumption of spending. The president fi- 
nally resumed spending, but only after being pres- 
ented with arguments that the policy was consis- 
tent with American historical experience and with 
liberalism, and that the resulting growth would 
bring in enough to pay back the deficits incurred. 

That decision was announced in April 1938. By 
August there were clear signs of recovery and it was 
assumed by all that the renewed spending program 
had caused the recovery. But by the time the reces- 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF I H E GREAT DEPRESSION 



KEYNES 



A N 



ECONOMICS 



sion struck, the General Theory was being read and 
avidly embraced by young American economists 
within and outside of the administration. Several 
addressed the recession crisis by restating Keynes's 
ideas in a brief, accessible manifesto, An Economic 
Program for American Democracy, published in No- 
vember 1938. The book was, in effect, a simplified, 
policy-oriented, Americanized distillate of Keynes's 
General Theory. It immediately became a best seller. 
Eccles was so impressed with its argument that he 
used his personal funds to buy copies for every 
member of the U.S. Congress. The Washington Star 
called it "the first authentic attempt to tell compact- 
ly and in simple language the complete economic 
and social ideology of the New Deal." The Boston 
Globe concluded that "for the first time the effects 
of haphazard spending and investment policies of 
the New Deal are dispassionately analyzed and 
given academic sanction." 

Of course, as economists and other policy mak- 
ers were beginning to understand, the base of that 
academic sanction was Keynes's General Theory. In 
it Keynes provided elaborate explanations for why 
it was possible for the economy to reach equilibri- 
um at levels well below full employment. His analy- 
sis of "liquidity preference" explained that in some 
circumstances potential investors might wish to re- 
tain rather than invest their resources. Thus, con- 
trary to classical economic theory, interest rates 
could fall to zero without attracting new invest- 
ment. His description of the "propensity to con- 
sume" explained what proportion of incomes citi- 
zens would, under various circumstances, re-inject 
into the economy through consumption. His "mul- 
tiplier" concept borrowed from economist R. F. 
Kahn to offer clearer answers to the question of 
how much stimulus would be given by a specific 
amount of public investment as it moved through 
the economy. The multiplier concept offered the 
possibility of predicting levels of increased econom- 
ic activity and tax yields, and thus assurance that an 
invigorated economy could eventually pay the defi- 
cits such investment created. 

None of these ideas appeared early enough in 
analytical form to affect New Deal policy, including 
even the resumption of spending in 1938. They did, 
however, as the Boston Globe reporters understood, 



provide academic sanction and legitimization of 
that policy. Informed observers quickly came to 
conflate Keynesian economics and the later New 
Deal. As Eccles put it, New Deal policies, now bol- 
stered by Keynes's academic sanction, offered 
"some assurance that we can go forward in the fu- 
ture." 

Keynes, the economic theorist, had little direct 
influence on the formulation of policy. The world, 
in fact, was ruled by others. But his work suggested 
that the United States was on the right path and 
thus brought hope and promise to a generation of 
young academics disheartened by the ideological 
choices that leaders of Italy, Germany, Spain, and 
Japan had made in their efforts to cope with the 
Great Depression. As the United States spiraled 
into recession in 1937, Western civilization seemed 
to hang in the balance. And in the minds of those 
persuaded by Keynes, the "academic scribbler," by 
explaining what was happening, had tipped that 
balance in the direction of the liberal democracies. 
Having thus grasped a hand of rescue at so critical 
a time, it is understandable that over six decades 
later Keynesian economics continued to be the pre- 
dominant paradigm for economic thought and pol- 
icy in much of the world, including even most so- 
cieties that had once embraced fascism and 
Marxism. 

See Also: ECONOMISTS; KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Feis, Herbert. The Fiscal Revolution in America. 1969. 

Hamouda, O. F., and B. B. Price, eds. Keynesianism and 
the Keynesian Revolution in America: A Memorial Vol- 
ume in Honour of Lorie Tarshis. 1998. 

May, Dean L. From New Deal to New Economics: The 
American Liberal Response to the Recession of 1937. 
1981. 

Pasinetti, Luigi L., and Bertram Schefold, eds. The Impact 
of Keynes on Economics in the 20th Century. 1999. 

Wells, Paul, ed. Post-Keynesian Economic Theory. 1995. 

Dean L. May 



ENCYCLOPEDIA E THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



5tl 



K E Y S E R L I N G 



LEON 



KEYSERLING, LEON 



Leon Hirsch Keyserling (January 22, 1908-August 
9, 1987) was a leading New Deal economic and 
legal adviser. After working briefly in the Agricul- 
tural Adjustment Administration (AAA), he served 
as Senator Robert F. Wagner's chief legislative aide 
from 1933 to 1937. From 1937 until 1946, Keyser- 
ling was the general counsel for federal housing au- 
thorities. His last government appointment was as 
a member of President Harry S. Truman's Council 
of Economic Advisers (CEA). 

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of 
Jewish immigrants, Keyserling graduated from Co- 
lumbia University in New York in 1928 and re- 
ceived a law degree from Harvard University in 
Massachusetts in 1931. He returned to Columbia 
for graduate work in economics with institutional 
economist Rexford Tugwell. Keyserling soon fol- 
lowed Tugwell to Washington, working first for the 
AAA and then for Wagner. In helping to draft the 
1935 National Labor Relations Act, also called the 
Wagner Act, Keyserling incorporated a purchasing 
power rationale into its preamble. In addition to 
quelling industrial unrest, the Wagner Act sought 
to restore equality of bargaining between employ- 
ers and employees so that workers could bargain 
for higher wages that would in turn sustain con- 
sumer demand. A strong labor movement could co- 
ordinate wages and profits to bring about economic 
recovery and prevent a return of economic decline. 
Keyserling believed that only trade unions orga- 
nized by industry with majority representation 
could serve as an effective check on corporate 
power. Having seen the failures of the labor provi- 
sions in section 7a of the National Industrial Recov- 
ery Act, Keyserling sought to insure that the Wag- 
ner Act endowed workers with sufficient rights to 
representation on the shop floor and created the 
National Labor Relations Board to enforce those 
rights. 

In addition to the maldistribution of income, 
the other major problem that Keyserling and other 
New Dealers saw was the failure of the heavy goods 
industry, which was responsible for so much unem- 
ployment. The Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 
1937, which Keyserling helped to draft, was intend- 



ed to help stimulate the production of durable 
goods by giving a boost to home construction. After 
its passage, Keyserling used his authority as the 
general counsel for the United States Housing Au- 
thority to lobby for increased federal spending and 
government insured loans for home construction. 

In 1940, Keyserling married Mary Dublin, exec- 
utive secretary of the National Consumers' League. 
At the end of the war, Keyserling helped to draft the 
Employment Act of 1946 to commit the govern- 
ment to maintaining maximum employment, pro- 
duction, and purchasing power. The Act created the 
CEA, on which Keyserling served until 1953, first as 
vice-chairman and then as chairman. In the post- 
war period, Keyserling continued to support a vig- 
orous labor movement as the way to redistribute 
national income and sustain economic growth. In 
the 1960s, he emerged as a leading critic of the 
Kennedy era tax cuts, arguing that they ignored 
fundamental questions of income distribution. 

See Also: INCOME DISTRIBUTION; NATIONAL 
LABOR RELATIONS ACT OF 1935 (WAGNER 
ACT). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Flash, Edward S., Ir. Economic Advice and Presidential 
Leadership: The Council of Economic Advisers. 1965. 

Irons, Peter. The New Deal Lawyers. 1982. 

Louchheim, Katie, ed. The Making of the New Deal: The 
Insiders Speak. 1984. 

Meg Tacobs 



KRISTALLNACHT 

Kristallnacht was the first massive, government- 
endorsed, violent action against Jews in Nazi Ger- 
many's Third Reich. It occurred on the night of No- 
vember 9/10, 1938, and its name, German for "crys- 
tal night," stems from the enormous amount of 
broken glass that covered the streets the following 
morning. 

The violence was precipitated by the govern- 
ment's decision to round up fifteen thousand Polish 
Jews in Germany late in October 1938, even though 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



K R I S T A L L N A C H T 




Pedestrians in Berlin pass by the shattered window of a Jewish-owned shop that was destroyed in November 1938 during 
Kristallnacht. National Archives and Records Administration, Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo 
Archives 



it knew that the Polish government was not willing 
to grant them entrance visas. The family of Her- 
schel Grynszpan, a Polish youth living in Paris, was 
among those left in a precarious situation on the 
border between Germany and Poland. In retalia- 
tion, Grynszpan assassinated Ernst vom Rath, the 
Third Secretary at Germany's embassy in Paris. 
Vom Rath died in the afternoon of November 9, 
and the news reached Adolf Hitler that evening, 
which was the anniversary of his attempt to over- 
throw the Weimar Republic in 1923. Hitler met 
with his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, and 
soon thereafter orders to wreak havoc on Jews were 



given to the Nazi paramilitary force, the Sturm- 
abteilung, or SA. 

This night resulted in widespread destruction of 
Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. The SA 
also took action against spiritual objects as they 
forced rabbis and other Jews to desecrate the Torah 
and to stand inside of synagogues and read from 
Mein Kampf. The SA smashed windows and set 
buildings ablaze. Over one hundred Jews were 
killed in this night of violence. The SA, assisted by 
Schutzstaffel (SS) troops, also engaged in the first 
major round-up of German Jews. They seized ap- 
proximately 25,000 Jewish men and placed them in 



ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION 



5U 



K R 



5 T A L L N A C 



the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, 
and Sachsenhausen. The attacks on the Jewish 
communities of Germany resulted in the destruc- 
tion of over two hundred synagogues and more 
than seven thousand Jewish-owned businesses. 
The Third Reich declared that the Jewish communi- 
ties had to pay a fine in the amount of one billion 
reichsmarks as punishment. 

While many Jews had earlier believed that 
Hitler would eventually be taken out of power, 
Kristallnacht signaled a different kind of Germany, 
one that threatened their lives directly. The push to 
emigrate intensified, but would-be emigrants faced 
many barriers. The Third Reich blocked their bank 
accounts, and countries would not accept immi- 
grants who could not provide for themselves. In 
1939, 185,000 Jews emigrated, but often they could 
only obtain entrance visas for another European 
country. Once the German occupation of Western 
Europe began in 1940, they were back under the 
control of the Third Reich, and many of these refu- 
gees were shipped to killing centers in the east dur- 
ing the Holocaust. 

In response to the pogrom, on November 15 
President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that he 
had taken the unusual step of recalling the Ameri- 



can ambassador to Germany for consultation. Roo- 
sevelt stated that the recent events in Germany had 
shocked him, but reiterated that additional visas 
would not be made available for Jewish refugees. 
Within the week, however, Roosevelt did agree to 
extend the visas of approximately 14,000 Jews who 
had entered on tourist visas until they had fulfilled 
citizenship requirements. One of the Jews who 
benefited from this decision was Albert Einstein. 

See Also: ANTI-SEMITISM; EUROPE, GREAT 
DEPRESSION IN; HITLER, ADOLF. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Abzug, Robert H. America Views the Holocaust, 1933- 
1945: A Brief Documentary Reader. 1999. 

Kaplan, Marion. Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life 
in Nazi Germany. 1996. 

Pehle, Walter, ed. November 1938: From "Reichskristall- 
nacht" to Genocide, translated by William Templer. 
1991. 

Thalmann, Rita, and Emmanuel Feinermann. Crystal 
Night: 9-10 November 1938, translated by Gilles Cre- 
monesi. 1974. 

Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 
1932-1945, translated by Ina Friedman and Haya 
Galai. 1991. 

Laura J. Hilton 



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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION