Transcript Week5_NewDeal

The United States from 1914 to 1945
The New Deal, 1932-1938
• Safety net:

Direct government emergency support to people in
trouble.
Works Progress Administration; Civilian Conservation
Corps
• Stability:

Regulatory institutions that protect the capitalist
system from its own worst impulses
Emergency Banking Act; Security and Exchange Commission
• Security:

Long term programs that provide economic security
to working and middle-class people
Social Security; The National Labor Relations Act
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Private Sector supporters of the
New Deal
• Consumer products sector
• Western developers (Henry
Kaiser)
• Old WWI War Industries Board
executives (Bernard Baruch)
• RCA and radio station owners
• The telecommunications
industry (AT&T) and anti-antitrust movement
• Big agriculture
Henry Kaiser of
Kaiser Aluminum
FDR
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Emergency Banking Act, 1933
• Vastly increases the
Reconstruction Finance
Corporation’s pot of money
• Federal Government issues
“fiscal conservators” for banks
to make sure they’re running
competently
• Creates Security and Exchange
Commission to oversee the
stock exchange
• Creates rules that separate
savings banks from brokerage
houses
• Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation, guaranteeing
savings up to $5,000
Nervous bankers in 1933 standing on Wall Street
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Glass-Steagal Act of 1933
• Banks can’t
affiliate with
brokerage firms.
• Banks can’t pack
their boards with
stockbrokers.
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Security and Exchange
Commission
• Public companies
must publish
budget, officers
and their financial
backgrounds
• Must have their
companies
audited
Joe “I’ll drink to that” Kennedy, first
Chair of the SEC
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Federal Emergency Relief
Administration (FERA), 1933
• Millions of dollars for
direct emergency
relief to the poor
• matching grants for
state poor relief
• power to take over
state relief systems if
they’re corrupt or
stingy
Harry Hopkins, FERA
administrator
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Civil Works Administration,
1933
• Half a million state highways upgraded
• Hundreds of bridges laid
• schools, courthouses, city halls, libraries,
zoos, sewage plants, heating plants, police
stations, hospitals, jails, state capitol
buildings went up
• Almost 500 new airports built
• 250,000 outdoor bathrooms constructed
along the nation’s roads
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Public Works Administration, 1933
•
•
•
•
•
•
583 municipal water systems
368 street and highway projects
622 sewage systems
263 hospitals
522 schools
including replacements for the great Long Beach
earthquake of 1933
• You’re welcome
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Let’s plant trees: Civilian
Conservation Corps, 1933
• Homeless boys recruited
by Labor Department to
plant trees
• Housed by War
Department
• Supervised by Interior
Department through the
National Parks Service
• Put three million idle
youngsters to work by
1942
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Tammany Hall and Mayor
Jimmy Walker of New York;
FDR and James Curley of
Boston
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Dawes Act, 1887
“Kill the Indian to save the man.”
• Privatization of
reservation land
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1881 Indians held
155,000,000 acres
1890 they held 104,000,000
1900 they held 77,000,000
Indian Reorganization Act
1934 • Repealed the Dawes Act
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John Collier
Allowed communal landholdings
Organized self governing tribes with power of
self-incorporation
Gave tribes right to ignore the act.
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The National Industrial
Recovery Act, 1933
• Created the National Recovery
Administration (NRA)
• Established production codes
for each industry to eliminate
wasteful competition and to
establish labor standards
• Created boards consisting of
businesspeople, labor leaders and
consumers
•Section 7(a) gave workers the
right to organize
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Agricultural Adjustment Act
• Subsection of the Farm Relief
Act of 1933
• Paid farmers not to produce
crops, meat, and dairy
products
• Hoped that this would
stabilize (increase) prices
• Put thousands of farm hands
out of work
The United States from 1914 to 1945
General Strike in
San Francisco, 1934
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Textile Workers’ Strike, 1934
Confrontation in Greenville, South Carolina, 1934
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Dust bowl, 1934-1935
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Oklahoma migration,
1934-1940
•Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas
farmers fleeing the dust bowl
•Displaced by the Agricultural
Adjustment Act
•Headed west because a smaller
migration had gone west in the
1920s
•3.5 million migrants came west
Dorthea Lange photograph of
Oklahoma migrant
The United States from 1914 to 1945
FDR to the NAACP’s Walter White
Walter White
"I did not choose the tools with which I
must work. Had I been permitted to
choose them I would have selected quite
different ones. But I've got to get
legislation passed by Congress to save
America. The Southerners by reason of
the seniority rule in Congress are
chairmen or occupy strategic places on
most of the Senate and House
committees. If I come out for the antilynching bill now, they will block every
bill I ask Congress to pass to keep
America from collapsing. I just can't
take that risk.“
FDR to Walter White
The United States from 1914 to 1945
October, 1934: Claude Neal lynched
in Jackson Country, Florida; federal
authorities do nothing.
Congress proposes new anti-lynch
bill which punishes lynching as
federal offense with five years
imprisonment
But the bill fails to get through the
Senate
The United States from 1914 to 1945
“The Popular Front,” 1934
• Rise of fascism
requires all
Communist
Parties to engage
in strategic
alliances with
capitalist
democracies
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Father John Coughlin
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Huey Long says “Share the Wealth,”
1934
• 5,000 dollars to every
American family
• Limit personal
fortunes to 1 million
dollars
• Old age pensions of
30 a month to persons
over sixty.
Governor/Senator/would-be-dictator,
Huey Long
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Fascist plot to take over America?
General Smedley Darlington Butler
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Upton Sinclair: End Poverty In
California (EPIC), 1934
• Tax unused land at
10 percent or more
• Unused land
would be sold and
widely distributed
• Revenues used to
finance
cooperatives
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Ham and Eggs!
• “Thirty every Thursday” – 30 dollars to seniors
every Thursday
• In 1938 the measure was put on the California
ballot
• It lost by ten percent of the vote
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Congressional elections, 1934
• Democrats gain
seats in House and
Senate
• 9 in House (now
322/103)
• 69 seats in the
Senate
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Roosevelt Coalition
• Organized labor
• Progressive women
• African-Americans
• The Urban-ethnic
Catholic/Jewish vote
Second New Deal
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Works Progress
Administration of 1935
• Funded
artists,
writers,
musicians
and theater
companies
• “Hell,
they’ve got
to eat too.” –
Harry
Hopkins
Bernard Zakheim, Coit Tower Mural
Second New Deal
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Federal Theatre Project
• 1,000 plays
produced
• 50,000
performances
• . . . reaching 25
million Americans
• via 12,000 FTP
actors
Hattie
Flannigan,
Director of the
Federal
Theater Project
Second New Deal
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Federal Theatre Project
Orson Welles, all-Haitian cast
version of Macbeth
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Diego Rivera, Mexican muralist
Second New Deal
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Kentucky Post Office Mural, WPA, 1937
Second New Deal
The United States from 1914 to 1945
WPA murals:
Callanan Middle
School, Iowa, 1937
Second New Deal
The United States from 1914 to 1945
William
Schwartz, WPA
mural: Fairfield,
Illinois, 1936
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Angie Debo, Federal Writers
Project Historian
Second New Deal
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Wagner Labor Relations Act, 1935
• Sets up a board to arbitrate labor
disputes and hold union
elections
• Sets up an independent legal
code that prohibits the
“unlawful labor practice,” which
includes . . .
 Firing a worker for trying to
organize a union
 Firing a worker for trying to
enforce a contract
• Encourages unions to sign “no
strike pledges” (no strike during
the life of a contract)
• But it excluded domestic and
agricultural workers.
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Congress
of Industrial
Organizations founded in 1935 . . .
included the United Mine Workers, the Mill and Smelter Workers, and the
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.
John Lewis and Sidney
Hillman
John L. Lewis and Bishop
Sheil, 1939
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Sit down
strikes in
Michigan
and Ohio
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Memorial Day
Massacre, 1937,
on the outskirts of Chicago,
Republic Steel
The United States from 1914 to 1945
The Townsend
Plan
• 200 dollars a month to
everybody over 60
• . . . Provided that
they spend it in 30
days
Dr. Francis Townsend
The United States from 1914 to 1945
Second New Deal
Social Security, 1935
• Establish a dedicated payroll tax
for retirement
• "one of the major turning points of
American history. No longer
could 'rugged individualism'
convincingly insist that
government, though obliged to
provide a climate favorable for the
growth of business profits, had no
responsibility whatever for the
welfare of the human beings who
did the work from which profit
was reaped.“
• But it excluded domestic and
agricultural workers.
The United States from 1914 to 1945
FDR wins
White
House in
1936 – 523
electoral
votes to 8