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3
Freedom from Fear, 1920–1945
. . . The only thing we have
to fear is fear itself.
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
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Chapter Outline
3.1
3.2
3.3
A Return to Normalcy 125
Harding’s Normalcy 126
Harding’s Progressive Measures 127
Teapot Dome and Untimely Death 127
Harding’s Legacy and Posthumous Scandal 128
Calvin Coolidge 129
Babbitt and the Economics of the 1920s 131
Therapeutic Ethos 131
Purchasing on Credit 132
Conclusion 132
The New Society in the 1920s 132
The New Morality of the 1920s 133
Why Change Your Wife? 134
The Jazz Age 134
Pushing the Boundaries at Coney Island 135
The Rise of Relativism 135
A Conservative Reaction 137
Fundamentalism 138
The Great Migration 139
Garveyism and Africa for the Africans 139
The Harlem Renaissance 140
Conclusion 140
The Crash (1929–1933) 141
A Quiet Storm 142
October 1929 142
Causes of the Great Depression 143
Hoover and the Depression 144
The Response to Hoover 145
Conclusion 147
3.4 Roosevelt and the New Deal
(1933–1939) 147
The Rendezvous with Destiny 148
The Inauguration 149
The First 100 Days—Banks and Beer 150
The Agricultural Adjustment Act 151
The National Industrial Recovery Act 151
Tennessee Valley Authority 152
Welfare Reforms 152
Relationship with Congress 153
Timeline of the 100 Days 153
Conclusion 154
3.5
Depression Era Culture (1930s) 154
Technology as Freedom 155
More Work for Mother 155
The Electronic Hearth 156
War of the Worlds 157
Car Culture 157
Tourism—Food, Fuel, and Motels 158
Movie Palaces 159
Conclusion 160
3.6
The Second New Deal (1935–1941) 161
New Deal Critics 161
The Second New Deal—Wagner Act 162
The Second New Deal—Social Security 163
The Supreme Court Battle 164
Roosevelt Recession 165
The Good Neighbor Policy 166
The Rise of Dictators 167
Conclusion 167
3.7
The World at War (1941–1945) 168
Fascism 168
New World Leaders 169
The Road to War 169
The Arsenal of Democracy 170
December 7, 1941 171
Mobilization at Home 171
The American Family on the Home
Front 172
Wartime Injustice 173
African Americans at War 174
The War in Europe 174
D-Day 175
The Battle of the Bulge 176
Strategic Bombing at Dresden 176
The Holocaust 177
The War in the Pacific 178
Iwo Jima and Okinawa 179
The Manhattan Project 180
Truman’s Decision 180
The Costs of War 181
Shaping the Postwar World at Yalta 182
Conclusion 184
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I
t was a time in flux between optimism in the 1920s, depression in the 1930s, and fear
and heroism in the 1940s. The years from 1920 to 1945 represented a quarter-century like
none other in American history, with a pace of change, what some have called the “violence of contrasts,” requiring a need for strong national leadership and resilient citizens
(Kennedy, 1999, p. xiii). These years began with the economic prosperity of the 1920s, a
decade often called “roaring” because a sense of optimism pervaded the country. It came
to a sudden end in October 1929 as the nation experienced an unparalleled stock market
crash. As the riches and wealth of many evaporated, and when jobs of many more Americans disappeared, the United States entered the Great Depression of the 1930s. Under
the leadership of the only person ever to be elected as president four times, Franklin D.
Roosevelt attempted to chart a return course to prosperity with his New Deal. However,
the focus of the nation changed once again in December 1941, when Japanese aircraft
attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Thrust inexorably into World War
II, the United States emerged from its Depression to coordinate closely with its allies in a
fight to preserve democracy against the forces of fascism.
Eminent historian C. Vann Woodward, writing the preface to a Pulitzer Prize–winning
book on these years called Freedom from Fear, remarked on the uniqueness of this era. He
called the changes and challenges that all Americans faced “bewildering.” From unparalleled prosperity to wretched poverty during the 1920s and 1930s, the war years of the
1940s witnessed perhaps the most complex change of all. According to Woodward this
was the “repudiation of a century-and-a-half of isolation as America entered World War
II” (Kennedy, 1999, p. xiii). In these years from 1920 to 1945, America experienced the permanent end of international isolation. No longer could the nation temporarily select when
and where to engage the world because her oceanic protection had ceased to serve as an
effective shield from global threats and challenges.
3.1 A Return to Normalcy
A
t the start of the 1920s, most everyone in America wanted to take a collective breath
and pause from the tumultuous era it had just endured. The world war, flu pandemic,
labor unrest, and racial violence of the previous decade, weighed greatly on the psyche
of many Americans. Many yearned for peace and strove to attain some level of calm and
prosperity. The nation was becoming a different place, as the 1920 census told. Most significantly, city populations were increasing, and for the first time, more than half of the
population (54 million) lived in places identified as urban. This did not mean that all of
these people were living in large cities. Instead urban, according to the 1920 census, simply
meant any community of more than 2,500 people. Nevertheless, times were changing, and
the 1920s represented a transitioning point between traditional and modern America. As
the number of people living in agricultural regions that centered on farming diminished,
those drawn to the big cities increased. More than 16 million Americans now lived in the
12 cities that had populations of more than 500,000 people (Kyvig, 2002, p. 8).
Despite these transitions from a traditional to modern America, there was one word that
captured the spirit of this entire era. It was a word popularized by Republican Warren
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CHAPTER 3
A large crowd gathers at the 1920
Republican Convention, where
Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding
was nominated for President.
G. Harding as he ran for president of the United States.
His word that captured the attention of the nation was
normalcy. Harding explained it like this in May 1920:
“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not
nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration;
not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity;
not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment,
but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but
sustainment in triumphant nationality” (Cashman,
1989, p. 84). In this chapter, we will explore how the
United States attempted to attain its new goal of normalcy in both the political and economic realms during
the 1920s. The result was a reshaping of America that
in many ways reflects the political and economic world
that surrounds us today.
Harding’s Normalcy
The 1920 election was one in which Woodrow Wilson, then President of the United States,
did not participate. With his health failing at the end of his term and his struggles over the
League of Nations continuing, another four years as president was something he neither
desired nor could endure. In his place, the Democrats selected Ohio’s Governor James M.
Cox as their candidate, with Franklin D. Roosevelt as the vice president. Regardless of the
outcome of the election, everyone knew that someone from Ohio was going to win the White
House because the Republicans ran a conservative senator from Ohio, Warren Harding.
The election was a landslide with Harding, and his vice president Calvin Coolidge, earning
16 million votes to Cox’s 9 million.
Harding’s presidential approach was, in many ways,
the opposite of his Progressive predecessor. The Progressive movement quickly declined after World War I
as a conservatism that supported more individual freedom and a limitation of governmental activism arose
(McGerr, 2005). Indeed, Harding was far more favorable to and tolerant of big business and demonstrated
his convictions by changing the policies of the Interstate
Commerce Commission and the Federal Reserve Board
to make them much more pro-business than they were
in the past. He also strove to enact legislation that gave
corporations more power. For example, business owners approved Harding’s more hands-on approach to
breaking strikes of organized workers and often made
workers sign agreements not to join unions. Labor leaders derisively called these yellow dog contracts. However, to their credit, business leaders devised a social
policy called welfare capitalism. This was a series of
programs that attempted to take care of the needs of the
workers through safe conditions, clean places to eat in
Republican running mates in 1920:
Warren G. Harding with Calvin
Coolidge, in June 1920.
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new cafeterias, and even social events like baseball leagues. More importantly, many businesses offered health insurance that became vital to the employees. As a result, union
membership declined dramatically. Harding’s appointment of four Supreme Court justices also pushed the country into a much more conservative direction.
Harding’s Progressive Measures
Harding was not completely opposed to all progressive ideas and demonstrated this during his second State of the Union address in 1922. He called for federal partnerships for
internal improvements projects such as irrigation and conservation, he wanted more electrical plants throughout the country, and he believed that child labor should end even if
that meant a new constitutional amendment (Dean, 2004).
The Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921 was one of the most
remarkable progressive successes on Harding’s watch. Introduced in 1918 by Jeannette
Rankin, the Republican congresswoman from Montana, it became the first social welfare
legislation sponsored by the federal government (Lemons, 1990). Rankin was the first
woman to serve in Congress, and her bill was significant because it called for states to
provide pre- and postnatal care, infant hygiene, and a place where mothers could go to
learn about child care. The main incentive for the bill was the alarmingly high infant mortality rate in the United States at the time. In 1920, the infant mortality rate for live births
was 95 out of 1,000 male babies and 76 out of 1,000 for female babies (Rothstein, 2003,
p. 93). Between 1925 and 1929, this improved to 69 babies (male and female combined)
who died out of every 1,000 live births (Eberstadt, 1995). The situation was worse among
African Americans, where poverty contributed to poor health, especially in large cities.
For example, in Harlem, the infant mortality rate was 70 percent higher than the rest of
New York City (LaFeber, 2008, p. 136). The fact that women could now vote due to the
suffrage amendment lent great support to this cause; it is likely that without women, the
bill would not have passed (Tobias, 1997). Harding signed it into law in 1921.
Teapot Dome and Untimely Death
Though things seemed to be running smoothly for Har
ding’s presidency, scandal was brewing underneath.
The most infamous was the Teapot Dome scandal. Teapot Rock overlooks a 9,000-acre oil deposit, 50 miles
north of Casper, Wyoming. In 1915, the United States
established a naval oil reserve there; however, Harding’s
secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, leased out these protected oil reserves to developers without competitive
bidding. Fall received money under the table from the
developers, calling it a “loan” of $700,000. Fall resigned
on March 4, 1923, and federal authorities subsequently
sent him to prison in 1931 (Noggle, 1965). This scandal
demonstrated the corruption that lay within the Har
ding administration, and much of the blame fell on Harding’s associates from Ohio whom he had appointed to
President Harding’s train in Alaska
with some of the entourage of 75 on
the caboose.
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political positions. The press and others derogatorily called them the Ohio Gang. Though
Harding had not personally accepted money during the Teapot Dome scandal, his close
relationship to those that did cast doubt on his judgment.
In June 1923, Harding planned a trip to Alaska and began campaigning for reelection
along the way. To increase the range and effectiveness of his speeches, he equipped his
presidential train with an innovation: a set of amplifiers mounted on the roof of the train
so that thousands could hear his words. He gave more than 85 speeches and countless
interviews before his train pulled into his last stop in San Francisco. However, on August
2, 1923, while his wife was reading him the Saturday Evening Post, he died. The official
death certificate indicated that he died from apoplexy, which is a loss of consciousness
due to a blocked blood vessel in the brain. He was just 58 years old. More than 3 million
people mourned the passing of his train as it traveled from the West Coast to Washington,
DC, and then back to his home in Ohio.
Harding’s Legacy and Posthumous Scandal
The cause of his death soon brought great speculation. The first scandal came to light
when Nan Britton published her “tell-all” book, The President’s Daughter, in 1927. According to Britton, she had had a six-year affair with Harding that began when he was an
Ohio senator. The Brittons and Hardings became friends in Marion, Ohio, so when Nan’s
mother needed a job after her husband’s death, Nan consulted with Harding. Harding
said that he was concerned for Nan and that perhaps he could “do something for her”
(Britton, 1927). By late February 1919, she realized that
she was to become the mother of Warren Harding’s
child. According to her, Harding looked forward with
anticipation to the event; on October 22, 1919, Elizabeth
Ann was born. That was Britton’s side of the story, and
her book became a best seller.
Nan Britton (1896–1991) and her
daughter, Elizabeth Ann (1919–
2005), who she claimed was
fathered by then Senator Warren
G. Harding.
Perhaps inspired by Nan Britton, Gaston B. Means published theories regarding another scandalous Harding
story in 1930 in a book called The Strange Death of President Harding. Means wrote that he met with Mrs. Har
ding upon her return to Washington. He described her
as “alert, cold, hard . . . [with] no touch of sympathy or
hysteria, or feeling” (Means and Thacker, 1930, p. 258–
259). He said at that moment he knew the truth; Means
surmised that she poisoned him by drugging his water
glass. He believed that Mrs. Harding reveled in having
the world focus on her and compliment her on how well
she was handling the situation. He postulated that Mrs.
Harding’s motive was the discovery of Harding’s infidelity with Nan Britton and that she also wanted to save
her husband from the nepotism scandals that involved
his friends.
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More recent analysis of Harding’s private letters have cast doubt on Britton’s story and
focused more attention on the complex extramarital affair between Harding and Mrs. Carrie Phillips. However, the fact that Phillips was likely a German spy further casts doubt
on Harding’s judgment (Robenalt, 2009). Nevertheless, these posthumous scandals were
important for several reasons. The first was because, in Nan Britton’s case, it represented
a new type of tabloid “tell-all” journalism in America that continues to this day. Second, it
was politically important to the Harding legacy because it helped to unmake his reputation. On his death, the country mourned his passing more than any president since Lincoln;
today, his legacy is that he is best remembered for being America’s worst president because
of the scandals associated with his presidency both before and after his death (Dean, 2004).
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge, Harding’s vice president, took over as chief executive upon confirmation of Harding’s death on August 3, 1923. As a Republican senator from Massachusetts,
Coolidge entered the national political spotlight during his handling of the 1919 Boston
Police Strike (see Section 2.7). Like Harding, Coolidge was also pro-business and believed
that it was the president’s job to listen and defer to Congress. He became well known for
slogans that encapsulated the Republican political philosophy, such as “The chief business
of the American people is business,” which he first stated in 1925 (Kennedy, 1999). Another
of his famous sayings was that “the man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man
that works there worships there” (Phillips, 2003). With sayings like these, Coolidge set the
tone of his presidency—which was strong on business and weak on government. Various
political commentators and satirists of the day, such as H. L. Mencken, claimed in 1927
that “Silent Cal” Coolidge’s ideal day was “one on which nothing whatever happens”
(Mencken, 2006). Mencken further criticized the president for evading the most important
problems that confronted the nation.
Coolidge did have a great task ahead of him when he took office. Few presidents in American history have assumed office with such tremendous scandals still hovering over the
previous administration. Harding was responsible for establishing the important Veterans’ Bureau in 1921 (which is now called the Veterans Administration), which worked to
give war veterans and their families a variety of social benefits such as health care, education, loans, insurance, and job training, but it was mired in scandal (Pencak, 2009, p. 389).
The Veterans’ Bureau became a “hotbed of fraud and kickbacks” to one of Harding’s chief
supporters (Brinkley and Dyer, 2004, p. 327). Further Harding problems arose during the
Coolidge presidency when investigators revealed that the former president’s attorney
general had allowed the Justice Department to engage in a variety of illegal activities.
Despite Coolidge’s struggles to overcome the scandals of his predecessor and the general loss of confidence in government, his economic policies did result in five-and-a-half
years of prosperity. Much of this was due to Andrew W. Mellon, his secretary of the treasury. The American public gave Coolidge a vote of confidence for his economic policies
in 1924, when they elected him to serve another four years of office because they liked
what they saw in the year-and-a-half that he served after Harding’s death. In part, he won
acclaim for lowering taxes four times, and he was careful with governmental spending.
He became a favorite of wealthy Americans by lowering estate taxes, and this fueled massive investment in the stock market (Greenberg, 2006).
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Technology in America
Television
At the same time people were exploring the wonders of film at movie theaters, a new technology
quietly emerged in the 1920s that promised to bring moving pictures to the home. It transformed the
market for the home radio by adding a visual component. Though television technology existed prior
to World War II, it was not commercially viable until the Dumont Television Network began broadcasting in the 1940s. Dumont called it the “biggest window in the world” and the “answer to man’s ageless
yearning for eyes and ears to pierce the barrier of distance.”
Initially, static and flickering black-and white-images shadowed across the television window. By the
1960s, new advancements in color improved the picture quality, remote controls began an era of
interactivity, and stereo sound vastly improved the listening experience. By the 1970s, viewers began
to “time shift” by recording programs and watching them on a video cassette recorder (VCR). In the
1980s, cable networks vastly increased the number of viewing channels beyond the standard NBC,
ABC, and CBS offerings. New networks like MTV (for music) and ESPN (for sports) tailored messages
and programs to specific audiences. By the turn of the 21st century, digital video recorders (DVRs)
enabled greater flexibility in recording programs, and the future promises increased convergence
possibilities between the television and the Internet.
The history of television in the United States is far more than a story of technological innovation.
Even more important is the resulting cultural change—with the remarkable ability to open a window
in one’s living room to instantaneously view images and sounds taking place throughout the world.
Cecilia Tichi called this the “electronic hearth,” meaning that television replaced and transformed the
previously communal family fire. While the radio also played a role in this transition, television’s ability
to communicate in moving images gave it a much greater capability to convey messages like the devastation of war or the ecstasy of victory in an athletic competition. These shared global events watched
by the world (from the Super Bowl to the Gulf War) had the power to unite the world in a common
and immediate experience.
For further reading see:
Tichi, C. (1991). Electronic hearth: Creating an American television culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Coolidge believed that hard-working people who worshipped God were the backbone of
society. Under his policies, the standard of living in the United States improved for all—
but most dramatically for the wealthiest Americans. With the increased wealth, the country became infatuated with consumerism. While many took advantage of more money in
their pockets to purchase radios, refrigerators, or Model-T automobiles, others were not
impressed with the nation’s materialistic direction. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald called it
the “greatest, gaudiest spree in history” (Johnson, 2001).
Another aspect of Coolidge’s popularity was how often he talked to the people themselves. Taking advantage of the increasing prevalence of the radio, he began broadcasting his addresses nationwide, and families anxiously listened in their living rooms. This
brought an unprecedented sense of familiarity with him, and it became a model for all
future presidential administrations. He took that same approach with journalists, holding
520 press conferences, more than any president in history at that time. He also welcomed
the latest newsreel technology into his private life as film crews captured him doing mundane tasks in his Vermont home (Greenberg, 2008, p. 7).
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Babbitt and the Economics of the 1920s
One of the best ways to understand the consumer environment of the 1920s is by reading Sinclair Lewis’s
novel Babbitt. The main character was George Babbitt,
whose character resonated with such deep archetypal
significance that the term Babbitt entered the English
language. Babbitt refers to any middle-class American
who is so attached to business that he or she becomes
a model of narrow-mindedness, self-satisfaction, and
conformity. The novel was an example of literary real- Sinclair Lewis became the first
ism, meaning that it used fictional characters to try to American to win a Nobel Prize in
paint an accurate portrait of the society of the time. It literature for his book Babbitt. Four
is a very modern story, in that the first seven chapters year later, in 1934 it became a Hollyexplore just one day in George Babbitt’s life, foreshad- wood movie with Guy Kibbee and
owing reality TV or the show 24. The central message Aline MacMahon.
was clear. Modern life revolved to a fault around business and consumerism and rendered it meaningless because consumers placed too much
emphasis on new technologies such as automobiles, car cigarette lighters, and alarm
clocks. The high point of Babbitt’s day was driving to work and filling up his car with
gas. This became something of a religious rite for him. At the gas station, he admired all
the gadgets and auto accessories on sale, such as sparkplugs with “immaculate porcelain
jackets.” The gas pump itself was a technological marvel, with red iron accents and an
ingenuous automatic dial whose clicking gave Babbitt a sense of power. The gas station
was also where Babbitt found wisdom, such as in the sign that said, “A fill in time saves
getting stuck—gas to-day 31 cents” (Lewis, 1922). Sinclair Lewis concluded that this mundane activity was a rite that “fortified” Babbitt, which was, in fact, exactly what consumerism was all about in the 1920s.
Therapeutic Ethos
An examination of advertisements in the 1920s also reveals the economic mindset of the
American people during this decade, and one of the main themes was the idea that active
consumerism brought therapy to the purchaser. Known as the therapeutic ethos, this was
a central way advertisers began marketing their products. One example was Listerine.
Prior to the 1920s, its manufacturers sold the liquid as a dressing for wounds. However, it
was not very popular, and few people saw a reason to purchase it. Then the company popularized an obscure medical term called “halitosis,” or bad breath, and suggested that its
product could cure this affliction. Though this was a term that few people had ever heard
of before, the advertising executives were creating a new social anxiety, claiming that
halitosis could slow someone’s advancement at work or even cause a wife to reject her
husband’s advances (Fox, 1997). The message for Listerine was simple—buy this product
and your life will be better—thus establishing a new goal for consumerism.
A remarkable number of advertisers began using this technique, perhaps the most unusual
being the game of billiards or pool. It was, according to the manufacturers of pool tables,
more than a game. Instead it was a sport that could be played year-round, improve mental
capabilities, aid digestion, and help circulation (Lears, 2001). These techniques became
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more sophisticated with the application of psychology
to advertising and consumption. For example, in 1924,
H. K. Nixon conducted experiments in which he tracked
the eye movements of consumers as they read advertisements. He attempted to perfect the ways that images
could draw consumers’ attention to read important text
about a product (Jansson-Boyd, 2010, p. 10).
Purchasing on Credit
With all of these important reasons to buy material
goods, businesses soon realized that consumers simply
did not have enough money in their pockets to afford
everything that they wanted. Therefore, they devised
a way for them to enjoy the products immediately, but
pay for them later. This technique for immediate gratification became known as buying on credit, and it was
very much opposite the Victorian ethos of the 19th cenA 1920s advertisement for Listertury, which held that no upstanding citizen incurred
ine stating, “Halitosis makes you
any debt to society. Turning this idea on its head, in
unpopular.”
the 1920s debt meant that you were a strong consumer.
While the trend began with more expensive items like
General Motors automobiles (Henry Ford was against
the use of credit), it soon extended to smaller items like refrigerators. Soon more and more
people began filling their home with the latest devices, but consumers owned fewer and
fewer of them outright.
Conclusion
When looking at the politics and economics of the 1920s, we find issues surprisingly similar to today’s headlines. Bookstores were and still are filled with tell-all books, revealing
scandals and marital infidelities about contemporary figures and politicians. Furthermore,
we still see the therapeutic ethos as a significant reason to make purchases, many of which
are on credit today. The conclusion made by some observers is that the 1920s was when
America became modern. As Nathan Miller wrote, “To an astonishing extent the 1920s
resemble our own era, at the turn of the twenty-first century; in many ways that decade
was a precursor of modern excesses” (Miller, 2004, p. 1). If the political and economic
world helped to shape and enable the excesses of the 1920s, what did the society of this
decade resemble? By looking at aspects of the “Roaring Twenties”—like sex, amusement,
science, religion, and art—we will see another mirror to our own day.
3.2 The New Society in the 1920s
W
hen you think of the 1920s, what comes to mind? It might be jazz music, films
portraying girls in flapper dresses dancing the Charleston, or pictures of Charles
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Lindbergh flying and breaking distance records in his airplane. Other images might come
from reading books about a time when alcohol was illegal and bootleggers and mobsters
skirted the law to keep the drinks flowing. There are other prevalent symbols too, such as
a rotund man, Babe Ruth, waddling around the baseball diamond as the greatest player
in his era. Men in suits and hats sat in the stands cheering him on, or they read of his
exploits in the newspapers, right after checking how much money the stock market made
them that day. It was an economic boom time. The decade became known as the Roaring
Twenties, and the celebration continued until the stock market crashed in 1929. But in this
section, we are going to forget that an economic collapse, a Great Depression, and another
world war were on the horizon for America. Instead, we are going to explore the new
society of America in the 1920s. Society is, of course, an immensely broad topic, but we
will examine the following as representative cultural themes of the decade: sex, morality,
leisure, science, religion, and art. These reveal a society that surprisingly resembles our
own in many ways, as well as a tension between conservative and liberal values (Drowne
and Huber, 2004).
The New Morality of the 1920s
The 1920s was an era in which a new morality swept across the country fueled by modern expressions of sexuality and the emergence of redefined gender roles for what came
to be called the New Woman. Women during this decade were much more empowered
to express themselves than their foremothers. For one thing, women could now voice
their opinions at the ballot box, and they strove to incorporate unprecedented freedoms
of expression into their personal lives.
These women were popularly known as flappers, which was a term originally describing lanky young women whose thin frames needed clothing, according to a 1920s fashion
writer, with “long straight lines to cover her awkwardness.” Department stores soon began advertizing these
gowns as “flapper-dresses” (Zeitz, 2006). Soon, the
term moved from describing a fashion to the characteristics of the New Woman herself. Daring in her social
actions and anxious to overturn staid, Victorian morals, the flapper was easily identifiable with her skirts,
heavy makeup, and cigarette in hand, often taping her
breasts flat to appear more physically fit and slender.
They enjoyed watching the latest hero and heroine at
the local movie house. The heroines included Clara
Bow, Greta Garbo, and Gloria Swanson, and their films
often addressed previously taboo subjects such as sex,
marriage, and divorce. The new morality represented a
period of liberation for women. Women were also more
apt to engage in premarital sex because of the prevalence
of contraceptive devices (see Section 2.3). Leading men
also graced the silver screen with romantic heroes such
as Douglas Fairbanks playing Zorro and Robin Hood Color illustration by Bert Wilson
and Rudolph Valentino representing “a symbol of mys- showing a 1920s flapper girl applyterious, forbidden eroticism, a vicarious fulfillment of ing makeup.
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dreams of illicit love and uninhibited passions” (Black,
2001, p. 27).
Why Change Your Wife?
Pioneering director Cecil B. DeMille’s 1920 film called
Why Change Your Wife? touched upon many of these
themes. The central tension in the film was between
a wife, who represented the Victorian morality of the
19th century, and a husband, who wanted to break free
of this and explore all the pleasures of the new relaxed
morality of the 1920s. Consumer culture loomed large
in this film and exemplified the therapeutic ethos, with
the consumption of material goods serving as a way to
achieve personal fulfillment and happiness. Audiences
saw this playing out in the film as the couple had an
argument over lingerie. When the wife refused to wear
Why Change Your Wife? Film poster,
risqué clothing (along with smoking, the Fox Trot, and
1920.
other elements of flapper culture), the husband decided
that he needed to change his wife, much like he might
return a defective product. He returned to the department store, kissed the woman who
originally modeled the lingerie for him, and began exploring other temptations of the
times. When his wife found out, she separated from him, but instead of finding happiness with her traditional values, she was miserable. Soon she realized the “error” of her
ways, and DeMille completed her transformation by putting her in a scandalous bathing
suit at a resort, where she caught the attention of her former husband. She abandoned
her Victorian ideals, adopted the erotic image of the New Woman, and accepted the new
flirtatious morality of the times. It was the classic “makeover” in the 1920s, and it enabled
her and her husband to reunite in a household in which they enjoyed drinking, dancing,
and smoking cigars. In the final scene, she dressed in the same lingerie that they originally
fought over. The message was that consumer culture was good and progressive and that if
the audience failed to experience the latest commodities, they would become stuck in the
rut of Victorian morality (MacDonald, 2010, pp. 61–62).
The Jazz Age
Music was also a central part of the 1920s, and jazz was the soundtrack of the decade. It
combined African American traditional styles such as the deep soulful feeling of blues
with the rhythmic beats of ragtime and, in the process, became a unique American musical form (Burns and Ward, 2000). The improvisational aspect of jazz let the musicians
spontaneously explore new sonic boundaries and let audiences listening on the radio or
dancing in front of big bands experience the newness and sexual openness of the “jazz
age.” It started in New Orleans but soon spread to Chicago and New York (Martin and
Waters, 2006, p. 89). However, it did not go mainstream until the Original Dixieland Jazz
Band, which was an all-white group that was clearly not the “original” jazz band, became
popular. This was one of the many examples in the 20th century where white Americans
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capitalized upon and mass marketed black culture. It did pave the way for legitimate
black jazz musicians like Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and many others to tour
the United States (Davidson, 2008, p. 703).
Pushing the Boundaries at Coney Island
If the new morality was prevalent on the movie screen and
the dance floors of the jazz age, where else was it found
in the 1920s? One unusual place was at the amusement
park, best exemplified by Coney Island. Located in New
York, Coney Island was a picnic destination in the late
19th century, but by the early 20th century these excur- A human roulette wheel with a
sions became more frequent, with public transportation crowd of children and young adults
making the journey from the city much easier. When pic- riding at New Steeplechase Park,
nics failed to draw enough people, entrepreneurs began Coney Island, New York. Photobuilding “popular amusements” such as mechanical graph, 1908.
rides, penny arcades, and concert halls. Soon, it became
a place where men and women found themselves in
close quarters, unsupervised, and anxious to test the boundaries of new social mores. The
amusement rides helped them do this. There was a machine at the Luna and Dreamland
parks at Coney Island that could supposedly “measure” the passion of a couple’s kiss.
These parks also featured rides called the Tunnel of Love, with long dark passageways
where men and women could suddenly find themselves alone. At another Coney Island
destination called Steeplechase, rides like the Wedding Ring twirled around and caused
strangers to fall into each others’ embraces. The Barrel of Love resulted in a similar experience for its riders. Finally, there was the Dew Drop ride, which was designed to raise women
skirts to the delight of onlookers. Historian Kathy Peiss, who has extensively studied the
history of leisure and working-class women, commented that Steeplechase was deliberately constructed with sexuality in mind in terms of “titillation, voyeurism, exhibitionism,
and a stress on couples and romance” (Peiss, 1986, p. 136). These parks provided a “minivacation” for the urban working classes, and their numbers grew dramatically in the 1920s.
The Rise of Relativism
Society and culture in the 1920s represented a vibrant era for intellectuals who had remarkably reconfigured their visions of the world over the previous half-century. For example,
Albert Einstein made dramatic discoveries about the universe that ironically had an influence on the new morality. As a physicist in Germany and then in the United States, Einstein
proposed his special and general theories of relativity in 1905 and 1915, which consisted
of complex mathematics that some skeptics suggested only he and God understood. His
claims seemed bizarre, such as when he theorized that if someone approached the speed
of light (186,000 miles per second), time literally slowed down, but only for them.
Einstein liked to communicate his theories with “thought experiments” (because traveling near the speed of light is impossible), and one of the most famous was his “twins
paradox” that demonstrated how time itself was relative to speed. He imagined one
20-year-old twin getting on a spaceship that traveled near the speed of light. According
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Technology in America
The Birth of the Rocket
While Einstein was envisioning thought experiments with imaginary spacecraft, there was one person
who made impressive real gains in rocketry. In 1926, Robert Goddard launched a liquid-fueled rocket,
the first small step in the coming of the space age, which would eventually pave the way for humans
to end their isolation on Earth and take their first steps on the moon. Goddard’s early motivation was
reading the science fiction stories of Jules Verne. Goddard carried this passion into graduate school,
where he theorized a rudimentary multistage rocket for escaping the Earth’s atmosphere. After World
War I, he became a physics professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, and in 1919 published an
essential book called A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. However, few considered his work
important, and the popular press often ridiculed his experiments. While this made Goddard secretive
and reclusive, it did not discourage his passion for his work. His brilliance attracted Charles Lindbergh,
who was his polar opposite in terms of personality as he achieved international fame with his piloting
exploits. Lindbergh used this popularity to help Goddard receive grants from the Guggenheim Fund to
purchase a desolate and isolated parcel of land in Roswell, New Mexico, to continue his investigations.
Goddard eventually registered for 214 patents, and on March 16, 1926, he was ready for his first test,
launching a liquid oxygen and gasoline–powered rocket 184 feet into the air. NASA historian Roger
Launius wrote, “It heralded the modern age of rocketry and set the stage for all later space travel.”
In honor of Goddard’s work, in May 1959 NASA named its third center (after Langley Research Center
in Virginia and Lewis Research Center in Ohio), the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
For further reading see:
Launius, R. D. (1994). NASA: A history of the U.S. civil space program. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing.
McDougall, W. A. (1997). The heavens and the earth: A political history of the space age. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
to his theory, as the twin traveled faster and faster, time actually slowed down for her in
relationship to the earthbound twin. While only a few hours elapsed on the spaceship,
decades would have elapsed for the twin on Earth. In this way, Einstein said that it was
possible for a 20-year-old twin to meet her 90-year-old twin sister. Scientists called this
phenomena time dilation, and it has actually been experimentally proven today at very
low speeds using highly accurate clocks on airplanes. In reality, this has no effect on our
lives because we cannot yet travel near the speed of light. For example, if someone spent
his or her entire life on an airplane, time would have only slowed down 0.00005 second
for him or her (Isaacson, 2007, p. 130). (See The Birth of the Rocket.)
Despite not having practical significance in the lives of Americas, Einstein’s theories were
incredibly important in the 1920s. This idea that time was “relative” moved from the
realm of science to culture. If time itself was relative, what else might also be placed into
this category? Artists, psychologists, and anthropologists all began making suggestions.
Pablo Picasso’s Cubism was a movement in art that had an incredibly abstract notion
of beauty. His work was notable for its fragmented vision of the human body and also
Picasso’s freedom to escape the conventional perspective of life. Art through Picasso’s
vision was not about capturing or depicting the world as it was, but instead about how he
saw it (Karmel, 2003).
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Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis located unconscious sexual desires within
the mind’s Id, suggesting that morality was no longer absolute, but was relative to time,
place, and cultural attitude. Freud directly contributed to the growth of “relativism” by
decentering each individual person and, in the process, delivered what he called the third
of the “blows to man’s narcissism” (Holt and Freud, 1989, p. 354). Narcissism is a strong
self-love or feeling of importance that extends to the realm of conceit, egotism, and vanity.
Freud asserted the first blow to this belief came when Copernicus proved that the Earth
was not at the center of the universe. The second blow was when Charles Darwin, the
British naturalist, proposed in 1859 that all species, including humans, evolved through a
slow process of natural selection. At the conceptual level, natural selection is fairly simple:
(1) organisms vary, and variations can be inherited; (2) organisms produce more offspring
than survive; (3) offspring that inherit variations that are favorable toward environmental conditions will survive and propagate. This is basically what natural selection is all
about, and this simple theory elegantly explains the biological diversity around us today.
What makes it unsettling to some is the idea that even humans have evolved through this
process, making us no different than animals. Freud attempted a third blow to narcissism
in which he suggested that humans were no longer the masters of themselves and that
subconscious and repressed memories from childhood conditioned our responses to life
far more than we realized.
Also contributing to the rise of relativism were anthropologists who promoted the principle of cultural relativism. This is usually taken to mean that cultures should be understood on their own terms in a framework where all cultures are more or less equal and
there is no absolute definition of morality. This reinforced the new morality of the 1920s,
with the belief that there was not only one way to live a moral life (A. J. Miller, 2002).
A Conservative Reaction
There were many who were uncomfortable with the new morality and intellectual movements of the 1920s. Many traditional Americans resisted Freud’s psychoanalysis, Picasso’s
art, Darwin’s science, and cultural relativism in general. Much like a Picasso painting,
they felt that American society and culture were becoming too fractured, and they often
blamed the influx of immigrants for this. One solution was the proposal of restrictive
immigration laws. “Nativists,” who opposed immigration, no longer saw value in the
United States as a great melting pot of cultures from around the world and sought drastic
measures for excluding all new arrivals. In 1918, the American Federation of Labor and
its leader Samuel Gompers proposed complete exclusion for a period of at least two years
because they feared the threat of immigrant labor for existing workers. A second argument was that immigration threatened the unity of Americans and that without a strong
homogenous core of people who supported traditional values, the country’s strength
would soon erode (Higham, 2002, p. 305).
Another conservative reaction came in 1915, when Colonel William Joseph Simmons
revived the secret society known as the Ku Klux Klan, which, as discussed earlier, was a
politically and racially motivated group that opposed racial equality (Nelson, 1999). This
extremist organization began in the 1860s but had been mostly dormant for 40 years. Simmons, a former farmer, circuit preacher, and university lecturer, tapped into the growing
opposition by many to the directions America was taking. By the 1920s, the new Klan had
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millions of dues-paying members, with local chapters in all 48 states. It was a national
movement that advanced far more than the notion of white supremacy. It also argued that
Catholics and immigrants were dangerous for the United States, and the Klan attracted
massive public crowds to celebrate its cause. For example, on July 4, 1923, tens of thousands gathered in Indiana to recognize the Klan gaining official status in the state. The
Klan was once known as the Invisible Empire, but in the 1920s, there was little about it
that was invisible. Newspaper writer Robert Coughlan described the event like this:
There were thirty bands; but as usual in Klan parades there was no music,
only the sound of drums. They rolled the slow, heavy tempo of the march
from the far north end of town to Foster Park, a low meadow bordering
Wildcat Creek where the Klan had put up a twenty-five-foot “fiery cross.”
There were three hundred mounted Klansmen interspersed in companies
among the fifty thousand hooded men, women, and children on foot. The
marchers moved in good order, and the measured tread of their feet, timed
to the rumbling of the drums and accented by the off-beat clatter of the
horses’ hoofs, filled the night with an overpowering sound. Many of the
marchers carried flaming torches, whose light threw grotesque shadows
up and down Main Street. (McVeigh, 2009, pp. 2–3)
Though the Klan diminished in importance by the 1930s, it proved a strong voice of discontent in the 1920s.
Fundamentalism
The strongest reaction against the new morality and relativism of the 1920s came from
conservative religious populations. While some religions like Catholicism supported the
ideas of Darwin and said that it was not in a disagreement with their reading of the Bible,
many Fundamentalist Christian denominations thought otherwise. The term fundamentalism was actually coined in 1920 as a movement to restore traditional values in the face of
modern indulgences and relaxed sexual morals. In California, Aimee Semple McPherson
combined these fundamentalist ideas with charismatic
radio broadcasts, becoming a model for later televised
evangelists (Ayers, 2009, p. 685). McPherson and others, like former professional baseball player and Christian evangelist Billy Sunday, spread their conservative
Christian message to millions. With their literal reading
of the Bible—especially Genesis, which said that God
created the heavens and the earth in six “literal” days—
they began arguing that evolution (which required billions of years for creation) should not be taught in the
Scopes Trial, July 10–21, 1925, in
public schools.
Dayton, Tennessee, where schoolteacher John Scopes was on trial for
teaching the theory of evolution.
His lawyer, Clarence Darrow, sits
on the right.
This came to a head in 1925 at the Scopes Monkey Trial,
which pitted John T. Scopes, a Tennessee high school science teacher, against orator and politician William Jennings Bryan. Scopes had taught theories of evolution to
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his students despite the fact that the Tennessee legislature had passed a law forbidding it.
The trial was a national spectacle with heated debate about science, religion, and the place
of humans in the world. Renowned lawyer Clarence Darrow handled the Scopes defense.
The end result was more anticlimactic than the media-frenzied buildup. The jury found
Scopes guilty of teaching evolution, and he had to pay a $100 fine. But the significance
was the start of the ever-growing rift between religious fundamentalists and Darwinian
evolutionists that continues to this day (Larson, 2006). Hollywood captured this story in
the 1960 film called Inherit the Wind.
The Great Migration
Fundamentalists were clearly disenchanted with modern America in the 1920s, but they
were not the only ones. Southern African Americans, tired of racial segregation, left the
South to find work and a better life, primarily in industrial cities in the North. Known
as the great migration, it was a dramatic relocation of the African American population.
Between 1910 and 1920, the population of African Americans in New York City swelled
from 91,709 to 152,467, from 44,103 to 109,458 in Chicago, and from 84,459 to 134,229 in
Philadelphia. In total, more than 600,000 African Americans left the South between 1914
and 1920. The migration reshaped the American city, but as they left behind problems in
the segregated South, they encountered new ones in the North, such as housing and public services discrimination, unsanitary living conditions, and a lack of health care (Ayers,
2009, p. 642).
Garveyism and Africa for the Africans
There were several responses to this new set of problems. One was Marcus Garvey’s
“Africa for the Africans” movement in the 1920s (Garvey and Hill, 2006, p. liii). Born in
Jamaica in 1887, Garvey searched for gainful employment and wound up in the United
States in 1916. The troubles that he encountered in his travels made him realize that there
were far larger concerns for the race itself. He believed that the way to solve the problem
was through a reunification of blacks in the United States with their homeland in Africa.
He established the Universal Negro Improvement Association and even built a steamship line to take blacks back to Liberia. Between 1919 and 1923, he sponsored international conventions, endorsed politicians, encouraged African American businesses, and
sparked an interest in black history and culture. However, his period of influence was
short-lived; he committed mail fraud (some called them trumped-up charges) and was
sentenced to prison in 1925. President Coolidge commuted his sentence in 1927 and sent
him back to Jamaica (Stein, 1991, p. 1). Though scholars disagree today on his overall
influence, there is little doubt that he left a strong legacy in the African American community. Garveyism, according to one reporter after his death, “set in motion what was
to become the most compelling force in Negro life—race and color consciousness” (Gordon, 2006, p. 165). When it died with Garvey’s arrest, it marked the end of a significant
moment of black nationalism that would not be revived until Malcolm X in the 1960s (see
Section 4.6).
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The Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
famously said “Harlem is in vogue.”
Another response to racial discrimination was by whites
who became intensely interested in American black
communities in the 1920s. Anthropologist Zora Neale
Hurston called them Negrotarians, and they sought
to bring attention to the plight of African Americans in
the inner cities. One was Robert Kerlin, who scoured
and excerpted poignant stories from African American newspapers and published them in 1920 in Voice of
the Negro. This gave white society a firsthand perspective of what it was like to live as an African American
in the United States. He wanted his book to become a
“primary document in promoting knowledge of the
Negro, his point of view, his way of thinking upon race
relations, his grievances, his aspirations, his demands.”
Kerlin was also a poet, and his eloquence was evident
in his introduction to his collection. He wrote, “Here is
the voice of the Negro, and his heart and mind. Here the
Negro race speaks as it thinks on the question of questions for America—the race question (Kerlin, 1968, p. v).
One other important role of the Negrotarian was philanthropic support of African American artists. This patronage system enabled a great expansion of black culture, especially
in places like New York’s Harlem (Wintz and Finkelman, 2004, p. 881). These black intellectuals took inspiration from their African heritage and, through their works of creativity, provided racial uplift for their own communities. Eventually called the New Negro,
which described African Americans with racial pride and an intense desire for equality,
in Harlem the artists who demanded respect from those that continued to harbor racist ideas resulted in the Harlem Renaissance. There are numerous examples during this
period, including novelists Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer; poets Bessie Mayle, Anne Spencer, and James Weldon Johnson; intellectuals W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain
Locke, and Walter White; and artists Archibald Motley, Jacob Lawrence, and Henry Bannarn. Musicians including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith,
and Duke Ellington played at popular locations like the Cotton Club, Apollo Theater, and
Speakeasies.
Conclusion
Frederick Lewis Allen wrote one of the classic books on the 1920s called Only Yesterday.
Published in 1931, it remained a best seller for years, with a half-million copies in print by
1932. He wrote it as a way to cope with the tragic deaths of his wife and daughter. In it he
said that “This book is an attempt to tell, and in some measure interpret, the story of what
in the future may be considered a distinct era in American history.” Allen called the 1920s
a “time of revolution,” and the nation that emerged on the other side of the decade was
very different that the one going in (Allen, 2000, p. ix).
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Looking back, we can see that the 1920s was “revolutionary” and “roaring” in many ways.
The new morality brought a more relaxed stance on sexuality. Men and women tested
these boundaries in experiential ways at amusement parks like Coney Island and at the
movie theaters. It was also a complex time because of new intellectual ideas that changed
the perceptions of reality. Einstein’s theories of relativity transformed a static universe
into one in which the observer determined reality. Picasso reconfigured art, and Freud
revised the understanding of the mind itself. These had important cultural ramifications.
If culture was relative, then art was not simply a white, upper-class pursuit. It also could
be found on the streets of Harlem, where many talented African American intellectuals
thrived. The Harlem Renaissance demonstrated that beauty and poetry existed in many
diverse areas, and this became one of the important cultural legacies of the 1920s.
Conservative detractors scorned cultural relativism as destructive of shared American
values. This took a variety of forms, from religious fundamentalism to the racial prejudices of the Ku Klux Klan. It is a debate that continues to this day and generates tremendous controversy by those who believe that neither morality nor culture is relative. We
will see its reemergence especially in the 1990s and the “culture wars.” Other rifts in our
culture today also have their genesis in the 1920s, most notably in the divide between religious fundamentalists and Darwinian evolutionists. Taken together, it is clear why many
referred to the 1920s as the “new society.” But the enthusiasm and excitement would not
last. Change was coming. October 1929 was approaching with an economic crash heard
around the world that plunged the United States into more than 15 years of depression.
3.3 The Crash (1929–1933)
I
t turned out to be one of the most unexpected presidential announcements in United
States history. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge was vacationing in South Dakota when
he suddenly sent slips of notepaper to a group of reporters who were following him. The
notes contained a 10-word message from Coolidge himself that changed the course of
U.S. history. It simply said, “I do not choose to run for President in 1928” (Ayers, 2009,
p. 695). After the astonishment subsided, the Republican Party began looking for candidates to take the mantle of leadership. Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce,
emerged as the frontrunner, and he eventually became the next President of the United
States, defeating New York’s democratic governor, Alfred E. Smith, in a landslide election. A mining engineer and a Quaker from Iowa, Hoover gained fame as the U.S. food
administrator during World War I, and the success in this position propelled him into his
political career. He took the office of president during a time of great optimism. With the
stock market on a perpetual rise, credit easy to come by, and jobs for those who wanted to
work, it seemed that many of society’s ills were on the road to elimination. Hoover himself shared this optimism and announced in 1928 that we are “nearer to the final triumph
over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing
among us” (Brands, 2009, p. 221).
This soon became one of the most ill-timed statements ever made by a U.S. president. Just
15 months later, fear and panic swept through the nation as the stock market crashed. It
ushered in an era called simply the Great Depression. Radiating from its epicenter in the
United States and quickly affecting the rest of the world, the poor, hungry, and jobless
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seemed to increase in numbers every day. In this section, we will explore the causes of this economic catastrophe, Hoover’s response, and the consequences and
experiences of the American people during this trying
time.
A Quiet Storm
Between 1925 and 1929, many Americans enjoyed the
fruits of capitalism. While there were certainly numerous poor people throughout the country, never before
had there been so many who were either wealthy or living much better than they imagined. Existing businesses
were turning profits, and new businesses opened every
day. The automobile industry exemplified this growth.
In 1926, it produced 4.3 million cars, and just three years later, production increased to 5.3
million. It seemed that the only outlook for the future was an optimistic one (Galbraith,
2009, p. 2). But there was a quiet storm brewing that few, if any, noticed.
Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), before
a crowd on his campaign train during his successful run for the presidency against Democrat, Alfred E.
Smith. 1928.
One of the flaws of the system was the way that many people purchased stocks and
invested in this economy. Stock prices rose nearly every day, and there was a surplus of
buyers, which drove up the price. Everyone had a tip on the next hot stock, and often they
were right, which fueled the speculative frenzy. Between May and September 1929 the
average stock increased by 40 percent. In order to buy more stocks, people began purchasing on margin, which meant that people were enticed to buy stocks with loans from their
brokers. Money seemed easy to make as exemplified by the film Stocks and Blondes.
The problem was what happened if the stocks decreased in value for those who purchased on margin. If a stock decreased, then it became very difficult to repay the loan. Few
people imagined this scenario could happen, and brokerage firms encouraged everyone
to enter the stock market on margin. With their very low credit rates, many people took
the brokers’ advice and borrowed money to invest. This was the quiet storm that was
about to erupt.
October 1929
The 1920s stock market hit its highest point on September 3, 1929. In the days immediately after, it began to
erratically drift lower, but few people expressed concern. In mid-October, Irving Fischer, a well-respected
economics professor from Yale, optimistically proclaimed that stocks would maintain their high plateau.
But this began to change on Thursday, October 24, 1929.
Within hours, panic streamed across all media outlets of
the day. Boys selling the morning newspapers shouted
Crowd gathers outside the New
York Stock Exchange during the
Crash of October 1929.
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the dire warnings. Radio announcers speculated about
a problem. In New York’s financial district, the concern
was evident on everyone’s faces (Smith, 2003, p. 124).
What was happening was a massive stock sell-off unlike
any in history. It happened so rapidly that the stock
ticker, which conveyed the status of the market to the
brokerage houses, could not keep up with the news, and
many people could not find out how bad the situation
really was. Officials at the New York Stock Exchange
ushered people away from the viewing windows.
Police arrived on the scene. By 11:30 in the morning, it
was clear that the market was disintegrating. Observing the hysteria on Wall Street, one reporter from the
Saturday Evening Post said that they looked like “dying
men counting their own last pulse beats” (Thomas and
Morgan, 1979, p. 363). By November, the Dow Jones
Industrial Average, a measure of the top 30 stocks in
the country, had declined 50 percent in just two months. Released one year before the
Brokerage houses began calling back loans from inves- crash occurred, Stocks and Blondes
tors who had purchased on margin. Few people had the depicted a booming economy.
resources to cover their debts, and many went bankrupt.
To make matters worse, companies failed, jobs were lost, and the spiraling downward
economy left few standing in its wake.
Causes of the Great Depression
While the dramatic images of people tearing up their stock certificates and jumping from
windows to their death represented the start of the Great Depression, in reality, the stock
market crash was not the sole cause. While it was the first sign of impending economic
disaster, there were several factors that contributed to and caused the Great Depression. The
first was one of diversification. Much of the success of the nation’s economy rested in the
hands of too few industries, such as construction and automobiles. In 1929, these began to
lose profitability, and newer industries in areas like plastics and chemicals could not grow as
fast as the others were declining (Brinkley, 2010, p. 654). The shift from industrial production
to new and profitable sectors like chemicals, consumer packaging, and customer service
could not lessen the length or severity of the Depression.
A second cause was a weaker consumer. Mass consumption was one of the primary stimulants to the American economy in the 1920s, with people taking advantage of higher
wages to purchase household goods. As the decade went on, employers returned fewer
profits to the workers, which diminished their ability to purchase nonessential goods and
services. Business owners began taking more profit for themselves and expanding their
production capabilities. In economic terms, the supply side increased at the expense of
the demand side because owners kept wages as low as possible (Tindall and Shi, 2006, p.
1147). The declining purchase power did not initially affect business because consumers
could buy on credit.
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This related to the third cause of the Great Depression: increasing debt. Because workers
had less disposable income to buy the products they needed or wanted, credit became
an option for them to buy now and pay later. People began paying for larger and more
expensive items with credit, such as automobiles. With wages not increasing fast enough
to keep pace with the credit demands, many people defaulted on loans. Bankers, hoping to
recoup their losses, often invested funds in the stock market. After the market crash suddenly the banks were also struggling to stay alive. Between 1930 and 1933, banks began to
fail, and this essentially shut down the American financial system (Bernanke, 2000).
A fourth issue was that the economic collapse became a worldwide problem. The United
States had the largest economy in the world at the time and, during the 1920s, spent a tremendous amount of money investing in rebuilding Europe after World War I. But when the
European economy started to falter, the United States suspended its international investments, and this weakened the economies of nations throughout the world. To compound
this issue, America increased the import tariff with the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930.
This law raised U.S. tariffs on roughly 20,000 imported goods, making it very difficult for
manufacturers in Europe to sell goods to the United States. As noted historian Richard
Hofstadter described it, this legislation “was a virtual declaration of economic war on
the rest of the world” (Houck, 2001). For example, the tariff raised duties on all Japanese
imports by 23 percent, causing hundreds of small businesses in Japan to close (Brendon,
2000). Furthermore, when Germany could not pay back war debts to France and England
in 1928, these nations in turn could not repay their debts to the United States, and a devastating depression swept through these European nations. In Germany, a young Adolph
Hitler took advantage of the depression in his country to ascend to power (Cravens, 2009).
Hoover and the Depression
While Hoover lacked the authority to prevent banks from failing or offering a safety net
to those who were penniless and without jobs, he nevertheless attempted to coordinate
a federal response to help the nation. The problem was that he acted neither quickly nor
creatively to the crisis. His first plan was to convene a conference of business leaders in
Washington, DC. There, he tried to win their support for a voluntary plan to help the
economy and restore confidence among Americans. He wanted business executives to
retain their employees; at the same time, he tried to convince labor leaders not to strike for higher wages. By
1931, it was clear that these voluntary measures were
not working. Because the federal government did not
have the power to enforce its demands, business leaders
simply did whatever they thought would best help their
own businesses survive. Other Hoover programs also
backfired. While he asked Congress for a massive (at
that time) $432 million public works program, he was
so concerned about a federal deficit that he raised taxes
in 1932 to pay for it. This was perhaps the worst year of Squatter’s shacks in Central Park
the Depression, and Hoover’s taxes made it even more with the landmark Dakota Apartment building in the background.
difficult.
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Section 3.3 The Crash (1929–1933)
However, Hoover did make some positive attempts to combat the Depression. One example was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which granted federal loans
to struggling businesses, such as banks, insurance companies, and railroads, to prevent
them from collapse. It was widely regarded as a failure because, despite its budget and
authority to lend several billion dollars to railroads and banks, RFC officials only loaned
money to organizations it felt had enough collateral to pay back the loans (Ippolito, 2003).
This was a too-conservative approach, and the RFC only used 20 percent of its funds to
help businesses in need.
The Response to Hoover
Hoover very quickly began losing the support and confidence of the American people.
Unemployment was one of the most visible signs of the Depression. It was not unusual for
some cities to have a 50 percent unemployment rate. Men without work aimlessly walked
the streets during the day in hopes of finding employment. They had few options with no
governmental aid and only private charities doing what they could to feed the poor and
homeless.
In most areas of the country during the Depression, the African American unemployment,
poverty, and homelessness rates were higher than they were for the white population. The
great migration resulted in nearly 400,000 African Americans leaving their homes in the South
to find work in the North. Even though African Americans were closely tied to the Republican Party, many of Hoover’s decisions alienated them. He failed to renounce lynching and
nominated John J. Parker to the Supreme Court, a man who believed African American participation in politics was a “source of evil and danger to both races” (Jonas, 2005). Though the
Senate rejected the nomination, it brought Hoover’s own judgment into question.
The press corps soon abandoned Hoover, too. He rarely said anything of substance in his
news conferences, and soon the 200 reporters who typically gathered to hear him speak dwindled to just 12.
Without the support of the press, Hoover was unable to
convince the American people that he was working to
bring an end to the Depression.
The American farmers were especially distraught. Like
those seeking industrial jobs, the farmers also struggled. One-third of all farmers lost their lands, and they
migrated further westward with whatever possessions
they could carry with them in hopes of starting over.
Western farmers not only had the Depression to contend
with, but also the worst drought in the nation’s history.
Their fields turned into dust bowls that made it nearly
impossible for some to grow crops. John Steinbeck’s
classic novel The Grapes of Wrath told the harrowing
story of an Oklahoma farm family who abandoned their
land because of the dust storms, drought, and depression (Gregory, 1989). High interest rates also hurt them,
along with the soaring costs of farming goods and the
African American seasonal cotton
workers waiting in hopes of
being hired for a day. During the
Great Depression, tractors, combined with low cotton prices, created hard times for agricultural
workers.
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Section 3.3 The Crash (1929–1933)
Technology in America
Rural Electrification
Nighttime during the 1930s in Indiana was a vast sea of darkness, as it was for nearly all of rural America. In the countryside, the only light after sundown came from candles and oil lamps. The main electrical company in Indiana was the Indiana General Service, and only 4 percent of its customers lived in
rural areas. In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act (REA) ended the electrical
isolation of agrarian populations throughout America. Indiana was the first state to begin
this process, and the initial REA farm in Muncie turned on its lights on May 22, 1936—the result of
60 miles of electrical cable. But electrification meant more than just light in darkness and a stronger
connection to the outside world. It also opened an important new market for electrical appliances.
The REA helped private electrification companies recoup their investments by sponsoring traveling
appliance shows beginning in 1938. Patterned after a Barnum and Bailey circus, these shows included
a huge tent erected in an empty field; instead of lions and tigers, there were electrical stoves, refrigerators, and hay dryers inside the tents. More than 5,000 people per day traveled to these big tents
from neighboring towns.
There were several significant effects of electrification. It improved farm life through the influx of
labor-saving products. However, at the same time, it began a vast reduction in farm population
because, as productivity increased, the number of farm laborers decreased. Most importantly, as
David Nye wrote in his book Electrifying America, electrification ended rural isolation by increasing a
city’s integration “irrevocably to a national culture.” Rural electrification meant that those separated
from large industrial centers could now go to the movies, listen to the radio, and eventually watch
television. Electricity was the enabling factor in the end of their isolation.
For further reading see:
Nye, D. E. (1990). Electrifying America: Social meanings of a new technology, 1880–1940. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
low prices for their crops. But it was more than economic and environmental conditions
that threatened their lives. Farmers felt that no one in government supported them or the
agrarian value system in America. In response, they established the Farmers’ Holiday
Association. Founded in 1932 by Milo Reno and the Iowa Farmers’ Union, its goals were
to raise national attention to their plight, as well as increase prices for farm products and
decrease foreclosures on farmers’ lands (Stock, 1997, p. 128).
Families everywhere suffered under the intense economic strains. Many shared homes
with relatives who had no other place to go, while others with rooms to spare accepted
borders who paid rent. The experience for women was also difficult because the Depression erased many of the professional gains they had made. With jobs being scarce, most
believed that women belonged in the home and not taking a job away from out-of-work
men. As a result, women tended to their domestic responsibilities and looked for ways to
earn extra money by doing laundry, selling baked goods, or sewing clothes. Despite these
hardships, the previously increasing divorce rate temporarily declined during the Depression (Clarke-Stewart and Brentano, 2007). In the 1930s, many men walked away from
their families when they could not bear the indignity of being unable to provide for them.
Violence was also more common in households during the Depression as men sometimes
expressed their frustrations through drinking and abuse. Jane Addams made the following observation about families and the Depression in 1931: “I have watched fear grip the
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Section 3.4 Roosevelt and the New Deal (1933–1939)
people in our neighborhood around Hull-House. Men
and women have seen their small savings disappear.
Heads of families see hunger for their children—one of
the most wretched things to endure” (Fradin and Fradin, 2006, p. 174).
American veterans were another group that strongly
protested the Hoover policies. During the summer of
1932, more than 45,000 World War I veterans, calling
themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force or the Bonus
Army, marched on Washington, DC. Most of them had
lost their jobs during the Depression, and then the government failed to uphold an eight-year-old promise to
pay a bonus due to them for their military service. During the march, the Senate did not pass the “bonus bill.”
This bill would have moved forward the date when the
veterans received their bonus, and Hoover feared violence after the bill’s defeat. He called his Army chief of
staff, Douglas MacArthur, to drive tanks through the
streets to disperse the marchers. The sad irony of sending the U.S. Army against its own veterans was difficult
for many to accept (Dickson and Allen, 2004). This was
the most devastating blow to Hoover’s reputation.
Bonus Army veterans from California bed down on the Capitol
grounds. The World War I veterans
protested to Congress for passage
of the Bonus Bill, which allowed
early payment of the bonuses, some
worth as much as $625 per soldier.
Conclusion
The first three years of the Great Depression demonstrated the severity and complexity of
the economic problems facing the nation. A few days before his death, former President
Calvin Coolidge, who had championed a business environment with few governmental
regulations and reveled in the prosperity of the 1920s, saw little hope for the future. In
January 1933, he told a reporter, “In other periods of depression it has always been possible to see some things which were solid and upon which you could base hope. But as I
look about, I now see nothing to give ground for hope, nothing of man” (Watkins, 1999,
p. 53). In the months before the 1932 election, few believed that Hoover would remain in
office. His policies did little to bring relief, and with the Republicans controlling the White
House for 12 years, the American people were ready for a change. They wanted a “new
deal” with the hopes of bringing an end to the depression and the start of a new era of
prosperity.
3.4 Roosevelt and the New Deal (1933–1939)
I
n 1932, during some of the worst times of the Depression, Democrats nominated the
governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to run for the presidency. He had
a famous name (distant cousin to former president Theodore Roosevelt) and a fiery
and charismatic persona. While he was giving his acceptance speech at the Democratic
convention, the Bonus Army still camped in Washington, DC, and the nation struggled
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desperately in the throes of the Depression. Roosevelt had a comment in his speech that
he delivered with particular conviction. He said, “Republican leaders not only have failed
in material things, they have failed in national vision, because in disaster they have held
out no hope . . . I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people”
(Houck, 2001). His rhetoric inspired the American people at a time when hope was fading.
After Roosevelt won the 1932 election, the New Deal became one of the most well-known
political labels in American history. While the merits and results are still debated today, it
unquestionably changed the course of U.S. history.
When Roosevelt first uttered these words, the New Deal was an undefined hope for change,
but it eventually became a series of programs that fundamentally reshaped America and
included the beginnings of the modern welfare system and increasing powers of regulation for the federal government. The programs reinterpreted the relationship between the
people and their government; in the process, Roosevelt became known as the “founding
father” of American liberalism. As historian Alonzo Hamby wrote, FDR’s “legacy to the
nation was no less than a new political tradition” (Hamby, 1992).
The Rendezvous with Destiny
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was born in 1882 to a wealthy family in New York.
Though not enamored with the academic world, he attended Harvard and Columbia Law
School but did not distinguish himself as a remarkable scholar. Nevertheless, because of
his heritage and family name, a well-known Wall Street law firm offered him a position,
and it appeared his future would be one of a typical lawyer. Roosevelt had other ideas
though and knew that his passions lay with politics. He got his first opportunity to pursue
this in 1910, when the Democratic Party nominated him to run for state assembly. Visibly
struggling through some of his speeches and his attempts to connect with the farmers
who asked him questions, few gave his political career much hope. However, Roosevelt
won the election in an upset (Hamby, 1992).
Roosevelt soon lent his support to New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson in his bid to
become president, and FDR eventually became an important presence for Wilson in New
York. In return, after Wilson won the presidency, he
appointed Roosevelt to the position of assistant secretary of the navy. It was the same job once held by Theodore Roosevelt. FDR soon found the appointment far
more important than he first imagined as the United
States entered World War I. Though FDR did not have
a military background, he became responsible for the
daily administrative duties of the entire navy, and he
performed his job admirably. After the war, the Democratic Party selected him to run in the 1920 presidential
election as vice president to James Cox. Despite the loss Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
when the country voted for the Republican ticket led by campaigning for president against
Warren Harding, it seemed that FDR was destined to incumbent Herbert Hoover. A
enjoy a long life in politics. However, a personal tragedy paraplegic from polio, he used his
nearly ended that career when, at age 39, he contracted car to compensate for his difficulty
polio.
in walking.
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At this time polio was a frightening and contagious disease that attacked the central
nervous system and destroyed or greatly diminished muscular capabilities. It included
a spectrum of symptoms from weakness to paralysis. Though we often forget about it
today (Jonas Salk’s vaccine in the 1950s virtually eradicated polio), in the 1920s it was
common for cities to have polio epidemics in the summer months (Oshinsky, 2005b). For
FDR, polio was an incredible personal struggle in which he battled not just the disease,
but also his overbearing mother’s plan for him to live the rest of his life on their country
estate as an invalid. FDR wanted an active and independent lifestyle and endured several
years of intense rehabilitative therapy. Despite his efforts, he never regained the use of his
legs and walked with the help of leg braces the rest of his life. Undaunted by his handicap,
in 1928 he returned to politics as the governor of New York, and with several years of success there, he became the favored choice to run for president in 1932. The election was a
landslide, with FDR defeating Hoover soundly in all but four states. It was a “rendezvous
with destiny” (Roosevelt, 1944).
its
The Inauguration
The Depression reached it most devastating point in the months between FDR’s victory
and when he entered the White House. The banks were collapsing, panic was growing,
and hope was fading. When FDR finally took the oath of office, he knew that this was a
moment to inject confidence in the American people, and his rousing speech on March
4, 1933, did just that. In the midst of panic, Americans saw and heard confidence. Most
notably, FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (Roosevelt, 1944). While
few people knew of his battles with polio, a secret that even the press kept for him, FDR
included allusions to it in his address. He said that the fear that gripped the nation was
a “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert
retreat into advance.” The word “paralyzes” was an important one. Through his own
experiences with literal paralysis, he deeply empathized
with the economic paralysis most Americans felt. He
knew the fear that it brought, and understood that victory came only by meeting the challenge head-on.
He did not enter the White House alone. When we
consider the significance of FDR, we must also take a
moment to look at the importance of his wife. Eleanor
Roosevelt was a woman of extreme influence in the history of the 20th century. Her social activism turned her
into an icon and an inspiration around the world. She
transformed the position of “First Lady” of the United
States from being a ceremonial observer to an active participant in the politics of her day. She became the first
woman to serve as a delegate to the United Nations. She
was involved politically as the first woman to lead the
Democratic Party, and many thought of her as the “conscience of the nation,” “FDR’s eyes and ears,” and the
“first lady of the world” (Black, 1999). She also broke
down many other gender barriers by becoming the first
woman to testify before Congress, offer her commentary
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt completes the first flight ever made by a
president’s wife when she flew from
Newark, New Jersey, to Washington,
DC. March 16, 1933.
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on the radio, speak before a party convention, write a syndicated column in a newspaper,
and go on tour earning money as a lecturer. She also became the first presidential wife to
hold her own press conferences (Goodwin, 1995).
Despite her prodigious capabilities, while her husband spoke about escaping the fear that
gripped the nation during his inauguration, Eleanor recalled that the moment was “very,
very solemn and a little terrifying” (Wolin, 2010). It was terrifying because Eleanor said
that “when Franklin got to that part of his speech when he said it might become necessary for him to assume powers ordinarily granted to a President in war time, he received
the biggest demonstration.” Eleanor was concerned about a president, even her husband,
having wartime powers in an era of peace. She said, “One has a feeling of going in blindly
because we’re in a tremendous stream, and none of us knows where we’re going to land”
(Schlesinger, 2003).
The First 100 Days—Banks and Beer
The Roosevelt administration hit the ground running. From March to June 1933, a period
of time referred to as FDR’s first 100 days in office, he initiated a tremendous amount of
new legislation directed at immediate improvements to the economy. His decisive actions
were unprecedented in American history. The first place he directed his attention was the
banks. He assembled his cabinet of advisors and decided to close all the banks for four
days, calling it a bank holiday. The purpose of it was to prevent the runs on the banks
by investors who were afraid of losing all of their money. It also gave the federal government time to figure out how to write legislation to strengthen them (J. E. Smith, 2008, p.
306). The result was the Emergency Banking Act that Congress signed into law three days
later. It gave power to the Treasury Department to inspect the banks and ensure that they
were operating wisely. The act also provided some federal funds to further support the
banks. Importantly, FDR rejected the notion of nationalizing the banks, or bringing them all under the control
of the federal government. This was what Hitler was
doing in Germany during this period, and FDR wanted
to avoid this solution. The Emergency Banking Act was
successful in restoring confidence as $1 billion in currency quickly moved from under people’s mattresses or
in coffee cans back into the banks. One of the reasons for
this confidence was the creation of the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation (FDIC). This corporation guaranteed that the government insured all bank deposits
under $5,000. If the bank failed, customers got their
money back from the government.
FDR knew that improving morale was also essential in
any recovery, both physical and economic. He felt that
his own presence was one way to achieve this, and in
an era before television and long before the Internet, the
best way to do this was through radio. Radio brought
his voice instantly into the living rooms of millions of
Americans, and he called these informal addresses
Portraits of Franklin Roosevelt
(1882–1945) and his Vice President,
John Garner (1868–1967), on the
cover of the Official Inaugural Program, March 4, 1933.
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Fireside Chats. One of positive messages in his first chat
was to announce plans to eliminate prohibition. Called
the Beer Bill, it legalized the sale and consumption of
3.2 percent alcohol beers and light wines. Within a few
days of taking office, FDR managed to raise the nation’s
spirits with alcohol and made them feel more secure
with their local banks (Kiewe, 2007, p. 134). Eventually
this would lead to the Twenty-first Amendment that
completely repealed Prohibition.
The Emergency Banking Act of 1933
temporarily closed down insolvent
banks. One-third of the country’s
banks never reopened.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act
The farmers were one of the groups of people hardest
hit by the Depression. As a result, FDR tailored his first
massive program to come to their aid with a plan called
the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). It passed Congress in May 1933 and had several goals. The first was to reduce the output from American farms, which resulted in the
surplus of food that drove down the price at market. Representatives from the major commodities industries (corn, cotton, wheat, tobacco, and rice) decided on an overall production limit. Then the government took this number, and the AAA directors officially told
each farmer how much they could produce. The government also had funds to pay some
farmers for leaving their land open. This worked well in the short term and strengthened
the agricultural industry. But mainly, the large farms reaped most of the benefits, and
it put the smaller farmer at a disadvantage. As a result, in 1936 the Supreme Court suspended the AAA because the Justices argued it was unconstitutional to limit farm production (O’Sullivan and Keuchel, 1989).
The National Industrial Recovery Act
While clearly the agricultural workers were struggling, so too was industry, and FDR
addressed its problems through the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). There
were two main components to this plan. The first was the creation of public works projects to improve and beautify the nation’s infrastructure and also put people to work. FDR
allocated $3.3 billion to create new buildings, roads, and flood controls. There are numerous examples of these projects that are still in use today, such as Chicago’s subway system,
Skyline Drive in Virginia, and New York’s Triborough Bridge. The second main part of
this plan was establishment of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). This was
controversial because the federal government established, along with input from consumers, laborers, and industry leaders, “fair practices” or codes of conduct in all industries.
Textiles were the first industry to come under these practices.
The process worked like this. Business leaders proposed a code that covered items like
production schedules, wages, and prices. The code then went to workers and consumers
for review, who highlighted key areas where, from their perspective, the code was unfair.
The NRA then stepped in to work through a compromise. These compromises led to
minimum wages, elimination of child labor, collective bargaining for union workers, and
limits to working hours per week. While these were positive developments that are an
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unquestioned part of the industrial workforce today, the Supreme Court called the NRA
unconstitutional in 1935. There were significant problems with it, such as larger organizations dominating the code writing and tailoring them to their benefit. There were other
problems, too. Most African Americans received no benefits from the program. Nevertheless, it was a short-term boost to industry that despite its abrupt ending left an enduring
mark (Brands, 2009).
Tennessee Valley Authority
There were two competing ideas for how to bring the nation out of the Depression. The
first was through private interests and the second was through nationalization—having
the federal government take over certain aspects of the economy. Examples of the first
approach included the AAA and NRA, while an example of the second was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The TVA was a plan to use federal funds to help develop
sources of inexpensive electricity. During World War I, the government began construction of a large dam at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River in Alabama. When the war
came to an end, the project stalled and was left unfinished. FDR thought that 1933 was
the time to return to it and proposed completing Muscle Shoals and building other dams
in the region known as the Tennessee Valley. Its goals were to reduce flooding, develop
electricity, promote reforestation, and assist local farmers (Hargrove, 1994). Ultimately, its
results were both positive and negative. It brought increased prosperity to the region, and
saved several millions of acres of land from erosion. But, overall, the TVA did not end the
poverty in the region, and thousands of families lost their farms when the government
pushed them off their land (Davidson, 2008). The TVA still exists today and provides electricity that serves 9 million people in 7 states.
Welfare Reforms
For the average American out of work, these New Deal programs might have been, in
theory, a positive step on the road to recovery; however, they did not provide immediate relief. In truth, FDR did not consider direct aid to
the people his most important task, but it was important enough that he addressed it in his first 100 days.
FDR attempted to achieve this in his first term through
three programs called the Civilian Conservation Corps
(CCC), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration
(FERA), and the Civil Works Administration (CWA).
The CCC targeted unemployed and unmarried men
between 18 and 25 years old and sought to give them
jobs. More than 3 million men earned $30 per month
working on national conservation projects in parks, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
forests, and other recreational areas. FERA provided having lunch at a mess table in
money directly to states to help relief agencies. In part Camp Fechner, a Civilian Conthis included a “dole” or a welfare system. Finally, the servation camp, at Big Meadows,
CWA put 4 million people to work in a variety of civil Virginia. He is surrounded by uniprojects, such as leaf raking and ditch digging. Look- formed CCC recruits and members
ing back on these public welfare efforts, FDR said the of his administration.
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Section 3.4 Roosevelt and the New Deal (1933–1939)
following at his second inauguration address: “the test
of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance
of those who have much. It is whether we add to the
abundance of those who have too little” (Alter, 2006).
Relationship with Congress
Roosevelt had a complex relationship with the U.S.
The New Deal Farm Security
Congress and was a master at pressuring and comproAdministration offered benefits
mising with his conservative detractors to the New Deal
to struggling farmers and their
programs. Each of the bills was different in how FDR
families.
negotiated with Congress, but the Farm Relief Act is
important for understanding the overall relationship.
The act sought to increase the number of agricultural
products that the AAA could control. At the beginning, FDR sent a message to Congress asking for quick passage due to the timing of the crop cycle. It was March, and the
farmers needed immediate relief for the upcoming growing season. Nevertheless, there
was significant delay in Congress. Joseph Martin, the Republican representative from
Massachusetts (and later the Speaker of the House), suggested that the Farm Relief Act
would transform the United States into Moscow-style communism. He also thought that
the increased taxes would unfairly burden the American consumer. The act eventually
became law, with a key Roosevelt concession. He appointed George Peek, one of the most
vocal opponents of crop restriction, to actually head the AAA. Peek’s appointment was
ironic given that one of the AAA’s main goals was the planned restriction of crop production. This concession began what one historian called an “enduring program of national
planning in agriculture,” and FDR made it a reality through an unusual and significant
compromise (Freidel, 1990).
Timeline of the 100 Days
Not all of the main programs enacted during the first 100 days have been discussed. To
give you an indication of the speed and scope of the legislation during this first 100 days,
here is a synopsis of some of the main legislation (Brinkley, 2010):
Date
Program
Description
March 9, 1933
Emergency Banking Relief Act
See earlier description in chapter.
March 20
The Economy Act
Gave the federal government the power to control
salaries and reorganize agencies in the interest of
the economy.
March 31
Civilian Conservation Corps
See earlier description in chapter.
April 7
Farm Relief Act
See earlier description in chapter.
April 19
Gold Standard
Abandoned the gold standard. See the Gold
Repeal Joint Resolution below.
May 12
Federal Emergency Relief Act
See earlier description in chapter.
May 12
Agricultural Adjustment Act
See earlier description in chapter.
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Section 3.5 Depression Era Culture (1930s)
Date
Program
Description
May 12
Emergency Farm Mortgage Act
Provided for the refinancing of farm mortgages.
May 18
Tennessee Valley Authority
See earlier description in chapter.
June 5
Gold Repeal Joint Resolution
Canceled the gold clause in federal and private
debts. This meant that all debts could be paid in
legal tender. This was the final step in ending the
gold standard.
June 13
Home Owners Loan Act
Refinanced home mortgages at lower monthly
payments.
June 16
National Industrial Recovery Act
See earlier description in chapter.
Conclusion
FDR’s first 100 days in office was a remarkable period and is known today as the genesis
of the “alphabet soup” of programs (because of their various acronyms like the AAA,
CCC, and FERA) that contributed, sometimes in very controversial ways, to easing the
economic strains facing the nation. It needs to be emphasized that neither FDR nor these
programs brought an end to the Depression itself. The Depression lasted not only well
beyond FDR’s first 100 days in office, but also through his firs...