The New Deal (1932-1938): Reviving America's Economy

1. The New Deal, 1932-1938 • Safety net: • Direct government emergency support to people in trouble.Works Progress Administration; Civilian Conservation Corps • Stability: • Regulatory institutions that protect the capitalist system from its own worst impulses Emergency Banking Act; Security and Exchange Commission • Security: • Long term programs that provide economic security to working and middle-class people Social Security; The National Labor Relations Act

2. Private Sector supporters of the New Deal • Consumer products sector • Western developers (Henry Kaiser) • Old WWI War Industries Board executives (Bernard Baruch) • RCA and radio station owners • The telecommunications industry (AT&T) and anti-anti-trust movement • Big agriculture Henry Kaiser of Kaiser Aluminum

3. FDR The Emergency Banking Act, 1933 • Vastly increases the Reconstruction Finance Corporation’s pot of money • Federal Government issues “fiscal conservators” for banks to make sure they’re running competently • Creates Security and Exchange Commission to oversee the stock exchange • Creates rules that separate savings banks from brokerage houses • Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, guaranteeing savings up to $5,000 Nervous bankers in 1933 standing on Wall Street

4. The Glass-Steagal Act of 1933 • Banks can’t affiliate with brokerage firms. • Banks can’t pack their boards with stockbrokers.

5. Security and Exchange Commission • Public companies must publish budget, officers and their financial backgrounds • Must have their companies audited Joe “I’ll drink to that” Kennedy, first Chair of the SEC

6. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), 1933 • Millions of dollars for direct emergency relief to the poor • matching grants for state poor relief • power to take over state relief systems if they’re corrupt or stingy Harry Hopkins, FERA administrator

7. The Civil Works Administration, 1933 • Half a million state highways upgraded • Hundreds of bridges laid • schools, courthouses, city halls, libraries, zoos, sewage plants, heating plants, police stations, hospitals, jails, state capitol buildings went up • Almost 500 new airports built • 250,000 outdoor bathrooms constructed along the nation’s roads

8. The Public Works Administration, 1933 • 583 municipal water systems • 368 street and highway projects • 622 sewage systems • 263 hospitals • 522 schools • including replacements for the great Long Beach earthquake of 1933 • You’re welcome

9. Let’s plant trees: Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933 • Homeless boys recruited by Labor Department to plant trees • Housed by War Department • Supervised by Interior Department through the National Parks Service • Put three million idle youngsters to work by 1942

10. Tammany Hall and Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York; FDR and James Curley of Boston

11. The Dawes Act, 1887“Kill the Indian to save the man.” • Privatization of reservation land • 1881 Indians held 155,000,000 acres • 1890 they held 104,000,000 • 1900 they held 77,000,000 Indian Reorganization Act1934 • Repealed the Dawes Act • Allowed communal landholdings • Organized self governing tribes with power of self-incorporation • Gave tribes right to ignore the act. John Collier

12. The National IndustrialRecovery Act, 1933 • Created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) • Established production codes for each industry to eliminate wasteful competition and to establish labor standards • Created boards consisting of businesspeople, labor leaders and consumers • Section 7(a) gave workers the right to organize

14. Agricultural Adjustment Act • Subsection of the Farm Relief Act of 1933 • Paid farmers not to produce crops, meat, and dairy products • Hoped that this would stabilize (increase) prices • Put thousands of farm hands out of work

15. General Strike inSan Francisco, 1934

16. Textile Workers’ Strike, 1934 Confrontation in Greenville, South Carolina, 1934

17. Dust bowl, 1934-1935

18. The Oklahoma migration,1934-1940 • Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas farmers fleeing the dust bowl • Displaced by the Agricultural Adjustment Act • Headed west because a smaller migration had gone west in the 1920s • 3.5 million migrants came west Dorthea Lange photograph of Oklahoma migrant

19. FDR to the NAACP’s Walter White "I did not choose the tools with which I must work. Had I been permitted to choose them I would have selected quite different ones. But I've got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk.“ FDR to Walter White Walter White

20. October, 1934: Claude Neal lynched in Jackson Country, Florida; federal authorities do nothing. Congress proposes new anti-lynch bill which punishes lynching as federal offense with five years imprisonment But the bill fails to get through the Senate

21. “The Popular Front,” 1934 • Rise of fascism requires all Communist Parties to engage in strategic alliances with capitalist democracies

22. Father John Coughlin

23. Huey Long says “Share the Wealth,” 1934 • 5,000 dollars to every American family • Limit personal fortunes to 1 million dollars • Old age pensions of 30 a month to persons over sixty. Governor/Senator/would-be-dictator, Huey Long

24. Fascist plot to take over America? General Smedley Darlington Butler

25. Upton Sinclair: End Poverty In California (EPIC), 1934 • Tax unused land at 10 percent or more • Unused land would be sold and widely distributed • Revenues used to finance cooperatives

26. Ham and Eggs! • “Thirty every Thursday” – 30 dollars to seniors every Thursday • In 1938 the measure was put on the California ballot • It lost by ten percent of the vote

27. Congressional elections, 1934 • Democrats gain seats in House and Senate • 9 in House (now 322/103) • 69 seats in the Senate

28. The Roosevelt Coalition • Organized labor • Progressive women • African-Americans • The Urban-ethnic Catholic/Jewish vote

29. Second New Deal The Works Progress Administration of 1935 • Funded artists, writers, musicians and theater companies • “Hell, they’ve got to eat too.” –Harry Hopkins Bernard Zakheim, Coit Tower Mural

30. Second New Deal Federal Theatre Project • 1,000 plays produced • 50,000 performances • . . . reaching 25 million Americans • via 12,000 FTP actors Hattie Flannigan, Director of the Federal Theater Project

31. Second New Deal Federal Theatre Project Orson Welles, all-Haitian cast version of Macbeth

32. Diego Rivera, Mexican muralist

33. Second New Deal Kentucky Post Office Mural, WPA, 1937

34. Second New Deal WPA murals: Callanan Middle School, Iowa, 1937

35. Second New Deal William Schwartz, WPA mural: Fairfield, Illinois, 1936

36. Angie Debo, Federal Writers Project Historian

37. Second New Deal The Wagner Labor Relations Act, 1935 • Sets up a board to arbitrate labor disputes and hold union elections • Sets up an independent legal code that prohibits the “unlawful labor practice,” which includes . . . • Firing a worker for trying to organize a union • Firing a worker for trying to enforce a contract • Encourages unions to sign “no strike pledges” (no strike during the life of a contract) • But it excluded domestic and agricultural workers.

38. The Congress of Industrial Organizations founded in 1935 . . . included the United Mine Workers, the Mill and Smelter Workers, and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. John Lewis and Sidney Hillman John L. Lewis and Bishop Sheil, 1939

39. Sit down strikes in Michigan and Ohio

40. Memorial Day Massacre, 1937,on the outskirts of Chicago, Republic Steel

41. 200 dollars a month to everybody over 60 . . . Provided that they spend it in 30 days The Townsend Plan Dr. Francis Townsend

42. Second New Deal Social Security, 1935 • Establish a dedicated payroll tax for retirement • "one of the major turning points of American history. No longer could 'rugged individualism' convincingly insist that government, though obliged to provide a climate favorable for the growth of business profits, had no responsibility whatever for the welfare of the human beings who did the work from which profit was reaped.“ • But it excluded domestic and agricultural workers.

43. FDR wins White House in 1936 – 523 electoral votes to 8