Hard Times Families Face the Depression Popular Culture Views the Depression

1. Even though the New Deal did not end the depression, it ushered in an unprecedented expansion of the federal government that redefined its role. By seeking to spread benefits more equitably among neglected portions of the population, the New Deal attracted African Americans, professional women, and organized labor to the Democratic Party.

2. For the first time, organized labor had federal support, and prominent blacks and women were brought into government service. The New Deal laid the foundation for a modified welfare state and created a political coalition that would dominate national politics for most of the next three decades.

3. Hard Times • Families Face the Depression • Popular Culture Views the Depression

4. A question of importance of course to be considered is: • How did American families react to the deprivations of the Great Depression?

5. The depression led to hardship for many Americans. Thousands had no jobs; thousands more experienced downward mobility. Commercial banks had invested heavily in stocks and, as banks failed, many middle-class Americans lost their life savings.

6. Race, ethnicity, age, class, and gender all influenced how Americans experienced the depression. • Blacks, Mexican Americans, and others already on the economic margins saw their opportunities shrink further and hard times weighed heavily on the nation’s senior citizens of all races, many of whom faced destitution. • People who believed in the ethic of upward mobility through hard work suddenly found themselves floundering in a society that didn’t reward them for their efforts.

7. The damage to individual lives cannot be measured solely in dollars; the detrimental impact of not being able to provide for one’s family was great. • After exhausting their savings and credit, many families faced the humiliation of going on relief. • Hardships left an “invisible scar,” and for the majority of Americans, the crux of the Great Depression was the fear of losing control over their lives.

8. What was the “invisible scar” of the Great Depression? • Many Americans suffered silently in the 1930s: • living on less income and accepting lower-paying, more menial jobs. • The loss of identity that resulted from unemployment, moving to poorer neighborhoods, or accepting charity was also psychologically damaging for both breadwinners and their spouses.

9. Sociologists who studied family life during the 1930s found that the depression usually intensified existing behavior. On the whole, far more families stayed together during the depression than broke apart.

10. Men and women experienced the Great Depression differently. Men considered themselves failures if they were no longer breadwinners, while women’s sense of importance increased as they struggled to keep their families afloat.

11. Family lives on public relief funds (1936)

12. The depression left a legacy of fear for many Americans that they might someday lose control of their lives again. • The depression limited the success of young men who entered their twenties during the depression. Robbed of time and opportunity to build careers, they were described as “runners, delayed at the gun.”

13. During the depression • the marriage rate dropped • the popularity of birth control increased, resulting in a declining birth rate. • In United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries (1936), a federal court struckdown all federal restrictions on the disseminationof contraceptive information. • Abortion remained illegal, but the number of women undergoing the procedure increased. • Margaret Sanger pioneered the establishment of professionally staffed birth control clinics and in 1937 won the American Medical Association’s endorsement of contraception.

14. Women workers did not fare well, but gender divisions of labor insulated some working women from unemployment. • In the 1930s, the total number of married women employed outside the home rose 50 percent; working women faced resentment and discrimination in the workplace, a sizable minority of women being the sole support of their families. • Single, divorced, deserted, or widowed women had no husbands to support them. This was especially true of poor black women; a survey of Chicago revealed that two-fifths of adult black women in the city were single. • Many fields where women workers already had been concentrated suffered less from economic contraction than did the heavy industries; when the depression ended, women were even more concentrated in low-paying, dead-end jobs than when it began.

15. White workers pushed minorities out of menial jobs. • Observers paid little attention to the impact of the depression on the black family, as white men and women willingly sought out jobs usually held by blacks or other minorities.

16. During the depression, most men and women continued to believe that the sexes have fundamentally different roles and responsibilities and that a woman’s life should be shaped by marriage and her husband’s career.

17. The depression also had a negative and sometimes permanent impact on the lives of young people, whose career aspirations were often delayed or unfulfilled. • Some of America’s young people became so demoralized by the depression that they became hobos or “sisters of the road.” • College was a privilege for a distinct minority, and many college students became involved in political movements; the Student Strike against War drew student support across the country.

18. What were the stages of the 1930s dust bowl disaster? • A severe drought on the Great Plains, after years of ill-advised farming techniques, - To maximize profit, farmers stripped the land of its natural vegetation, destroying the ecological balance of the plains; when the rains dried up, there was nothing to hold the soil. This created severe wind erosion and ultimately a series of dust storms. In May 1934 the storms reached the Upper Midwest and even the East, where they blackened the skies

19. The dust bowl was one of the reasons for the great migration of “Okies” from the region. (The other was the eviction of farm workers from the land due to the growth of large-scale agriculture.) • “Okie” descendants came to make up a large proportion of California’s population, especially in the San Joaquin Valley.

21. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath immortalized the Okies, ruined by the ecological disasterand unable to compete with large-scale corporate farms, who headed west in response to promises of good jobs in California. • A few Okies were professionals, business proprietors, or white-collar workers, and the drive west was fairly easy along Route 66.

23. California agriculture was large-scale, intensive, and diversified, and its massive irrigation system laid the groundwork for serious future environmental problems. • Key California crops had staggered harvest times and required a great deal of transient labor; a steady supply of cheap migrant labor made this type of farming feasible. • At first, migrants met hostility from old time Californians, but they stayed and filled important roles in California’s expanding economy.

24. America’s Minorities and the New Deal • Easter and Southern European ethnics • Formidable force within Democratic Party • Received New Deal aid through programs targeted at urban areas

25. African Americans • Marian Anderson • New Deal did more to reinforce patterns of racial discrimination than to advance the cause of racial equality • Administration took symbolic steps in support of civil rights but did not make the issue a priority

26. America’s Minorities and the New Deal(cont) • Mexican Americans • Deportation campaign continued from Hoover administration • Not really included in most New Deal programs • Native Americans • John Collier at the Bureau of Indian Affairs • Commitment to cultural pluralism • Indian Reorganization Act (1934) • Revoked allotment practices • Redistributed land to tribes and otherwise fostered community authority

27. African Americans in the Depression • African Americans, who had always known discrimination and limited opportunities, viewed the depression differently from most whites. • Despite the black migration to the cities of the North, most African Americans still lived in the South and earned less than a quarter of the annual average wages of a factory worker.

28. Throughout the 1920s, southern agriculture suffered from falling prices and overproduction, so the depression made an already desperate situation worse. • The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, which some black farmers joined, could do little to reform an agricultural system based on deep economic and racial inequalities

29. The hasty trials and the harsh sentences in the 1931 Scottsboro, Alabama, rape case along with an increase in lynching in the early 1930s gave black Americans a strong incentive to head for the North and the Midwest. • Harlem, one of their main destinations, was already strained by the enormous influx of African Americans in the 1920s and, in 1935, was the setting of the only major race riot of the decade, when anger exploded over the lack of jobs, a slowdown in relief services, and economic exploitation of blacks.

30. Partly in response to the riot but mainly in return for growing black allegiance to the Democratic Party, the New Deal channeled significant amounts of relief money toward blacks outside the South. • The NAACP continued to challenge the status quo of race relations, though calls for racial justice went largely unheeded during the depression.

31. Mexican American Communities • With fear of competition from foreign workers at a peak, many Mexican Americans left California and returned to Mexico. • A federal deportation policy—fostered by racism—was partly responsible for the exodus, but many more Mexicans left voluntarily when work ran out and local relief agencies refused to assist them.

32. Forced “repatriation” slowed after 1932, but deportation of Mexican Americans was still a constant threat and a reminder of their fragile status in the United States. • Discrimination and exploitation were omnipresent in the Mexican community; César Chávez, a Mexican American, became one of the twentieth century’s most influential labor organizers.

33. Many Mexican Americans worked as miners or held industrial jobs where they established a vibrant tradition of labor activism. For example, Bert Corona launched his career as a labor organizer with the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union in Los Angeles. • Young single women preferred the higher paying cannery work to domestic service, needlework, and farm labor; Mexican American women played a leading role in the formation of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America union.

34. Joining labor unions and becoming more involved in American politics were important steps in the creation of a distinctive Mexican American ethnic identity.

35. Asian Americans Face the Depression • Men and women of Asian descent constituted a minority that concentrated primarily in the western states. • Despite being educated, Asians found relatively few professional jobs open to them, as white firms refused to hire them.

36. Asian Americans had carved out a modest success by the time of the depression, but a California law prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning land. Using devices including putting land titles in the names of their citizen children, most Japanese farmers held on to their land, and the amount of acreage owned actually increased. • Chinese Americans clustered in ethnic enterprises in the city’s Chinatown; although Chinatown’s businesses suffered during the depression, they bounced back more quickly.

37. In hard times the Chinese turned inward to the community, getting assistance from traditional Chinese social organizations and kin networks. • Filipinos were not affected by the ban on Asian immigration passed in 1924 because the Philippines was a U.S. territory. • In 1936, Filipinos and Mexican workers came together in a Field Workers Union chartered by the American Federation of Labor.

38. The Tydings-McDuffie Act declared the Philippines an independent nation, classified all Filipinos in the United States as aliens, and restricted immigration; as aliens, Filipinos were not eligible for citizenship or most assistance programs.

39. The Great Depression saw a flowering of American culture. The WPA employed many writers and artists to produce works that celebrated the lives of ordinary people throughout the nation. • A hallmark of the era was the "documentary impulse," a presentation in photography, graphic arts, music, and film of a social reality designed to elicit public empathy. As Europe moved toward war and Japan expanded its incursions in the Far East, Roosevelt focused less on domestic reform and more on international relations

40. One of the more innovative New Deal programs was the Federal Theatre Project. Its director, Hallie Flanagan, envisioned a nationwide network of community theaters that would produce plays of social relevance. "Living Newspaper" productions, such as the one advertised in this 1938 poster for a performance in Oregon, were documentary plays designed to expose Americans to contemporary social problems. One Third of a Nation by Arthur Arent tackled the history of New York City's housing problems, while at the same time it promoted New Deal Housing legislation.

42. Popular Culture Views the Depression

43. Popular culture played an important role in getting the United States through the trauma of the Great Depression. • The mass culture that had taken root during the 1920s, especially the movies and radio, flourished spectacularly in the 1930s. • Americans spent their time and money differently during the depression. Things once considered luxuries—cigarettes, movies, and radios—became necessities to help counteract the bleak times.

44. What functions did movies perform for Americans in the 1930s? • The movies were the most popular form of entertainment in America; more than 60 percent of the population saw at least one movie a week. • With their exciting plots, glamorous stars, and exotic locations, they were a means for escaping from daily life in the depression. • The movies also reflected and reinforced values and customs.

45. Americans turned to popular culture in order to alleviate the trauma of the depression. • In response to public outcry against immorality in the movies, the industry established a means of self-censorship—the Production Code Administration.

46. Many movies were more than escapist pastimes and contained messages that reflected a sense of the social crisis engulfing the nation and reaffirmed traditional values like democracy, individualism, and egalitarianism; others contained criticisms that the system wasn’t working. • Popular gangster movies suggested that incompetent or corrupt politicians, police, and businessmen were as much to blame for organized crime as the gangsters.

47. Depression-era films by Frank Capra pitted the virtuous small-town hero against corrupt urban shysters whose machinations subverted the nation’s ideals. • Radio occupied an increasingly important place in popular culture during the 1930s; ownership rose from 13 million households to 27.5 million households during the decade. • In a resurgence of traditionalism, attendance at religious services rose, and the home was once again the center for pleasurable pastimes such as playing Monopoly and reading aloud.

48. Communist Party • During the darkest days of the Depression a Number of writers and Intellectuals turned to the Communist Party • “John Dewey came forward to proclaim the bankruptcy of the old parties and call for the formation of a third ‘middle class’party on the LaFollette model. Thus, while the New Republic’s staff economist and its patron philosopher sought to amend traditional liberal positions, its most perceptive literary critic went further and repudiated them in favor of Marxism.”

49. Culture and the Crisis: An Open Letter to the Writers, Artists, Teachers, Physicians, Engineers, Scientists, and Other Professional Workers of America was an influential pamphlet-manifesto issued in 1932 by the League of Professional Groups. Its immediate goal was to boost support among American professionals for the Communist Party's 1932 presidential ticket of William Z. Foster and James W. Ford. • Source: Novelguide.com

50. The pamphlet maintained that the Communist candidates alone acknowledged the collapse of capitalism behind the suffering of the Great Depression. The pamphlet struck a more distinctive note in arguing that only a Communist America would allow professionals freedom in the studio, classroom, or lab. Professionals composed a social class in their own right, one distinct from the class of "muscle workers" and that of the "irresponsible business men." The economic crisis presented this class of professional "brain workers" with the historic opportunity to join with their "true comrades," the muscle workers, and to liberate themselves from "false money-standards.“ • Source: Novelguide.com