1 Chapter 1 THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND ITS IMPACT ON LITERARY PRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEW The Present thesis aims at exploring the impact of great depression on the American creative imagination and pinpoint how the prevailing American reality was transformed into fictional idiom, with especial reference to the novels of John Steinbeck, Nathanael West and John Dos Passos. The authors selected for the study enjoy international reputation for their contribution to American literature. They are also known for artistically representing the disconcerting socio-economic and cultural transformation in their novels. Despite the thematic and contextual parities and affinities, these writers are recognized for their masterful handling of the genre, narrative techniques and linguistic accuracies in their own distinguishing means and methodologies and their modes of perfections and presentation. The creative consciousness does not operate in vacuum. It is inextricably linked with the immediate social, economic, moral, political, historical and cultural ambience that has produced shaped and propelled it. One cannot deny the role of the individual psyche of the author, the amount of sensitivity he is endowed with, of his predilections, his means and methods of perceptions, his ability to perceive the intricacies of situations, his linguistic dexterity and of his notions of life and art, in the structure of his vision and art. These are the intrinsic components of his vision. The external and contextual forces, however, also play a role of crucial importance in carving the vision and art of a writer. The authors selected for study here, naturally were no exception. Contemporaneity governs the beauty and relevance of their fictional art. They were inevitably influenced by the socio-
36
Embed
THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND ITS IMPACT ON LITERARY PRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEWshodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/74657/6/07... · · 2016-03-08THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND ITS IMPACT
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
1
Chapter 1
THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND ITS IMPACT ON
LITERARY PRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEW
The Present thesis aims at exploring the impact of great
depression on the American creative imagination and pinpoint how the
prevailing American reality was transformed into fictional idiom, with
especial reference to the novels of John Steinbeck, Nathanael West and
John Dos Passos. The authors selected for the study enjoy international
reputation for their contribution to American literature. They are also
known for artistically representing the disconcerting socio-economic
and cultural transformation in their novels. Despite the thematic and
contextual parities and affinities, these writers are recognized for their
masterful handling of the genre, narrative techniques and linguistic
accuracies in their own distinguishing means and methodologies and
their modes of perfections and presentation.
The creative consciousness does not operate in vacuum. It is
inextricably linked with the immediate social, economic, moral,
political, historical and cultural ambience that has produced shaped and
propelled it. One cannot deny the role of the individual psyche of the
author, the amount of sensitivity he is endowed with, of his
predilections, his means and methods of perceptions, his ability to
perceive the intricacies of situations, his linguistic dexterity and of his
notions of life and art, in the structure of his vision and art. These are
the intrinsic components of his vision. The external and contextual
forces, however, also play a role of crucial importance in carving the
vision and art of a writer. The authors selected for study here, naturally
were no exception. Contemporaneity governs the beauty and relevance
of their fictional art. They were inevitably influenced by the socio-
2
economic and historico – political occurrences of their time. It was,
besides other things, the Great Depression that had a great impact on
their thematic and generic preoccupation. It therefore seems necessary
to trace out the magnanimity of the great slum called the Great
Depression and its socio-economic, historical and political dimensions.
Because highly disconcerting and loaded metaphors and symbols were
used to describe the poverty-stricken, desolated and deserted
American land, like ‘dust-bowl’, ‘desert’, ‘whirlpool of dust’, ‘sand
storm’, ‘wretched’ and ‘wasteland’, etc.
The Great Depression is significant from yet another point of
view. The Great Depression is often called a “defining moment” in the
20th century history of the United States. It certainly is considered to be
a spring source of poverty, hungry, unemployment, dispossession and
displacement. But more importantly, The Great Depression is also
known for its impact on the economic designing of the USA. It created
a platform to chalk out some methodologies, strategies and policies
that have a direct bearing on the American economists and
intellectuals. The Social Security system introduced during that decade
is an important component of America administrative machinery. Its
most lasting effect, it should be especially mentioned here, was a
transformation of the role of the federal government in their economy.
The Great Depression in fact, drastically changed economic of thinking
of the USA.
The Great Depression also greatly affected the political ideology
and warfare strategies of America. The contemporary American
literature in general and American novel in particular kept in pace with
stunning transformation and in the context of the present study, the
transformation from high voltage romanticism and consumption-
oriented predilections for the young generation, what Gertrude Stein
3
called “The lost generation, to the slum of 1929 and also to the
American participation in the World War II”.
The Great Depression of 1929-33, in fact, was the most severe
economic crisis of modern times. Millions of people lost their jobs, and
many farmers and business were bankrupted. Industrialized nations and
those supplying primary products (food and raw materials) were all
affected in one way or another. In Germany the United States industrial
output fell by about 50 per cent, and between 25 and 33 per cent of the
industrial labor force was unemployed.
The thirties was a decade of scanty rainfall, draught,
foodlessness and joblessness. For eight years dust blew on the southern
plains. There came in a yellowish-brown haze from the South and in
rolling walls of black from the North. The simplest acts of life;
breathing, eating a meal, taking a walk; were no longer simple.
Children wore dust masks, women hung wet sheets over windows in a
futile attempt to stop the dirt, and farmers watched helplessly as their
crops blew away.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s lasted about a decade. Its primary
area of impact was on the southern Plains. The northern Plains were
not so badly affected, but nonetheless, the drought, windblown dust
and agricultural decline were no strangers to the north. In fact the
agricultural devastation helped to lengthen the Depression whose
effects were felt worldwide. The movement of people on the Plains
was also profound.
Poor agricultural practices and years of sustained drought caused
the Dust Bowl. Plains grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted
to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land
produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s
deepened, the farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing would
4
grow. The ground cover that held the soil in place was gone. The
Plains winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust
to the sky. The sky could darken for days, and even the most well
sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on furniture. In some
places the dust would drift like snow, covering farmsteads and it was
extended from 1931 till 1939.
The Great Depression was an economic slump in North
America, Europe, and other industrialized countries of the world that
began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and the
most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western
world.
Though the U.S. economy had gone into depression six months
earlier, the Great Depression may be said to have begun with a
catastrophic collapse of stock-market prices on the New York Stock
Exchange in October 1929. During the next three years stock prices in
the United States continued to fall, until by late 1932 they had dropped
to only about 20 percent of their value in 1929. Besides ruining many
thousands of individual investors, this precipitous decline in the value
of assets greatly strained banks and other financial institutions,
particularly those holding stocks in their portfolios. Many banks were
consequently forced into insolvency; by 1933, 11,000 of the United
States banks had failed. The failure of so many banks, combined with a
general and nationwide loss of confidence in the economy, led to
much-reduced levels of spending and demand and hence of production,
thus aggravating the downward spiral. Murray Rothbard rightly points
out that:
It resulted in a deterioration in the output and
drastic rise in unemployment. The U.S.
manufacturing output got down to 54 percent of its
level in 1929, and unemployment had gone up to
5
between 12 and 15 million workers, or 25-30
percent of the work force.[1]
The Great Depression began in the United States but quickly
turned into a worldwide economic slump owing to the special and
intimate relationships that had been forged between the United States
and European economies after World War I. The United States had
emerged from the war as the major creditor and financier of postwar
Europe, whose national economies had been greatly weakened by the
war itself, by war debts, and, in the case of Germany and other
defeated nations, by the need to pay war reparations. So once the
American economy slumped and the flow of American investment
credits to Europe dried up, prosperity tended to collapse there as well.
The Depression hit hardest those nations that were most deeply
indebted to the United States, i.e., Germany and Great Britain. In
Germany, unemployment rose sharply beginning in late 1929 and by
early 1932 it had reached 6 million workers, or 25 percent of the work
force. Britain was less severely affected, but its industrial and export
sectors remained seriously depressed until World War II. Many other
countries also had been greatly affected by this unprecedented
upheaval.
The nations faced formidable challenges and were engaged in
preparing strategies to confront this gigantic problem. Almost all
nations sought to protect their domestic production by imposing tariffs,
raising existing ones, and setting quotas on foreign imports. The effect
of these restrictive measures was to greatly reduce the volume of
international trade. By 1932 the total value of world trade had fallen
by more than half as country after country took measures against the
importation of foreign goods.
6
American polities naturally could not have remained unaffected.
The Great Depression had important consequences in the political
sphere. In the United States, economic distress led to the election of the
democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in late 1932.
Roosevelt introduced a number of major changes in the structure of the
American economy, using increased government regulation and
massive public-works projects to promote a recovery. But despite this
active intervention, mass unemployment and economic stagnation
continued, though on a somewhat reduced scale. About 15 percent of
the work force was still unemployed in 1939, at the outbreak of World
War II. In Europe, the Great Depression strengthened extremist forces
and lowered the prestige of liberal democracy. In Germany, economic
distress directly contributed to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
The Great Depression, at least in part was caused by underlying
weaknesses and imbalances within the U.S. economy that had been
obscured by the boom psychology and speculative euphoria of the
1920s. The Depression exposed those weaknesses, of the nation’s
political and financial institutions to cope with the vicious downward
economic cycle that had monstrously established itself. Prior to the
Great Depression, governments traditionally took little or no action in
times of business downturn, relying instead on impersonal market
forces to achieve the necessary economic correction. But market forces
alone proved unable to achieve the desired recovery in the early years
of the Great Depression, and this painful discovery eventually inspired
some fundamental changes in the United States’ economic structure in
the form of taxation, industrial regulation, public works, etc.
The Depression was eventually to cause a complete turn-around
in economic theory and government policy. In the 1920s governments
and business people largely believed, as they had since the 19th
7
century, that prosperity resulted from the least possible government
intervention in the domestic economy, from open international
relations with little trade discrimination, and from currencies that were
fixed in value and readily convertible. Few people would continue to
believe this in the 1930s.
The Depression spread rapidly around the world because the
responses made by governments were flawed. When faced with falling
export earnings they overreacted and severely increased tariffs on
imports, thus further reducing trade. Moreover, since deflation was the
only policy supported by economic theory at the time, the initial
response of every government was to cut their spending. As a result
consumer demand fell even further. Deflationary policies were
critically linked to exchange rates. Under the Gold Standard, which
linked currencies to the value of gold, governments were committed to
maintaining fixed exchange rates. However, during the Depression
they were forced to keep interest rates high to persuade banks to buy
and hold their currency. Since prices were falling, interest-rate
repayments rose in real terms, making it too expensive for both
businesses and individuals to borrow.
The fundamental cause of the Great Depression in the United
States was a decline in spending (sometimes referred to as aggregate
demand), which led to a decline in production as manufacturers and
merchandisers noticed an unintended rise in inventories. The sources
of the contraction in spending in the United States varied over the
course of the Depression, but they cumulated into a monumental
decline in aggregate demand. The American decline was transmitted to
the rest of the world largely through the gold standard. However, a
variety of other factors also influenced the downturn in various
countries.
8
The initial decline in output in the United States in the summer
of 1929 is widely believed to have stemmed from tight U.S. monetary
policy aimed at limiting stock market speculation. The 1920s had been
a prosperous decade, but not an exceptional boom period; wholesale
goods prices had remained nearly constant throughout the decade and
there had been mild recessions in both 1924 and 1927. The one
obvious area of excess was the stock market. Stock prices had risen
more than fourfold from the low in 1921 to the peak reached in 1929.
In1928 and 1929, the Federal Reserve had raised interest rates in hopes
of slowing the rapid rise in stock prices. These higher interest rates
depressed interest-sensitive spending in areas such as construction and
automobile purchases, which in turn reduced production. In 1920s,
with a radical change in the America life style in general and that of
young generation in particular had accelerated the purchase and
construction of flats, houses and apartments. The entire young
generation wanted to live independently away from the moral strictures
and conventional family conscription. They were infused with new
spirit of their time and squandered money ruthlessly. They were
governed by the dictum of boom and prosperity, and this attitude and
practice of the young generation is also considered one of the major
causes of the great depression. Bordo and White rightly point out that:
“Some scholars believe that a boom in housing
construction in the mid-1920s led to an excess
supply of housing and particularly large drop in
construction in 1928 and 1929.” [2]
By the fall of 1929, U.S. stock prices had reached levels that
could not be justified by reasonable anticipations of future earnings. As
a result, when a variety of minor events led to gradual price declines in
October 1929, investors lost confidence and the stock market bubble
9
burst. Panic selling began on “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929.
Many stocks had been purchased on margin that is, using loans secured
by only a small fraction of the stocks’ value. As a result, the price
declines forced some investors to liquidate their holdings, thus
exacerbating the fall in prices. Between their peak in September and
their low in November, U.S. stock prices (measured using the Cowles
Index) declined 33 percent. Because the decline was so dramatic, this
event is often referred to as the Great Crash of 1929.The stock market
crash reduced American aggregate demand substantially. Consumer
purchases of durable goods and business investment fell sharply after
the crash. A likely explanation is that the financial crisis generated
considerable uncertainty about future income, which in turn led
consumers and firms to put off purchases of durable goods. Although
the loss of wealth caused by the decline in stock prices was relatively
small, the crash may also have depressed spending by making people
feel poorer. As a result of the drastic decline in consumer and firm
spending, real output in the United States, which had been declining
slowly up to this point, fell rapidly in late 1929 and throughout 1930.
Randall E. Parker point out that :
“Thus, while the Great Crash of the stock market
and the Great Depression are two quite separate
events, it is rightly observed, the decline in stock
prices was one factor causing the decline in
production and employment in the United
States.”[3]
The next blow to aggregate demand occurred in the fall of 1930,
when the first of four waves of banking panics gripped the United
States. A banking panic arises when many depositors lose confidence
in the solvency of banks and simultaneously demand their deposits be
paid to them in cash. Banks, which typically hold only a fraction of
10
deposits as cash reserves, must liquidate loans in order to raise the
required cash. This process of hasty liquidation can cause even a
previously solvent bank to fail. The United States experienced
widespread banking panics during 1930 and 1932. This wave of panics
continued throughout the winter of 1933 and culminated with the
national “bank holiday” declared by President Franklin Roosevelt on
March 6, 1933. The bank holiday closed all banks, permitting them to
reopen only after being deemed solvent by government inspectors.
The panics took a severe toll on the American banking system.
By 1933, one-fifth of the banks in existence at the start of 1930 had
failed. By their nature, banking panics are largely irrational,
inexplicable events, but some of the factors contributing to the problem
can be explained. Economic historians believe that substantial
increases in farm debt in the 1920s, together with U.S. policies that
encouraged small, undiversified banks, created an environment where
such panics could ignite and spread. The heavy farm debt stemmed in
part from the response to the high prices of agricultural goods during
World War I. American farmers borrowed heavily to purchase and
improve land in order to increase production. The decline in farm
commodity prices following the war made it difficult for farmers to
keep up with their loan payments. The Federal Reserve did little to try
to stem the banking panics. Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, in
the classic study, A Monetary History of the United States, argue that
the death of Benjamin Strong, the governor of the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, was an important source of this inaction. Strong
had been a forceful leader who understood the ability of the central
bank to limit panics. His death left a power vacuum at the Federal
Reserve and allowed leaders with less sensible views to block effective
11
intervention. The panics caused a dramatic rise in the amount of
currency people wished to hold, relative to their bank deposits.
This rise in the currency-to-deposit ratio was a key reason why
the money supply in the United States declined 31 percent between
1929 and 1933. In addition to allowing the panics to reduce the U.S.
money supply, the Federal Reserve also deliberately contracted the
money supply and raised interest rates in September 1931, when
Britain was forced off the gold standard the investors feared that the
United States would devalue as well. Scholars believe that such
declines in the money supply caused by Federal Reserve decisions had
a severe contractionary effect on output. A simple picture provides
perhaps the clearest evidence of the key role monetary collapse played
in the Great Depression in the United States. In ordinary times, such as
the 1920s, both the money supply and output tend to grow steadily.
But, in the early 1930s, both plummeted. The decline in the money
supply depressed spending in a number of ways. Perhaps most
importantly, because of actual price declines and the rapid decline in
the money supply, consumers and business people came to expect
deflation – that is, they expected wages and prices to be lower in the
future. As a result, even though nominal interstates were very low,
people did not want to borrow because they feared that future wages
and profits would be inadequate to cover the loan payments. This
hesitancy, in turn, led to severe reductions in both consumer spending
and business investment spending. The panics surely exacerbated the
decline in spending by generating pessimism and a loss of confidence.
Furthermore, the failure of so many banks disrupted lending, thereby
reducing the funds available to finance investment.
The gold standard was another important cause of the Great
Depression. Some economists believe that the Federal Reserve allowed
12
or caused the huge declines in the American money supply partly to
preserve the gold standard. Friedman and White have a valid point to
make in this regard:
“Under the gold standard, each country set a value
of its currency in terms of gold and took monetary
actions to defend the fixed price. It is possible that
had the Federal Reserve expanded greatly in
response to the banking panics, foreigners could
have lost confidence in the United States’
commitment to the gold standard. This could have
led to large gold outflows and the United States
could have been forced to devalue. Likewise, had
the Federal Reserve not tightened in the fall of
1931, it is possible that there would have been a
speculative attack on the dollar and the Unites
States would have been forced to abandon the gold
standard along with Great Britain. While there is
debate about the role the gold standard played in
limiting U.S. monetary policy, there is no question
that it was a key factor in the transmission of the
American decline to the rest of the world. Under
the gold standard, imbalances in trade or asset
flows gave rise to international gold flows. For
example, in the mid-1920s intense international
demand for American assets such as stocks and
bonds brought large inflows of gold to the United
States.” [4]
Likewise, a decision by France after World War I to return to the
gold standard with an undervalued franc led to trade surpluses and
substantial gold inflows. Britain chose to return to the gold standard
after World War I at the prewar parity. Wartime inflation, however,
implied that the pound was overvalued, and this overvaluation led to
trade deficits and substantial gold outflows after 1925. To stem the
gold outflow, the Bank of England raised interest rates substantially.
High interest rates depressed British spending and led to high
unemployment in Great Britain throughout the second half of the
1920s.Once the U.S. economy began to contract severely, the tendency
for gold to flow out of other countries and toward the United States
13
intensified. This took place because deflation in the United States made
American goods particularly desirable to foreigners, while low income
reduced American demand for foreign products. To counteract the
resulting tendency toward an American trade surplus and foreign gold
outflows, central banks throughout the world raised interest rates.
Maintaining the international gold standard, in essence, required a
massive monetary contraction throughout the world to match the one
occurring in the United States. The result was a decline in output and
prices in countries throughout the world that also nearly matched the
downturn in the United States. Financial crises and banking panics
occurred in a number of countries besides the United States. In May
1931 payment difficulties at the Creditanstalt, Austria’s largest bank,
set off astringe of financial crises that enveloped much of Europe and
were a key factor forcing Britain to abandon the gold standard. Among
the countries hardest hit by bank failures and volatile financial markets
were Austria, Germany, and Hungary. These widespread banking
crises could have been the result of poor regulation and other local
factors, or simple contagion from one country to another.
Some scholars stress the importance of other international
linkages. Foreign lending to Germany and Latin America had
expanded greatly in the mid-1920s. U.S. lending abroad then fell in
1928 and 1929 as a result of high interest rates and the booming stock
market in the United States. This reduction in foreign lending may
have led to further credit contractions and declines in output in
borrower countries. Thomas E. Hall, J. David Ferguson point out that:
In Germany, which experienced extremely rapid
inflation (“hyperinflation”) in the early 1920s,
monetary authorities may have hesitated to
undertake expansionary policy to counteract the
economic slowdown because they worried it might
re-ignite inflation. The effects of reduced foreign
14
lending may explain why the economies of
Germany, Argentina, and Brazil turned down
before the Great Depression began in the United
States. [5]
The 1930 enactment of the Smoot-Hawley tariff in the United
States and the worldwide rise in protectionist trade policies created
other complications. The Smoot-Hawley tariff was meant to boost farm
incomes by reducing foreign competition in agricultural products. But
other countries followed suit, both in retaliation and in an attempt to
force a correction of trade imbalances. Scholars now believe that these
policies may have reduced trade somewhat, but were not a significant
cause of the Depression in the large industrial producers. Protectionist
policies, however, may have contributed to the extreme decline in the
world price of raw materials, which caused severe balance-of-
payments problems for primary-commodity producing countries in
Africa, Asia, and Latin America and led to contractionary policies.
The election resulted in a smashing victory for Roosevelt, who
won 22,800,000 votes to Hoover’s 15,700,000. The United States was
about to enter a new era of economic and political change.
In 1933 the new president, Franklin Roosevelt, brought an air of
confidence and optimism that quickly rallied the people to the banner
of his program, known as the New Deal. “The only thing we have to
fear is fear itself,” the president declared in his inaugural address to the
nation.
In a certain sense, it is fair to say that the New Deal merely
introduced types of social and economic reform familiar to many
Europeans for more than a generation. Moreover, the New Deal
represented the culmination of a long-range trend toward abandonment
of “laissez-faire” capitalism, going back to the regulation of the
15
railroads in the 1880s, and the flood of state and national reform
legislation introduced in the Progressive era of Theodore Roosevelt
and Woodrow Wilson.
What was truly novel about the New Deal, however, was the
speed with which it accomplished what previously had taken
generations. In fact, many of the reforms were hastily drawn and
weakly administered; some actually contradicted others. And during
the entire New Deal era, public criticism and debate were never
interrupted or suspended; in fact, the New Deal brought to the
individual citizen a sharp revival of interest in government. Studs
Terkel point out:
“When Roosevelt took the presidential oath, the
banking and credit system of the nation was in a
state of paralysis. With astonishing rapidity the
nation’s banks were first closed -- and then
reopened only if they were solvent. The
administration adopted a policy of moderate
currency inflation to start an upward movement in
commodity prices and to afford some relief to
debtors. New governmental agencies brought
generous credit facilities to industry and
agriculture. The Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation (FDIC) insured savings-bank deposits
up to $5,000, and severe regulations were imposed
upon the sale of securities on the stock
exchange.”[6]
By 1933 millions of Americans were out of work. Bread lines
were a common sight in most cities. Hundreds of thousands roamed the
country in search of food, work and shelter. “Brother, can you spare a
dime?” went the refrain of a popular song.
An early step for the unemployed came in the form of the
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a program enacted by Congress to
bring relief to young men between 18 and 25 years of age. Run in
semi-military style, the CCC enrolled jobless young men in work
16
camps across the country for about $30 per month. About 2 million
young men took part during the decade. They participated in a variety
of conservation projects: planting trees to combat soil erosion and
maintain national forests; eliminating stream pollution; creating fish,
game and bird sanctuaries; and conserving coal, petroleum, shale, gas,
sodium and helium deposits.
Work relief came in the form of the Civil Works Administration.
Although criticized as “make work,” the jobs funded ranged from ditch
digging to highway repairs to teaching. Created in November 1933, it
was abandoned in the spring of 1934. Roosevelt and his key officials,
however, continued to favor unemployment programs based on work
relief rather than welfare.
The New Deal years were characterized by a belief that greater
regulation would solve many of the country’s problems. In 1933, for
example, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) to
provide economic relief to farmers. The AAA had at its core a plan to
raise crop prices by paying farmers a subsidy to compensate for
voluntary cutbacks in production. Funds for the payments would be
generated by a tax levied on industries that processed crops. By the
time the act had become law, however, the growing season was well
underway, and the AAA encouraged farmers to plow under their
abundant crops. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace called this
activity a “shocking commentary on our civilization.” Nevertheless,
through the AAA and the Commodity Credit Corporation, a program
which extended loans for crops kept in storage and off the market,
output dropped.
Robert F. Himmelberg point out that:
“Between 1932 and 1935, farm income increased by
more than 50 percent, but only partly because of
federal programs. During the same years that
17
farmers were being encouraged to take land out of
production -- displacing tenants and sharecroppers
-- a severe drought hit the Great Plains states,
significantly reducing farm production. Violent
wind and dust storms ravaged the southern Great
Plains in what became known as the “Dust Bowl,”
throughout the 1930s, but particularly from 1935 to
1938. Crops were destroyed, cars and machinery
were ruined, people and animals were harmed.
Approximately 800,000 people, often called
“Okies,” left Arkansas, Texas, Missouri and
Oklahoma during the 1930s and 1940s. Most
headed farther west to the land of myth and
promise, California. The migrants were not only
farmers, but also professionals, retailers and others
whose livelihoods were connected to the health of
the farm communities. California was not the place
of their dreams, at least initially. Most migrants
ended up competing for seasonal jobs picking crops
at extremely low wages.” [7]
The government provided aid in the form of the Soil
Conservation Service, established in 1935. Farm practices that had
damaged the soil had intensified the severity of the storms, and the
Service taught farmers measures to reduce erosion. In addition, almost
30,000 kilometers of trees were planted to break the force of winds.
Although the AAA had been mostly successful, it was
abandoned in 1936, when the tax on food processors was ruled
unconstitutional. Six weeks later Congress passed a more effective
farm-relief act, which authorized the government to make payments to
farmers who reduced plantings of soil-depleting crops - thereby
achieving crop reduction through soil conservation practices.
By 1940 nearly 6 million farmers were receiving federal
subsidies under this program. The New Act likewise provided loans on
surplus crops, insurance for wheat and a system of planned storage to
ensure a stable food supply. Soon, prices of agricultural commodities
rose, and economic stability for the farmer began to seem possible.
18
The National Recovery Administration (NRA), established in
1933 with the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), attempted to
end cut-throat competition by setting codes of fair competitive practice
to generate more jobs and thus more buying. Although the NRA was
welcomed initially, business complained bitterly of over-regulation as
recovery began to take hold. The NRA was declared unconstitutional
in 1935. By this time other policies were fostering recovery, and the
government soon took the position that administered prices in certain
lines of business were a severe drain on the national economy and a
barrier to recovery.
It was also during the New Deal that organized labor made
greater gains than at any previous time in American history. NIRA had
guaranteed to labor the right of collective bargaining (bargaining as a
unit representing individual workers with industry). Then in 1935
Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which defined
unfair labor practices, gave workers the right to bargain through unions
of their own choice and prohibited employers from interfering with
union activities. It also created the National Labor Relations Board to
supervise collective bargaining, administer elections and ensure
workers the right to choose the organization that should represent them
in dealing with employers.
The great progress made in labor organization brought in
working people a growing sense of common interests, and labor’s
power increased not only in industry but also in politics. This power
was exercised largely within the framework of the two major parties.
However, the Democratic Party generally received more union support
than the Republicans.
In its early years, the New Deal sponsored a remarkable series of
legislative initiatives and achieved significant increases in production
19
and prices -- but it did not bring an end to the Depression. And as the
sense of immediate crisis eased, new demands emerged. Businessmen
mourned the end of “laissez-faire” and chafed under the regulations of
the NIRA. Vocal attacks also mounted from the political left and right
as dreamers, schemers and politicians alike emerged with economic
panaceas that drew wide audiences of those dissatisfied with the pace
of recovery. They included Francis E. Townsend’s plan for generous
old-age pensions; the inflationary suggestions of Father Coughlin, the
radio priest who blamed international bankers in speeches increasingly
peppered with anti-Semitic imagery; and most formidably, the “Every
Man a King” plan of Huey P. Long, senator and former governor of
Louisiana, the powerful and ruthless spokesman of the displaced who
ran the state like a personal fiefdom.
In the face of these pressures from left and right, President
Roosevelt backed a new set of economic and social measures.
Prominent among these were measures to fight poverty, to counter
unemployment with work and to provide a social safety net.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA), the principal relief
agency of the so-called second New Deal, was an attempt to provide
work rather than welfare. Under the WPA, buildings, roads, airports
and schools were constructed. Actors, painters, musicians and writers
were employed through the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Art
Project and the Federal Writers Project. In addition, the National Youth
Administration gave part-time employment to students, established
training programs and provided aid to unemployed youth. The WPA
only included about three million jobless at a time; when it was
abandoned in 1943 it had helped a total of 9 million people.
Dixon Wecter point out that:
20
“But the New Deal’s cornerstone, according to
Roosevelt, was the Social Security Act of 1935.
Social Security created a system of insurance for
the aged, unemployed and disabled based on
employer and employee contributions. Many other
industrialized nations had already enacted such
programs, but calls for such an initiative in the
United States by the Progressives in the early 1900s
had gone unheeded. Although conservatives
complained that the Social Security system went
against American traditions, it was actually
relatively conservative. Social Security was funded
in large part by taxes on the earnings of current
workers, with a single fixed rate for all regardless
of income. To Roosevelt, these limitations on the
programs were compromises to ensure passage.
Although its origins were initially quite modest,
Social Security today is one of the largest domestic
programs administered by the U.S.
government.”[8]
In 1936, the Republican Party nominated Alfred M. Landon, the
relatively liberal governor of Kansas, to oppose Roosevelt. Despite all
the complaints leveled at the New Deal, Roosevelt won an even more
decisive victory than in 1932. He took 60 percent of the population and
carried all states except Maine and Vermont. In this election, a broad
new coalition aligned with the Democratic Party emerged, consisting
of labor, most farmers, immigrants and urban ethnic groups from East
and Southern Europe, African Americans and the South. The
Republican Party received the support of business as well as middle-
class members of small towns and suburbs. This political alliance, with
some variation and shifting, remained intact for several decades.
From 1932 to 1938 there was widespread public debate on the
meaning of New Deal policies to the nation’s political and economic
life. It became obvious that Americans wanted the government to take
greater responsibility for the welfare of the nation. Indeed, historians
generally credit the New Deal with establishing the foundations of the
21
modern welfare state in the United States. Some New Deal critics
argued that the indefinite extension of government functions would
eventually undermine the liberties of the people. But President
Roosevelt insisted that measures fostering economic well-being would
strengthen liberty and democracy.
In a radio address in 1938, Roosevelt reminded the American
people that:
“Democracy has disappeared in several other great
nations, not because the people of those nations
disliked democracy, but because they had grown
tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing
their children hungry while they sat helpless in the
face of government confusion and government
weakness through lack of leadership....Finally, in
desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the
hope of getting something to eat. We in America
know that our democratic institutions can be
preserved and made to work. But in order to
preserve them we need...to prove that the practical
operation of democratic government is equal to the
task of protecting the security of the people....The
people of America are in agreement in defending
their liberties at any cost, and the first line of the
defense lies in the protection of economic
security.”[9]
Before Roosevelt’s second term was well under way, his
domestic program was overshadowed by a new danger little noted by
average Americans: the expansionist designs of totalitarian regimes in
Japan, Italy and Germany. In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria and
crushed Chinese resistance; a year later the Japanese set up the puppet
state of Manchukuo. Italy, having succumbed to fascism, enlarged its
boundaries in Libya and in 1935 attacked Ethiopia. Germany, where
Adolf Hitler had organized the National Socialist Party and seized the
reins of government in 1933, reoccupied the Rhineland and undertook
large-scale rearmament.
22
As the real nature of totalitarianism became clear, and as
Germany, Italy and Japan continued their aggression, American
apprehension fueled isolationist sentiment. In 1938, after Hitler had
incorporated Austria into the German Reich, his demands for the
Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia made war seem possible at any
moment in Europe. The United States, disillusioned by the failure of
the crusade for democracy in World War I, announced that in no
circumstances could any country involved in the conflict look to it for
aid. John Kenneth point out that:
“Neutrality legislation, enacted piecemeal from
1935 to 1937, prohibited trade with or credit to any
of the warring nations. The objective was to
prevent, at almost any cost, the involvement of the
United States in a non-American war.” [10]
With the Nazi assault on Poland in 1939 and the outbreak of
World War II, isolationist sentiment increased, even though Americans
were far from neutral in their feelings about world events. Public
sentiment clearly favored the victims of Hitler’s aggression and
supported the Allied powers that stood in opposition to German
expansion. Under the circumstances, however, Roosevelt could only
wait until public opinion regarding U.S. involvement was altered by
events.
With the fall of France and the air war against Britain in 1940,
the debate intensified between those who favored aiding the
democracies and the isolationists, organized around the America First
Committee, whose support ranged from Midwestern conservatives to
left-leaning pacifists. In the end, the interventionist argument won a
protracted public debate, aided in large measure by the work of the
Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.
23
The United States joined Canada in a Mutual Board of Defense,
and aligned with the Latin American Republics in extending collective
protection to the nations in the Western Hemisphere. Congress,
confronted with the mounting crisis, voted immense sums for
rearmament, and in September 1940 passed the first peacetime
conscription bill ever enacted in the United States - albeit by a margin
of one vote in the House of Representatives. In early 1941, Congress
approved the Lend-Lease Program, which enabled President Roosevelt
to transfer arms and equipment to any nation (notably Great Britain,
the Soviet Union and China) deemed vital to the defense of the United
States. Total Lend-Lease aid by war’s end amounted to more than
$50,000 million.
The 1940 presidential election campaign demonstrated that the
isolationists, while vocal, commanded relatively few followers