In 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s State of the Union address set out what he termed an “economic Bill of Rights” that would act as a manifesto of liberal policies after World War Two. Politically, however, the United States was a different place than the country that had faced the ravages of the Great Depression of the 1930s and ushered in Roosevelt’s New Deal to transform the relationship between government and the people. Key legacies of the New Deal, such as Social Security, remained and were gradually expanded, but opponents of governmental regulation of the economy launched a bitter campaign after the war to roll back labor union rights and dismantle the New Deal state.
Liberal heirs to FDR in the 1950s, represented by figures like two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, struggled to rework liberalism to tackle the realities of a more prosperous age. The long shadow of the U.S. Cold War with the Soviet Union also set up new challenges for liberal politicians trying to juggle domestic and international priorities in an era of superpower rivalry and American global dominance. The election of John F. Kennedy as president in November 1960 seemed to represent a narrow victory for Cold War liberalism, and his election coincided with the intensification of the struggle for racial equality in the United States that would do much to shape liberal politics in the 1960s. After his assassination in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson launched his “Great Society,” a commitment to eradicate poverty and to provide greater economic security for Americans through policies such as Medicare. But his administration’s deepening involvement in the Vietnam War and its mixed record on alleviating poverty did much to taint the positive connotations of “liberalism” that had dominated politics during the New Deal era.
Article
William Thomas Okie
The period from 1900 to 1945 was characterized by both surprising continuity and dramatic change in southern agriculture. Unlike the rest of the nation, which urbanized and industrialized at a rapid pace in the late nineteenth century, the South remained overwhelmingly rural and poor, from the 1880s through the 1930s. But by 1945, the region was beginning to urbanize and industrialize into a recognizably modern South, with a population concentrated in urban centers, industries taking hold, and agriculture following the larger-scale, mechanized trend common in other farming regions of the country. Three overlapping factors explain this long lag followed by rapid transformation. First, the cumulative effects of two centuries of land-extensive, staple crop agriculture and white supremacy had sapped the region of much of its fertility and limited its options for prosperity. Second, in response to this “problem South,” generations of reformers sought to modernize the South, along with other rural areas around the world. These piecemeal efforts became the foundation for the South’s dramatic transformation by federal policy known as the New Deal. Third, poor rural southerners, both black and white, left the countryside in increasing numbers. Coupled with the labor demands created by two major military conflicts, World War I and World War II, this movement aided and abetted the mechanization of agriculture and the depopulation of the rural South.
Article
Ahmed White
On the afternoon of May 30, 1937, the Chicago Police killed or mortally wounded ten men who were among a large group of unionists attempting to picket a mill operated by the Republic Steel Corporation. Scores of demonstrators were injured, some critically, in this shocking episode. The “Memorial Day Massacre” occurred during the Little Steel Strike, a sprawling and protracted conflict that arose out of the Committee for Industrial Organization’s (CIO) attempt to overcome the strident resistance of a coalition of power companies and to organize the basic steel industry. The strike evolved into a contest to decide how much the Second New Deal and its legislative centerpiece, the Wagner Act, would alter the landscape of American labor relations. This was evident in Chicago, where the unionists’ efforts to engage in mass picketing at Republic’s plant were an attempt to wrest from the Wagner Act’s ambiguous terms an effective right to strike, and where the violence of the police, who were doing Republic’s bidding, was intended to prevent this. Ultimately, the use of violence against the unionists not only defeated this bid to engage in mass picketing but served, along with similar clashes elsewhere during the strike, to justify government intervention that ended the walkout and secured the companies’ victory. Later, the strike and the massacre were invoked to justify political and legal changes that further limited the right to strike and that endorsed much of what the police, the steel companies, and their allies had done during the conflict. While the CIO did eventually organize steel, this success was primarily the result of the war and not the strike or the labor law. And although the National Labor Relations Board prosecuted the steel companies for violating the Wagner Act, this litigation took years and ended with Republic facing only modest penalties.
Article
President Abraham Lincoln signed the law that established the Department of Agriculture in 1862 and in 1889, President Grover Cleveland signed the law that raised the Department to Cabinet status. Thus, by 1900 the US Department of Agriculture had been established for nearly four decades, had been a Cabinet-level department for one, and was recognized as a rising star among agricultural science institutions. Over the first half of the next century, the USDA would grow beyond its scientific research roots to assume a role in supporting rural and farm life more broadly, with a presence that reached across the nation. The Department acquired regulatory responsibilities in plant and animal health and food safety and quality, added research in farm management and agricultural economics, provided extension services to reach farms and rural communities in all regions, and created conservation and forestry programs to protect natural resources and prevent soil erosion and flooding across the geographical diversity of rural America. The Department gained additional responsibility for delivering credit, price supports, supply management, and rural rehabilitation programs during the severe economic depression that disrupted the agricultural economy and rural life from 1920 to 1940, while building efficient systems for encouraging production and facilitating distribution of food during the crises of World War I and World War II that bounded those decades. In the process, the Department became a pioneer in developing the regulatory state as well as in piloting programs and bureaucratic systems that empowered cooperative leadership at the federal, state, and local levels and democratic participation in implementing programs in local communities.
Article
Sharon Musher
During the Great Depression, artists and intellectuals—like others who were down-and-out—turned to the federal government to demand work and a livable wage. In a brief flowering of public art, the New Deal funded thousands of needy and meritorious artists to decorate, document, entertain, and teach the nation. Working through Federal Project Number One under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, which included the Federal Theatre Project, Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, and Federal Writers’ Project as well as the Treasury’s Section of Painting and Sculpture (renamed the Section of Fine Arts) and Roy Stryker’s Historical Section, which operated under the Resettlement Administration, the Farm Security Administration, and then the Office of War Information, the artists produced hundreds of thousands of works of art to entertain millions of Americans.
The arts projects democratized the artists receiving public support, the citizens creating and experiencing original works of art, creative styles, and artistic subjects. They drew attention to previously neglected publics, including formerly enslaved people, Native Americans, migrant workers, and the working class. But art administrators also limited artists’ autonomy. They rejected nudity and overt politics, maintained racial segregation, and upheld racial and gendered discrimination. Political realignment, budget cuts, decentralization, congressional hearings, and loyalty oaths further constrained artists. In 1939, Congress terminated the Theatre Project and reorganized the other art projects. Congress defunded most of the remaining art projects in 1943, almost two years after the United States entered World War II. Despite a relatively short life and enduring controversies, New Deal art remains an important example of how robust public patronage can stimulate the arts and society.
Article
Erik Gellman and Margaret Rung
From the late 1920s through the 1930s, countries on every inhabited continent suffered through a dramatic and wrenching economic contraction termed the Great Depression, an economic collapse that has come to represent the nadir of modern economic history. With national unemployment reaching well into double digits for over a decade, productivity levels falling by half, prices severely depressed, and millions of Americans without adequate food, shelter or clothing, the United States experienced some of the Great Depression’s severest consequences. The crisis left deep physical, psychological, political, social, and cultural impressions on the national landscape. It encouraged political reform and reaction, renewed labor activism, spurred migration, unleashed grass-roots movements, inspired cultural experimentation, and challenged family structures and gender roles.
Article
Jeffrey Helgeson
Early 20th century American labor and working-class history is a subfield of American social history that focuses attention on the complex lives of working people in a rapidly changing global political and economic system. Once focused closely on institutional dynamics in the workplace and electoral politics, labor history has expanded and refined its approach to include questions about the families, communities, identities, and cultures workers have developed over time. With a critical eye on the limits of liberal capitalism and democracy for workers’ welfare, labor historians explore individual and collective struggles against exclusion from opportunity, as well as accommodation to political and economic contexts defined by rapid and volatile growth and deep inequality.
Particularly important are the ways that workers both defined and were defined by differences of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and place. Individual workers and organized groups of working Americans both transformed and were transformed by the main struggles of the industrial era, including conflicts over the place of former slaves and their descendants in the United States, mass immigration and migrations, technological change, new management and business models, the development of a consumer economy, the rise of a more active federal government, and the evolution of popular culture.
The period between 1896 and 1945 saw a crucial transition in the labor and working-class history of the United States. At its outset, Americans were working many more hours a day than the eight for which they had fought hard in the late 19th century. On average, Americans labored fifty-four to sixty-three hours per week in dangerous working conditions (approximately 35,000 workers died in accidents annually at the turn of the century). By 1920, half of all Americans lived in growing urban neighborhoods, and for many of them chronic unemployment, poverty, and deep social divides had become a regular part of life. Workers had little power in either the Democratic or Republican party. They faced a legal system that gave them no rights at work but the right to quit, judges who took the side of employers in the labor market by issuing thousands of injunctions against even nonviolent workers’ organizing, and vigilantes and police forces that did not hesitate to repress dissent violently. The ranks of organized labor were shrinking in the years before the economy began to recover in 1897. Dreams of a more democratic alternative to wage labor and corporate-dominated capitalism had been all but destroyed. Workers struggled to find their place in an emerging consumer-oriented culture that assumed everyone ought to strive for the often unattainable, and not necessarily desirable, marks of middle-class respectability.
Yet American labor emerged from World War II with the main sectors of the industrial economy organized, with greater earning potential than any previous generation of American workers, and with unprecedented power as an organized interest group that could appeal to the federal government to promote its welfare. Though American workers as a whole had made no grand challenge to the nation’s basic corporate-centered political economy in the preceding four and one-half decades, they entered the postwar world with a greater level of power, and a bigger share in the proceeds of a booming economy, than anyone could have imagined in 1896. The labor and working-class history of the United States between 1900 and 1945, then, is the story of how working-class individuals, families, and communities—members of an extremely diverse American working class—managed to carve out positions of political, economic, and cultural influence, even as they remained divided among themselves, dependent upon corporate power, and increasingly invested in a individualistic, competitive, acquisitive culture.
Article
Wendy L. Wall
The New Deal generally refers to a set of domestic policies implemented by the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the crisis of the Great Depression. Propelled by that economic cataclysm, Roosevelt and his New Dealers pushed through legislation that regulated the banking and securities industries, provided relief for the unemployed, aided farmers, electrified rural areas, promoted conservation, built national infrastructure, regulated wages and hours, and bolstered the power of unions. The Tennessee Valley Authority prevented floods and brought electricity and economic progress to seven states in one of the most impoverished parts of the nation. The Works Progress Administration offered jobs to millions of unemployed Americans and launched an unprecedented federal venture into the arena of culture. By providing social insurance to the elderly and unemployed, the Social Security Act laid the foundation for the U.S. welfare state.
The benefits of the New Deal were not equitably distributed. Many New Deal programs—farm subsidies, work relief projects, social insurance, and labor protection programs—discriminated against racial minorities and women, while profiting white men disproportionately. Nevertheless, women achieved symbolic breakthroughs, and African Americans benefited more from Roosevelt’s policies than they had from any past administration since Abraham Lincoln’s. The New Deal did not end the Depression—only World War II did that—but it did spur economic recovery. It also helped to make American capitalism less volatile by extending federal regulation into new areas of the economy.
Although the New Deal most often refers to policies and programs put in place between 1933 and 1938, some scholars have used the term more expansively to encompass later domestic legislation or U.S. actions abroad that seemed animated by the same values and impulses—above all, a desire to make individuals more secure and a belief in institutional solutions to long-standing problems. In order to pass his legislative agenda, Roosevelt drew many Catholic and Jewish immigrants, industrial workers, and African Americans into the Democratic Party. Together with white Southerners, these groups formed what became known as the “New Deal coalition.” This unlikely political alliance endured long after Roosevelt’s death, supporting the Democratic Party and a “liberal” agenda for nearly half a century. When the coalition finally cracked in 1980, historians looked back on this extended epoch as reflecting a “New Deal order.”
Article
Margaret Garb
Housing in America has long stood as a symbol of the nation’s political values and a measure of its economic health. In the 18th century, a farmhouse represented Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of a nation of independent property owners; in the mid-20th century, the suburban house was seen as an emblem of an expanding middle class. Alongside those well-known symbols were a host of other housing forms—tenements, slave quarters, row houses, French apartments, loft condos, and public housing towers—that revealed much about American social order and the material conditions of life for many people.
Since the 19th century, housing markets have been fundamental forces driving the nation’s economy and a major focus of government policies. Home construction has provided jobs for skilled and unskilled laborers. Land speculation, housing development, and the home mortgage industry have generated billions of dollars in investment capital, while ups and downs in housing markets have been considered signals of major changes in the economy. Since the New Deal of the 1930s, the federal government has buttressed the home construction industry and offered economic incentives for home buyers, giving the United States the highest home ownership rate in the world. The housing market crash of 2008 slashed property values and sparked a rapid increase in home foreclosures, especially in places like Southern California and the suburbs of the Northeast, where housing prices had ballooned over the previous two decades. The real estate crisis led to government efforts to prop up the mortgage banking industry and to assist struggling homeowners. The crisis led, as well, to a drop in rates of home ownership, an increase in rental housing, and a growth in homelessness.
Home ownership remains a goal for many Americans and an ideal long associated with the American dream. The owner-occupied home—whether single-family or multifamily dwelling—is typically the largest investment made by an American family. Through much of the 18th and 19th centuries, housing designs varied from region to region. In the mid-20th century, mass production techniques and national building codes tended to standardize design, especially in new suburban housing. In the 18th century, the family home was a site of waged and unwaged work; it was the center of a farm, plantation, or craftsman’s workshop. Two and a half centuries later, a house was a consumer good: its size, location, and decor marked the family’s status and wealth.
