Onset

• unemployment at 25%, bankruptcies peaked 1932, 5000 bank failures, high Smoot-Hawley tariff, Austrian bank collapse, devalued currencies off gold standard

Hard Times

• worse for big cities, blue collar, children, married women workers
• "Business Girls in the Big City " March of Time, Dec. 24, 1936
• lost jobs, houses, "hooverville"
• "migration of despair" of hoboes, Woody Guthrie and American Roots Music
• "Mexican Americans were among the foremost victims of this revived racism."
• Cesar Chavez and Barrio Logan
• New York boycott of small Chinese laundries 1932
• drought in South 1930, lynchings increased, Scottsboro boys
• Responses

Farm Belt

• farm prices declined 50%, auctions and foreclosures
• drought and Dust Bowl - The Plow That Broke the Plains
• Okie migration, John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange
• Migrant Mother photos and Oakland archive

Hoover

• "Washington, D.C. was still a segregated, sleepy southern town"
• "Hoover embodied the Horatio Alger myth"
• voluntary cooperation, some government aid, "but Hoover's activism coexisted uneasily with a persistent conservatism"
• only 25% jobless received aid
• Frank Murphy in Detroit 1930, feeding stations, thrift gardens, but ran out of money

Self-help

• "moral capitalism" expected of the elite
• Moral Man and Immoral Society book by Niebuhr
• end of great urban migrations of 1920s
• organic farming of Scott and Helen Nearing in Vermont
• rent parties at end of the month in Harlem
• Unemployed Citizens' League in Seattle

Movements

• communist "unemployment councils" moved evictees back into homes
• communist Sharecroppers' Union in Alabama shootouts
• "The stark confrontations of the early 1930s helped to radicalize thousands of impoverished men and women who later built potent industrial unions and social movements."
• 2 great protests of 1932: Ford Hunger March, Bonus March

FDR

• "the foundation for the powerful, politically intrusive state"
• "liberalism came into its own as an ideology of governance, an electoral coalition, and a social and cultural force."
• "came to embody the state a friend and protector"
• wife Eleanor "the real mother to a nation"
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC
• Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Felix Frankfurter
• Fireside Chats on radio, hundred days
• Liberal Response and First New Deal 1933-1934 - bank holiday, FDIC, SEC
• FERA, CCC, CWA
• "replicated the racial, regional, and gender divisions that plagued the nation."
• Second New Deal 1935-39

AAA and NRA

• parity payments, crop reduction, food processing tax, plow-up
• STFU in Arkansas sought direct parity payments
• "King Cotton's Slaves," March of Time, Aug. 7, 1936
• Wallace purged radicals from AAA in 1935 - led to Farm Security Administration
• NIRA section 7a "the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing"

South and West

• "were virtually undeveloped countries"
• TVA, REA, PWA
• Oakland bridge, Pasadena freeway, LA schools
• John Collier and Indian Reorganization Act ended allotment

Organized Labor

• "the amazingly rapid rebirth of the United Mine Workers" under John L. Lewis
• "Labor versus Labor" March of Time, Sept. 30, 1936
• Amalgamated Clothing Workers and ILGWU organized garmet industry
• NLB required secret-ballot elections
• Rose Pesotta organized ILGWU in LA
• Wyndham Mortimer organized White Motor in Cleveland
• Douglas Lincoln MacMahon led Transit Workers Union
• James Carey was first president of the UE

Strikes

• three great strikes in 1934
• Battle of Toledo at the Auto-Lite picket line
• Minneapolis truckers vs. Citizens' Alliance
• San Francisco longshoremen and general strike
• "In each case, radicals defied conservative AFL leaders and obilized thousands of working people in concerted, militant action. Workers developed innovative tactics and countered force with force."
• helped create the UAW, Teamsters, ILWU
• failures: California pickers, East Coast textile strike
• criminal syndicalism act in California used to imprison leaders of groups that sought a change in industrial ownership by force
• biggest strike of 1934 - 376,000 of United Textile Worker's Union against "stretch-out" added looms, but leadership gave in and "humble down"

Critics

• American Liberty league 1934 by Raskob, DuPont, Sloan
• Associated Farmers in California
• Radical Response
• Huey Long 1934 Share Our Wealth plan and clubs
• Charles Coughlin the Detroit radio priest of "social Catholicism"
• Francis Townsend pension plan in Long Beach
• Upton Sinclair EPIC movement in Californa's Democratic party
• Father Divine in Harlem - March of Time Feb. 14, 1936
• Communist Popular Front strategy
• Minnesota Farmer-Labor party
• Wisconsin Progressive Party reborn by LaFollettes
• Supreme Court Schecter "sick chicken" decision May 27, 1935