Module four Assignment | College Homework Help

Book being used for this class: David Shi and George Tindall, America: A Narrative History vol. 2 10th ed. (brief)

The New Era, America in the Twenties

The popular image of the 1920s, as a decade of prosperity and riotous living and of bootleggers and gangsters, flappers and hot jazz, flagpole sitters, and marathon dancers, is indelibly etched in the American psyche. But this image is also profoundly misleading. The 1920s was a decade of deep cultural conflict. The pre-Civil War decades had fundamental conflicts in American society that involved geographic regions. During the Gilded Age, conflicts centered on ethnicity and social class. Conversely, the conflicts of the 1920s were primarily cultural, pitting a more cosmopolitan, modernist, urban culture against a more provincial, traditionalist, rural culture. It was a time when alcohol was illegal but more Americans drank than ever before. It was a time when the KKK would become mainstream and popular across the nation less for its hatred of blacks than for its hatred of all those thought of as “un-American.” Obvious signs of change were everywhere. One commentator called the twenties a “revolution in morals and manners.” Sexual mores, gender roles, hairstyles, and dress all changed profoundly. Many Americans regarded these changes as liberation from the country’s Victorian past. But for others, morals seemed to be decaying, and the United States seemed to be changing in undesirable ways.

Various real and scary things helped to intensify some of the country’s domestic tensions. The threat of domestic terrorism was common. For example, on May 1, 1919, U.S. postal officials discovered 20 bombs in the mail of John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Jr., and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A month later, bombs exploded in eight American cities including a senator’s home in Washington D.C. Such terror continued into the next year. On September 16, 1920, a bomb left in a parked horse-drawn wagon exploded near Wall Street in Manhattan’s financial district, killing 30 people and injuring hundreds. Authorities came up with a list of subjects, but no one was charged with the crime.

The way that the federal government explained these violent acts to the public was by claiming communists had caused the unrest. It was just that simple. During the 1880s/90s, American had learned about communism as it related to workers’ striking and the larger process of immigration and urbanization. It was a confusing time as we have already learned in prior modules. However, one thing that was made very clear to Americans: communism was not a loyal and good philosophy for ordinary Americans to follow. It was just a bad idea if you wanted to fit in and succeed in the U.S. After World War I ended, and real bombs were going off all over the country’s major cities, the prior American fear over communism meshed easily with this new panic about domestic terrorism. Sure, the process was a bit simplistic to just claim the communists were trying to overthrow the country, but this new way of thinking posed few practical problems for most Americans. Only people of immigrant heritage, possibly from Russia or Germany where socialism was dominant, had much to worry from what came to be known as the American “Red Scare.” If you were, for example, an immigrant who was seen to be causing problems either in the form of dissention or labor unrest, then the possibility was real that you would face punishment from your neighbors during the “Red Scare.” Look at a case from Hammond, Indiana where a jury took only two minutes to acquit the killer of an immigrant who had yelled “To Hell with the United States.” At a victory pageant in Washington, D.C., a sailor shot a man who refused to stand during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner, while the crowd clapped and cheered. A clerk in a Waterbury, Connecticut clothing store was sentenced to jail for six months for remarking to a customer that the Russian revolutionary Lenin was “the brainiest” or “one of the brainiest” world leaders.

Public fears of communism and social unrest spilled over into labor relations as well. In November 1919, American Legionnaires in Washington State stormed the office of the International Workers of the World (IWW). Four attackers died in a gunfight before townspeople overpowered the IWW members and took them to jail. A mob broke into the jail, seized one of the IWW members, and hanged him from a railroad bridge. Federal officials subsequently prosecuted 165 IWW leaders, not their vigilante murderers, who received sentences of up to 25 years in prison. Congress and state legislatures joined in the attack on alleged communist radicals. In May 1919, the House refused to seat Victor Berger, a Socialist from Milwaukee, after he was convicted of sedition. The House again denied him his seat following a special election in December 1919. Not until he was re-elected again in 1922, after the government dropped the sedition charges, did Congress finally seat him. In 1920, the New York State Legislature expelled five members. They were told that they had been elected on a platform “absolutely opposite to the best interests” of New York.

Matter really boiled over when President Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, led raids on leftist organizations such as the Communist Party and the International Workers of the World. Palmer hoped to use the issue of radicalism in his campaign to become president in 1920. He created the precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which collected the names of thousands of known or suspected communists. In November 1919, Palmer ordered government raids that resulted in the arrests of 250 suspected radicals in 11 cities. The Palmer Raids reached their height on January 2, 1920, when government agents made raids in 33 cities. Nationwide, more than 4,000 alleged communists were arrested and jailed without bond, and 556 aliens were deported back to Russia on a boat–including the radical orator Emma Goldman who was a full-blown American citizen without question. Palmer and his government officials, keep in mind a young man named J. Edgar Hoover got his start working for Palmer in this fight against communists, claimed to be ridding the country of the “moral perverts,” but his tactics alienated many people who viewed them as violations of civil liberties.

Indeed, the 1920s was a time when the U.S. made a full commitment to limiting immigration as a means to keeping the nation safe. World War I revealed that the economy could function effectively without foreign immigration; opposition to immigration restriction withered away. Not only had World War I demonstrated that immigrants had become “Americanized,” but with the establishment of new European nation states, interest in European politics faded away. While some opponents of immigration argued that it threatened the nation’s culture, most of the arguments advanced against immigration were economic. Among the chief proponents of immigration restriction were the unions of the American Federation of Labor. Organized labor feared that American workers’ wages would decline if unskilled immigrant workers flooded the labor market. Meanwhile, many businessmen feared dangerous foreign radicals. Most ethnic groups (already in the U.S.) agreed that immigration should be reduced. In 1924, Congress acted by passing the National Origins Act. The law categorized different types of immigrants by both their nationality and racial characteristics. It reduced the number of all immigrants allowed into the United States each year to two percent based on results from 1890 census. It also barred Asians entirely.

Such actions pleased domestic groups that claimed to love the U.S. such as the KKK. A new version of the Ku Klux Klan arose during the early 1920s. Throughout this time period, immigration, fear of radicalism, and a revolution in morals and manners fanned anxiety. Roman Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and foreigners were only the most obvious targets of the Klan’s fear-mongering. Contributing to the Klan’s membership growth was a post-war depression in agriculture, the migration of African Americans into Northern cities, and a swelling of religious bigotry. Klan members considered themselves defenders of Prohibition, traditional morality, and true Americanism. During the early 1920s, the Klan helped elect 16 U.S. Senators and many Representatives and local officials. By 1924, when the Klan had reached its peak in numbers and influence, it claimed to control 24 of the nation’s 48 state legislatures. That year it succeeded in blocking the nomination of Al Smith, a New York Catholic, at the Democratic National Convention.

The three million members of the Klan after World War I were quite open in their activities. Many were small-business owners, independent professionals, clerical workers, and farmers. Members marched in parades, patronized Klan merchants, and voted for Klan-endorsed political candidates. The Klan was particularly strong in the Deep South, Oklahoma, and Indiana. Historians once considered the Ku Klux Klan a group of marginal misfits, rural traditionalists unable to cope with the coming of a modern urban society. But recent scholarship shows that Klan members were a cross-section of native Protestants; many were women, and many came from urban areas.

During the height of the post-World War I Red Scare, there was one story that captured the nation’s attention since it seemed to mesh fears with communism, immigrants, and a changing America. In April 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were accused of double murder for a robbery-gone-bad in Massachusetts. No witnesses had gotten a good look at the perpetrators of the murder and robbery. The witnesses described a shootout in the street and the robbers escaping in a Buick, scattering tacks to deter pursuers. Anti-immigrant, anti-radical sentiment led the police to focus on local anarchists. Indeed, both Sacco and Vanzetti were followers a radical Italian anarchist and they were arrested for the crime. Police noted they acted nervously when questioned. Neither man had a criminal record, but that was not something that many people at the time cared much about. In 1921, both men were convicted in a trial that was marred by prejudice against Italians, immigrants, and radical beliefs. The evidence was ambiguous as to the pairs’ guilt or innocence, but the trial was a sham. The prosecution played heavily on the pairs’ radical beliefs; the men were kept in an iron cage during the trial. The jury foreman muttered unflattering stereotypes about Italians. In his instructions to the jury, the presiding judge urged the jury to remember their “true American citizenship.” The pair was electrocuted in 1927 and the case remains a basic part of understanding American fear of immigrants and political dissent during the 1920s.

But what about the so-called “roaring twenties?” Did anyone have any fun during the decade? What new “toys” did they employ? Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-made, exact-size clothing. They were the first to play electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen to commercial radio broadcasts, and to drink fresh orange juice year round. In countless ways, large and small, American life was transformed during the 1920s, at least in urban areas. Cigarettes, cosmetics, and synthetic fabrics such as rayon became staples of American life. Newspaper gossip columns, illuminated billboards, and commercial airplane flights were novelties during the 1920s. The United States became a consumer society.

Two automotive titans, Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, symbolized the profound transformations that took place in American industry during the 1910s and 1920s. In 1913, the 50-year-old Ford had revolutionized American manufacturing by introducing the automated assembly line. By using conveyor belts to bring automobile parts to workers, he reduced the assembly time for a Ford car from 12 ½ hours in 1912 to just 1 ½ hours in 1914. Declining production costs allowed Ford to cut automobile prices–six times between 1921 and 1925. The cost of a new Ford was reduced to just $290. This amount was less than three months wages for an average American worker; it made cars affordable for the average family. To lower employee turnover and raise productivity, Ford introduced a minimum wage of $5 in 1914–twice what most workers earned–and shortened the workday from nine hours to eight hours. Twelve years later, Ford reduced his workweek from six days to five days. Ford demonstrated the dynamic logic of mass production: that expanded production allows manufacturers to reduce costs, and therefore, increases the number of products sold; and that higher wages allow workers to buy more products.

Cars were the symbol of the new consumer society that emerged in the 1920s. In 1919, there were just 6.7 million cars on American roads. By 1929, there were more than 27 million cars–or nearly one car for every household in the United States. In that year, one American out of every five owned a car–compared to one out of every 37 English and one out of every 40 French car owners. Car manufacturers and banks encouraged the public to buy the car of their dreams on credit. Thus, the American love affair with the car began. In 1929, a quarter of all American families purchased a car. About 60 percent bought cars on credit, often paying interest rates of 30 percent or higher.

Cars revolutionized the American way of life. Enthusiasts claimed that the automobile promoted family togetherness through evening rides, picnics, and weekend excursions. Critics decried squabbles between parents and teenagers over use of the automobile and an apparent decline in church attendance resulting from Sunday outings. Worst of all, charged critics, automobiles gave young people freedom and privacy, serving as “portable bedrooms” that couples could take anywhere.

Alongside the automobile, the telephone and electricity also became emblems of the consumer economy. By 1930, two-thirds of all American households had electricity, and half of American households had telephones. As more and more of America’s homes received electricity, new appliances followed: refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and toasters quickly took hold. Advertisers claimed that “labor saving” appliances would ease the sheer physical drudgery of housework, but they did not shorten the average housewife’s work week. Women had to do more because standards of cleanliness kept rising. Sheets had to be changed weekly; the house had to be vacuumed daily. In short, social pressure expanded household chores to keep pace with the new technology. Far from liberating women, appliances imposed new standards of cleanliness.

A fundamental shift took place in the American economy during the 1920s. The nation’s families spent a declining proportion of their income on necessities–food, clothing, and utilities–and an increasing share on appliances, recreation, and a host of new consumer products. As a result, older industries, such as textiles, railroads, and steel, declined, while newer industries, such as appliances, automobiles, aviation, chemicals, entertainment, and processed foods, surged ahead rapidly. This transformation mirrored many other changes taking place: in race relations, sexuality, and what it means to be an American. The 1920s were a time when ideas and attitudes changes in the U.S. for so many different things. The country had truly entered the modern era.

The U.S. in a Troubled World, 1920-41

World War I left the public suspicious of foreign crusades. Americans wanted to retreat from foreign affairs. “The people have had all the war, all the taxation, and all the military service they want,” declared President Calvin Coolidge in 1925. During the 1920s, the United States tried to promote world peace through diplomatic means. This preference for peace rather than war was somewhat of an international attitude that could be heard in France, Britain, and other nations that had suffered greatly during the years 1914-1918. You might, in fact, be surprised how deeply people living in the 1920s felt about keeping peace through diplomacy. In 1928, the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, and Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg attempted to outlaw war. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, which was eventually signed by 62 nations, renounced war as an instrument for resolving international disputes. Both Secretary Kellogg and Briand won the Nobel Peace Prize for this wholly Progressive accomplishment, but even cynics of the time recognized nothing and no one could ever really enforce the Pact should a nation decide to become aggressive. Indeed, during the 1930s, non-peaceful men like Hitler and Stalin gained power in the large countries of Germany and USSR. To understand part of the reason that WWII started I 1939 you must accept that serious men took the “peace idea” to be true while others then took advantage of them through war.

This attitude of maintaining world peace above all else, later known as appeasement strategy, was a big part of American life. It was not exactly that the American people had grown shy of fighting and feared conflicts, but rather they wanted a return to the Washingtonian tradition in US foreign policy. This meant one thing: isolationism. During the Great Depression isolationist sentiment surged. In 1935, some 150,000-college students participated in a nationwide Student Strike for Peace, and half a million signed pledges saying that they would refuse to serve in the event of war. A public opinion poll indicated that 39 percent of college students would refuse to participate in any war, even if the country was invaded.

Anti-war sentiment was not confined to undergraduates. Disillusionment over World War I fed opposition to foreign entanglements. This was what George Washington spoke to the nation about in 1796. “We didn’t win a thing we set out for in the last war,” said Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota. “We merely succeeded, with tremendous loss of life, to make secure the loans of private bankers to the Allies.” The overwhelming majority of Americans agreed; an opinion poll in 1935 found that 70 percent of Americans believed that intervention in World War I had been a mistake.

Isolationist ideas spread through American popular culture during the mid-1930s. The Book of the Month Club featured a volume titled Merchants of Death, which contended that the United States had been drawn into the European war by international arms manufacturers who had deliberately fomented conflict in order to market their products. From 1934 to 1936, a congressional committee, chaired by Senator Nye, investigated charges that false Allied propaganda and unscrupulous Wall Street bankers had dragged Americans into the European war. In April 1935–the 18th anniversary of American entry into World War I–50,000 veterans held a peace march in Washington, D.C. Congress heeded these opinions. Between 1935 and 1937, lawmakers passed three separate neutrality laws that clamped an embargo on arms sales to belligerents, forbade American ships from entering war zones and prohibited them from being armed, and barred Americans from traveling on belligerent ships. Clearly, Congress was determined not to repeat what it regarded as the mistakes that had plunged the United States into World War I.

By 1938, however, pacifist sentiment was fading. A rapidly modernizing Japan was seeking to acquire raw materials and territory on the Asian mainland; a revived Germany was rebuilding its military power and acquiring land bloodlessly on its eastern borders; and Italy was trying to restore Roman glory through military might. Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany by exploiting the psychological injuries inflicted on Germans by World War I. Tapping into an ugly strain of anti-Semitism in German culture, he blamed many of the nation’s economic woes on German Jews, who only constituted one percent of Germany’s population. Anti-Semitism was an integral part of Hitler’s political program. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws forbade intermarriages, restricted property rights, and barred Jews from the civil service, the universities, and all professional and managerial occupations. On the night of November 9, 1939–a night now known as Kristallnacht (the night of the broken glass)–the Nazis imprisoned more than 20,000 Jews in concentration camps and destroyed more than 200 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish businesses.

Hitler’s government also outlawed labor unions, imposed newspaper censorship, and decreed that the Nazis would constitute Germany’s only political party. The regime established a secret police force, the Gestapo, to suppress all opposition and required all children, 10 years and older, to join youth organizations designed to inculcate Nazi beliefs. By 1935, Hitler had transformed Germany into a fascist state. The government exercised total control over all political, economic, and cultural activities. Any number of Americans who lived during the 1920/30s might well have agreed with Hitler anti-Jewish feelings. Americans were growing concerned, however, about the wholly anti-democratic nature of Nazism unrelated to Jews. The two systems could not co-exist especially if the Nazis continued to act in an aggressive and threatening manner to those who wished to keep global peace.

During the 1930s, a series of threats to world peace arose. Japan attacked China; Italy attacked Ethiopia; and Nazi Germany rearmed, occupied the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and seized Czechoslovakia. Nazism gets most of the publicity, but it was not the primary threat to U.S. prosperity. In September 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and flexed its muscles to other nations trying to grow economically in the Far East. The U.S. was certainly one of those nations as we learned in the lecture about quest for empire.  American President Hoover rejected, however, calls for a U.S. military response and he also refused to impose economic sanctions against Japan. He ignored the Japanese government’s claims to the lands because it was based on force.

Expecting bolder measures, Japan ignored this slap on the wrist and concluded that the United States would not use military might to oppose its designs on the Far East. In 1937, Japan invaded China. The U.S. again stood by silently. Any doubts regarding the U.S. desire to avoid war vanished a few weeks later. In December 1937, Japanese aircraft bombed the Panay, a U.S. gunboat stationed on the Yangtze River near Nanking, killing three Americans. While the attack angered the public, few calls for war rang out. Please remember this was not at all the case following the sinking of the Maine or the Lusitania. That had angered people in the United States a great deal. When the Japanese killed American servicemen, however, now President Roosevelt quickly accepted Japan’s apology and agreed that Japan should pay indemnities for the injured and seek punishment of the pilots responsible for the bloodshed.

At the same time that officials in the US worked to avoid war in Japan, FR and UK hoped to avoid war with GER. In September 1938, Edouard Daladier, the premier of France, and Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s prime minister, met with Hitler in Munich, Germany, to determine whether he was committed to his policy of force when dealing with his neighboring countries. Hitler and his Nazi Party had just taken over Austria and were now signaling a desire to annex Czechoslovakia as well. Keep in mind that these British and French leaders were “peace” advocates and were dreadfully unwilling to use force against Germany. Instead, they eagerly accepted Hitler’s promises not to seek any additional territory in Europe. Upon arriving in England, Chamberlain told his anxious countrymen that he had returned with an agreement that guaranteed “peace in our time.” In less than a year, however, this conference and the appeasement it gave the Nazis would become synonymous with shame and Chamberlain would be vilified for believing Hitler’s lies.

As early as 1935, Roosevelt had come to realize that Hitler represented a threat to Western civilization. Yet the American public was strongly isolationist. Over the next six years, Roosevelt schemed to supply aid to the British and French. Many of his most influential advisers were against him. They argued that arms for the Europeans meant fewer arms for Americans.

Roosevelt responded to the European war by issuing a proclamation of neutrality. At the same time, he took a number of steps designed to help Britain. He pushed a fourth Neutrality Act through Congress, which permitted belligerents to purchase war materials, provided that they paid cash and carried the goods away in their own ships. This act aided the British because Britain controlled the Atlantic’s sea-lanes. In September 1940, he persuaded Congress to pass the first peacetime draft in American history and signed an executive agreement with Great Britain, transferring 50 destroyers in exchange for 99-year leases on eight British bases in the Western Hemisphere.

The European war dominated the election of 1940. During the campaign, Republican candidate Wendell Willkie charged Roosevelt with maneuvering the United States into the European war. Charles Lindbergh and the powerful labor leader John L. Lewis called Roosevelt a warmonger. On the eve of the election, Roosevelt responded, offering these reassuring words to American parents: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Running for an unprecedented third term, Roosevelt easily defeated Willkie, receiving 449 electoral votes to the Republican candidate’s 82 votes.

After the election, Churchill informed Roosevelt that Britain could no longer afford to purchase war supplies. The president responded by persuading Congress to replace “cash-and-carry” with “Lend-Lease,” which gave the president authority to sell, exchange, lend, or lease war materiel to any country whose defense was vital to U.S. security. In November 1941, President Roosevelt offered lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union, which had been invaded by Germany in June 1941. Meanwhile, the American navy began to signal the location of German submarines to British destroyers.

None of this, however, explains why the U.S. would enter gain the troubled world of global politics. It only shows, perhaps, that the isolationist argument so powerful during the 1920s and 1930s had faded a bit. The U.S. would enter WW II because of the Japanese attack against the naval base in Pearl Harbor. It was not an attack against the U.S. as Hawaii was not a state in 1941. It was an attack against a military base and the U.S. declared war the next day.

Why did it happen? That is a good question to examine. It shows just how troubled the world was in the 1930s. After Japan invaded China in 1937, relations between Washington and Tokyo deteriorated rapidly. In 1940, Japan occupied northern Indochina, a step toward its goal of capturing the oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies. To stop Japanese aggression, the United States placed an embargo on the export of scrap metal, oil, and aviation fuel to Japan. Also, President Roosevelt froze Japanese bank accounts in the United States. Harmed by these economic sanctions, Japan negotiated with the United States throughout 1941. The United States demanded that Japan withdraw immediately from Indochina and China–concessions that would have ended Japan’s dream of economic and military hegemony in Asia.

In a last ditch effort to avoid war, Japan promised not to march further south, not to attack the Soviet Union, and not to declare war against the United States if Germany and America went to war. In return, Japan asked the United States to abandon China. Roosevelt refused. In October 1941, the Japanese government fell, and General Hideki Tojo, the leader of the militants, seized power. War with the U.S. was imminent. Most military experts expected Japan to attack the Dutch East Indies to secure oil and rubber. Before striking there, however, Japan moved to neutralize American power in the western Pacific.

At 7:02 a.m., December 7, 1941, an army mobile radar unit set up on Oahu Island in Hawaii picked up the tell-tale blips of approaching aircraft. The two privates operating the radar contacted the Army’s General Information Center, but the duty officer there told them to remain calm; the planes were probably American B-17s flying in from California. In fact, they were Japanese aircraft that had been launched from six aircraft carriers 200 miles north of Hawaii. At 7:55 a.m., the first Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the main base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Moored in the harbor were more than 70 warships, including eight of the fleet’s nine battleships. There were also 2 heavy cruisers, 29 destroyers, and 5 submarines. Four hundred airplanes were stationed nearby.

Japanese torpedo bombers, flying just 50 feet above the water, launched torpedoes at the docked American warships. Japanese dive bombers strafed the ships’ decks with machine gun fire, while Japanese fighters dropped high explosive bombs on the aircraft sitting on the ground. Within half an hour, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was virtually destroyed. The U.S. battleship Arizona was a burning hulk. Three other large ships–the Oklahoma, the West Virginia, and the California–were sinking.

A second attack took place at 9 a.m., but the damage had been done. Seven of the eight battleships were sunk or severely damaged. Out of the 400 aircraft, 188 had been destroyed and 159 were severely damaged. The worst damage occurred to the Arizona; a thousand of the ship’s sailors drowned or burned to death. Altogether, 2,403 Americans died during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; another 1,178 were wounded. Japan lost just 55 men. This attack, the so-called 9/11 event of that generation, is perhaps the best evidence of what historians call the world’s “troubles.” Despite best intentions to outlaw war and compromise difference, the world major industrialized countries had reached a tension point yet again.

Great Depression and New Deal

The great stock market crash of October 1929 brought the economic prosperity of the 1920s to a symbolic end. For the next ten years, Americans knew a deep economic depression. By 1933, reported unemployment had soared to 25 percent, up from just 3.2 percent in 1929. This number does not count those millions more people that didn’t report unemployment to the government as there was not reason to do so. Industrial production also took a hit as jobs and orders declined. The industrial sector, cars, steel, railways, reported that business was down in some cases by 50 percent. In 1929 before the crash, investment in the U.S. economy totaled $16 billion. By 1933, the figure had fallen to $340 million–a decrease of 98 percent.

Why did the seemingly boundless prosperity of the 1920s end so suddenly? And why, once an economic downturn began, did the Great Depression last so long? Economists have been hard pressed to explain why “prosperity’s decade” ended in financial disaster. In 1929, the American economy appeared to be extraordinarily healthy. Employment was high and inflation was virtually non-existent. Industrial production had risen 30 percent between 1919 and 1929, and per capita income had climbed from $520 to $681. The United States accounted for nearly half of the world’s industrial output. Still, the seeds of the Depression were already present in the “boom” years of the 1920s.

For many groups of Americans, the prosperity of the 1920s was a cruel illusion. Even during the most prosperous years of the Roaring Twenties, most families lived below what contemporaries defined as the poverty line. In 1929, economists considered $2,500 the income necessary to support a family. In that year, more than 60 percent of the nation’s families earned less than $2,000 a year–the income necessary for basic necessities–and over 40 percent earned less than $1,500 annually. Although labor productivity soared during the 1920s because of electrification and more efficient management, wages stagnated or fell in mining, transportation, and manufacturing. Hourly wages in coalmines sagged from 84.5 cents in 1923 to just 62.5 cents in 1929.

The twenties were not “roaring” for everyone. Prosperity bypassed specific groups of Americans entirely. A 1928 report on the condition of Native Americans found that half owned less than $500 and that 71 percent lived on less than $200 a year. Mexican Americans, too, had failed to share in the prosperity. During the 1920s, each year 25,000 Mexicans migrated to the United States. A great number lived in conditions that betrayed evidence of extreme poverty. In Los Angeles their infant mortality rate was five times higher than the rate for Anglos, and most homes lacked toilets. A survey found that a substantial number of Mexican Americans had virtually no meat or fresh vegetables in their diet; 40 percent said that they could not afford to give their children milk.

This misery was not just in the cities. People living in the Midwestern farm sector had been mired in depression since 1921. Farm prices had been depressed ever since the end of World War I, when European agriculture revived, and grain from Argentina and Australia entered the world market. Strapped with long-term debts, high taxes, and a sharp drop in crop prices, farmers lost ground throughout the 1920s. In 1910, a farmer’s income was 40 percent of a city worker’s. By 1930, it had sagged to just 30 percent. The decline in farm income reverberated throughout the economy. Rural consumers stopped buying farm implements, tractors, automobiles, furniture, and appliances. Millions of farmers defaulted on their debts, placing tremendous pressure on the banking system. Between 1920 and 1929, more than 5,000 of the country’s 30,000 banks failed.

Because of the banking crisis, thousands of small businesspeople failed because they could not secure loans. Thousands more went bankrupt because they had lost their working capital in the stock market crash. A heavy burden of consumer debt also weakened the economy. Consumers built up an unmanageable amount of consumer installment and mortgage debt, taking out loans to buy cars, appliances, and homes in the suburbs. To repay these loans, consumers cut back sharply on discretionary spending. Drops in consumer spending led inevitably to reductions in production and worker layoffs. Unemployed workers then spent less, and the cycle repeated itself.

It is important to remember, however, the depression did not strike instantly; it infected the country gradually, like a slow-growing cancer. Measured in human terms, the Great Depression was the worst economic catastrophe in American history. It hit urban and rural areas, blue-and white-collar families alike. In the nation’s cities, unemployed men took to the streets to sell apples or to shine shoes. Thousands of others hopped freight trains and wandered from town to town, looking for jobs or handouts.

Unlike most of Western Europe, the United States had no federal system of unemployment insurance. The relief burden fell on state and municipal governments working in cooperation with private charities, such as the Red Cross and the Community Chest. Created to handle temporary emergencies, these groups lacked the resources to alleviate the massive suffering created by the Great Depression. Poor Southerners, whose states had virtually no relief funds, were particularly hard hit. The Great Depression was, however, a global phenomenon. Unlike previous economic downturns, which generally were confined to a handful of nations or specific regions. Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America all suffered from the economic collapse. International trade fell 30 percent and by 1932 roughly thirty million people had no way to earn money and support their families.

How did countries around the globe respond to this catastrophe? Some people endorsed dictators who promised to make the country strong again etc. In Germany, Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party won power. After becoming chancellor in 1932, Hitler outlawed labor unions, restructured German industry into a series of cartels, and after 1935, instituted a massive program of military rearmament that ended high unemployment. Simply put: he ended unions and placed a large order for iron and steel-based products. In Japan, fascist militarists seized control of the government and conquered Manchuria because they believed the region’s rich raw materials would help them end the Great Depression. This was not the only path followed, however. Canada, Great Britain, and France pressed policies known as welfare capitalism. In this schema, the elected government officials and their bureaucrats assume ultimate responsibility for promoting a reasonably fair distribution of wealth and power that lessens the probability of any sector in society experiencing bankruptcy and destitution.

The U.S. followed a slightly different path than other nations partly because the U.S. faced unique problems during the Great Depression. Compared to other industrialized countries, the economic decline brought on by the Depression was steeper and more protracted in the United States. The unemployment rate rose higher and remained higher longer than in any other western society. Unemployment jumped from less than 3 million in 1929 to 4 million in 1930, to 8 million in 1931, and to 12 ½ million in 1932. In that year, a quarter of the nation’s families did not have a single employed wage earner. Even those fortunate enough to have jobs suffered drastic pay cuts and reductions in working hours. Only one company in ten failed to cut pay, and in 1932 three-quarters of all workers were on part-time schedules, averaging just 60 percent of the normal workweek. By 1933 average family income had tumbled 40 percent, from $2,300 in 1929 to just $1,500 four years later. In the Pennsylvania coalfields, three or four families crowded together in one-room shacks and lived on wild weeds. In Arkansas, families were found inhabiting caves. In Oakland, California, whole families lived in sewer pipes.

The Depression had a powerful impact on families. It forced couples to delay marriage and drove the birthrate below the replacement level for the first time in American history. The divorce rate fell, for the simple fact that many couples could not afford to maintain separate households or to pay legal fees. The Depression inflicted a heavy psychological toll on jobless men. With no wages to punctuate their ability, many men lost power as primary decision makers. Large numbers of men lost self-respect, became immobilized and stopped looking for work, while others turned to alcohol or became self-destructive or abusive to their families. Many Americans came to believe from these experiences that acting alone or with private associations could not solve the economic problems they faced. Increasingly, they looked to the federal government for help.

But President Herbert Hoover was not inclined to use the federal government to offer direct aid to Americans. He knew about the problems: when he took office in 1928 the unemployment rate was 4.4 percent. Four years later, the rate was 23.6 percent. But Hoover was what was called a “rugged individualist.” He was a self-made millionaire from a rural Iowa town. His views were that the American system was based on “self-reliance” and that government should avoid intervening with peoples’ affairs. This sentiment was, for those of you learning a bit in HIST 101, the total opposite of Teddy Roosevelt’s attitudes in the earlier “Square Deal.” President Hoover, during a global economic depression that ravaged the nation, argued that federal relief programs would undermine individual character and make citizens forever dependent on the American government for the existence and survival.

What Hoover failed to recognize as he ran for re-election in 1932, however, was the Great Depression had produced a fundamental transformation in public attitudes. It had led Americans to view the federal government as the ultimate protector of public well-being. People now wanted some help dealing with their economic troubles and that help (according to the period’s Progressive attitudes) needed to come from federal and state governments. If President Hoover didn’t want to take this step, the Democrat Party was happy to nominate a candidate that would use his power to offer help. It was Franklin Roosevelt (Teddy’s fifth cousin) that promised “a New Deal for the American people.” Although his speech contained few concrete proposals, Roosevelt radiated confidence, giving many desperate voters hope. He won the 1932 election easily over President Hoover, but the economic troubles for the U.S. did not end anytime soon.

On March 4, 1933, the day Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, the U.S. and its people faced desperate challenges. In his inaugural address, however, Roosevelt expressed confidence that his administration could end the Depression. “The only thing we have to fear,” he declared, “is fear itself.” In his first hundred days in office, he pushed 15 major bills through Congress. The bills would reshape every aspect of the economy, from banking and industry to agriculture and social welfare. The president promised decisive action. He called Congress into special session and demanded “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

He ttacked the bank crisis first. He declared a national bank holiday, which closed all banks. In just four days, his aides drafted the Emergency Banking Relief Act which permitted solvent banks to reopen under government supervision. The law also gave the president broad powers over the Federal Reserve System. The law radically reshaped the nation’s banking system; Congress passed the law in just 8 hours.

Roosevelt appealed directly to the people to generate support for his program. On March 12 he conducted the first of many radio “fireside chats.” Using the radio in the way later presidents exploited television, he explained what he had done in plain, simple terms and told the public to have “confidence and courage.” When the banks reopened the following day, people demonstrated their faith by making more deposits than withdrawals. One of Roosevelt’s key advisors did not exaggerate when he later boasted, “Capitalism was saved in eight days.”

The president quickly pushed ahead on other fronts. The Federal Emergency Relief Act pumped $500 million into state-run welfare programs. The Homeowners Loan Act provided the first federal mortgage financing and loan guarantees. By the end of Roosevelt’s first term, the Homeowners Loan Act provided more than 1 million loans. In addition, Roosevelt took the nation off the gold standard, devalued the dollar, and ordered the Federal Reserve System to ease credit. Other important laws passed during the 100 days included the Agricultural Adjustment Act–the nation’s first system of agricultural price and production supports; the National Industrial Recovery Act–the first major attempt to plan and regulate the economy; and the Tennessee Valley Authority Act–the first direct government involvement in energy production totaling $3 billion. The Glass-Steagall Act provided a federal guarantee of all bank deposits under $5,000, separated commercial and investment banking, and strengthened the Federal Reserve’s ability to stabilize the economy.

The New Dealers were strongly influenced by the Progressive reformers of the early 20th century, who believed that government had not only a right, but also a duty to intervene in all aspects of economic life in order to improve the U.S. This was not, however, the attitude held by all Americans. By 1935, Roosevelt’s programs were provoking strong opposition. Many conservatives regarded his programs as infringements on the rights of the individual, while a growing number of critics argued that they did not go far enough. Three figures stepped forward to challenge Roosevelt: Huey Long, a Louisiana senator; Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest from Detroit; and Francis Townsend, a retired California physician.

Of the three, Huey Long attracted the widest following. Ambitious, endowed with supernatural energy, and totally devoid of scruples, Long was a fiery, spellbinding orator in the tradition of southern populism. As governor and then U.S. senator, he ruled Louisiana with an iron hand, keeping a private army equipped with sub-machine guns and a “deduct box,” where he kept funds deducted from state employees’ salaries. Yet the people of Louisiana loved him because he attacked the big oil companies, increased state spending on public works, and improved public schools. Although he backed Roosevelt in 1932, Long quickly abandoned the president and opposed the New Deal as too conservative.

Huey Long was immensely popular, especially among the poor. Part of his appeal lay in his style; he dressed in vanilla ice cream-white suits and called himself “the Kingfish,” after a character in “Amos ‘n Andy.” He became a popular legend by playing up his country origins and ridiculing the rich. In one incident, he issued a “budget” showing how millionaires could economize by living on $10,000 a day. Early in 1934, Long announced his “Share Our Wealth” program. Vowing to make “every man a king,” he promised to soak the rich by imposing a stiff tax on inheritances over $5 million and by levying a 100 percent tax on annual incomes over $1 million. The confiscated funds, in turn, would be distributed to the people, guaranteeing every American family an annual income of no less than $2,000. In Long’s words, the money would be more than enough to buy “a radio, a car, and a home.” By February 1935, Long’s followers had organized over 27,000 “Share Our Wealth” clubs. Roosevelt had to take him seriously, for a Democratic poll revealed that Long could attract three-to-four million voters to an independent presidential ticket.

The country’s reform spirit was pretty much all gone by the end of 1938. A conservative alliance of southern Democrats and northern Republicans in Congress blocked all efforts to expand the New Deal. In the congressional elections of 1938, Roosevelt campaigned against five conservative senators who opposed the New Deal. Nevertheless, all won re-election. Roosevelt’s failures showed conservative Democrats that they could defy the president with impunity. What, then, can we make of the New Deal? Roosevelt’s programs  did not end the Depression. Nor did it significantly redistribute income. It did, however, provide Americans with economic security that they had never known before. The New Deal legacies include unemployment insurance, old age insurance, and insured bank deposits. The Wagner Act reduced violence in labor relations. The Securities and Exchange Commission protected stock market investments of millions of small investors. The Federal Housing Administration and Fannie Mae enabled a majority of Americans to become homeowners. The New Deal’s greatest legacy was a shift in government philosophy. As a result of the New Deal, Americans came to believe that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure the health of the nation’s economy and the welfare of its citizens.