Interpreting American History: The New Deal and the Great Depression

Aaron D. Purcell

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781612778709
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this second volume of the Interpreting American History series, experts on the 1930s address the changing historical interpretations of a critical period in American history. Following a decade of prosperity, the Great Depression brought unemployment, economic ruin, poverty, and a sense of hopelessness to millions of Americans. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs aimed to bring relief, recovery, and reform to the masses.

More than seventy-five years after Roosevelt took the oath as president, Americans are still debating what did and did not happen in the 1930s to help the nation recover from its worst economic depression. Proponents and detractors have cast the successes and failures of the New Deal in many lights. Historians have argued that the New Deal went too far, that it did not go far enough, that it created more problems than it solved, and even that its shaky foundations are the reason for the economic and social instability of the Great Recession of the early twenty-first century.

The contributors to this volume explore how historians have judged the nature, effects, and outcomes of the New Deal. Arranged in three sections, the essays discuss Roosevelt's New Deal revolution, explore the groups on the fringes of the New Deal, and consider the legacies of 1930s reform. Chapters focus on specific areas of study, including politics, agriculture, the environment, labor, African Americans, the economy, social programs, the arts, mobilization for World War II, and memory. These fields represent today's emerging interpretations of one of the most significant decades of the twentieth century.

Interpreting American History: The New Deal and the Great Depression introduces readers to this important period by examining the major historical debates that surround the 1930s, giving students a succinct and indispensable istoriographic overview.

CHAPTER ONE

Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great Depression

AARON D. PURCELL

Before the ascendancy of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1933, Americans lacked a host of reassurances; for many, employment, food, stability, prosperity, and hope had all become scarce. The Great Depression officially began with the collapse of the stock market in October 1929.¹ President Herbert Hoover’s efforts at economic recovery were varied. Hoover largely followed the tradition of limited involvement in the economy by the federal government. He relied on American businesses to stop the downward spiral and trusted that philanthropic and religious groups could reach the struggling masses. Many of Hoover’s recovery efforts mirrored New Deal agencies, but the size and scale of his approach paled in comparison. While some of Hoover’s programs yielded small signs of recovery, overall his measures proved ineffective in reversing the nation’s economic plunge.²

The arrival of Roosevelt in the early 1930s changed the political landscape and offered Americans, more than anything, a sense of hope. Compared with Hoover, Roosevelt’s charisma, charm, and confidence inspired optimism. Roosevelt and his team of advisors, the “brain trust,” promised great change through experimentation. Solutions came in the form of federal assistance, with government programs that were part of what he called, in the closing lines of his 1932 acceptance speech for the Democratic Party’s nomination, “a New Deal for the American people.”³ New Deal programs started in early 1933, with a flurry of activity during Roosevelt’s First Hundred Days in office. With Roosevelt’s encouragement, Congress created a variety of new federal agencies and programs, designed to reach Americans in need. The first New Deal programs were created to provide employment, regulate the economy, stabilize banking, reclaim or protect the natural environment, and in the process reignite the American spirit.⁴

The scale and scope of Roosevelt’s initial recovery efforts were unprecedented. Up to then the only interaction most Americans had with the federal government was receiving their mail. But the New Deal created a relationship between local communities and lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Roosevelt’s effective use of the radio to address Americans in his “fireside chats” strengthened the ties between the voters and the executive office.⁵ Early New Deal programs brought some immediate results: millions returned to work, the national banking structure regained its footing, the government pumped new money into the economy, public works projects focused on better managing the natural environment, and the nation’s infrastructure improved dramatically. Despite such advances, many of the larger shadows of the Great Depression, such as unemployment, abject poverty, environmental ruin, farm foreclosures, and homelessness worsened.

The programs of the First New Deal, 1933–1934, were uneven and drew considerable criticism. Opponents from the political right characterized the New Deal as socialism, or worse. Those on the left charged that the new federal programs had not brought about the recovery Roosevelt promised.⁶ Most damaging to Roosevelt, the Supreme Court made several rulings against key New Deal programs, ending agencies such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The elimination of these cornerstone First New Deal agencies that addressed the nation’s agricultural and industrial woes weighed heavily on Roosevelt’s broader agenda and overshadowed his political future.⁷

In 1935, Roosevelt launched the programs of the Second New Deal. These programs, which most notably included the Social Security Act, were more pragmatic and less experimental than those launched during the First New Deal. Roosevelt’s landslide victory in the 1936 presidential election ensured that a majority of the New Deal’s programs lasted through the remainder of the decade.⁸ However, the New Deal suffered significant setbacks. In 1937, Roosevelt unsuccessfully attempted to expand the Supreme Court in order to appoint new justices who would be sympathetic to the New Deal. Roosevelt’s “court-packing” misstep coincided with another dramatic economic downturn, which effectively erased previous gains in per capita income, employment, and the gross national product.⁹ The programs of the New Deal constituted an important part of national recovery in the last few years of the 1930s. However, in time, New Deal programs gave way to other government initiatives to prepare the nation for war. As the nation and the people transitioned from economic recovery to military preparedness, the Roosevelt administration either terminated New Deal programs or folded them into new government initiatives designed to help fight the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. These shifts often obscured the exact results of the New Deal, which left scholars to determine whether it was a catalyst for positive change or detrimental to national recovery.

STUDYING AND INTERPRETING

The history and historiography of the New Deal and the Great Depression are inseparable. It is also impossible to understand the 1930s without considering Roosevelt. He casts an enormous shadow across the twentieth century; his approach to recovery during the Great Depression represents one of his most significant contributions. In the past eighty years, scholars have produced hundreds of studies of the New Deal, the Great Depression, Roosevelt, and the 1930s. Scholarship on these topics has remained steady and recent attention to the programs of the New Deal has produced a groundswell of new writing. This chapter reviews the most significant academic writings on the New Deal and Great Depression to provide readers with recurring themes in this period of study. It does not, however, address the growing list of non-academic books on the subject, because of their political, rather than historical, focus.

A majority of scholars studying the 1930s, regardless of when they were writing, have approached the New Deal by examining the origins, the extent, and the results of the reforms. First, scholars questioned who was responsible for the reforms of the New Deal, with one group maintaining that Roosevelt and his advisors were the key and, and another arguing that the people generally, rather than Roosevelt and his advisors, were the chief instigators in identifying areas for reform. Second, scholars have either interpreted the 1930s as a period of American liberalism in which the New Deal was the engine for change, or they have viewed the New Deal as a conservative moment when government officials sought to appease business, labor, and popular demands for change. As a result, one group of historians portrayed Roosevelt as a near socialist, while other scholars argued that Roosevelt took steps to save capitalism. Finally, scholars have searched for New Deal connections to other reform movements, especially focusing on the Populist Movement of the late nineteenth century, the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, and the Great Society programs of the 1960s.¹⁰ Historians have argued variously that the New Deal went too far, that it did not go far enough, that it created more problems than it solved, or even that its shaky foundations are the reason for the economic and social instability of the Great Recession of the early twenty-first century.

The varied scholarship on the New Deal and the Great Depression presents an example of how historical interpretation changes over time. One constant across all these studies is the importance of historical revisionism, or the re-examination of previous historical interpretations. The corpus of scholarship on the New Deal and the Great Depression fits well within a few major categories, or schools, of historical interpretative thought that developed. It is important to remember that scholars representing these schools of thought wrote across a wide period of time and their interpretations changed over the decades. A categorical and chronological approach is perhaps the easiest way to digest eighty years of scholarship and understand the mainstream threads of historical interpretation for this period.¹¹

INTERPRETATIONS FROM CONTEMPORARIES

The first wave of publications focused on the New Deal and the Great Depression came from participants and contemporaries. While few of these authors were professional historians, they offered later scholars important perspectives on the period. Frederick Lewis Allen, a journalist who wrote the widely popular Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (1931), capped off the difficult decade with a sequel titled Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America (1939).¹² Other writers tackled the period through significant works of fiction and non-fiction based on the harsh social realities of the Great Depression. Books such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (1941) by James Agee and Walker Evans became influential works on the period.¹³

The New Deal and Roosevelt stood at the center of many early studies of the 1930s. One of the first significant volleys against the New Deal and Roosevelt’s recovery efforts came from Herbert Hoover. Throughout the decade, Hoover wrote and spoke about the inadequacies of the New Deal. He believed that Roosevelt’s approach to remedying the Great Depression threatened free-enterprise economics, the essence of American democratic ideals, and most importantly the liberty of the American people because of an ever-expanding federal government at the expense of states, localities, and self-government. Hoover warned that the government excesses of the New Deal would lead to a revolution similar to those that had taken place in European countries.¹⁴

Other detractors of the New Deal came from the political right and left. Notables such as Louisiana governor and senator Huey P. Long, radio evangelist Charles E. Coughlin, Democratic Party stalwart and former New York governor Alfred E. Smith, and later Republican Party challenger Wendell Willkie each gained a national following for their harsh criticisms of Roosevelt and the New Deal.¹⁵ Their speeches and writings attracted significant attention from Americans unsatisfied with New Deal recovery. These detractors founded anti-New Deal organizations, the most influential of which was the conservative democratic American Liberty League, organized in 1934.¹⁶

An important set of contemporary voices came from the people who launched or managed the programs of the New Deal. Many members of Roosevelt’s cabinet and his advisors wrote books about their experiences during the 1930s, most with uniformly positive recollections. Commentary on the New Deal came from the pens of such notables as James Farley, the postmaster general and chairman of the Democratic National Committee who was largely responsible for Roosevelt’s rise to the presidency, the Secretary of the Interior and director of the Public Works Administration, Harold Ickes, Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins, and key Roosevelt aide and executive director of the National Recovery Administration, Donald Richburg.¹⁷

Several important figures from the Roosevelt administration published books that questioned the New Deal for failing to do enough. Raymond Moley, an early Roosevelt advisor, and Rexford Tugwell, an economist who drafted early New Deal policies, both criticized the effectiveness of Roosevelt’s economic and social recovery efforts. They each argued that the New Deal and Roosevelt had not gone far enough to change the national economy to encourage recovery.¹⁸ Tugwell, Moley, and other contemporaries had been early proponents of the New Deal, but their support turned into opposition as the Great Depression worsened.

Other autobiographies, case studies, and memoirs from former New Dealers and Roosevelt associates appeared during the second half of the twentieth century. Their firsthand participation and recollections remain an important component of New Deal historiography, especially for the role of memory in history. By the end of World War II, the first group of professional historians produced scholarly interpretations of the New Deal, Roosevelt, and the Great Depression.

PROGRESSIVE HISTORIANS

The first scholarly works on the New Deal and the Great Depression appeared in the 1940s, largely from a group categorized as the progressive historians. These scholars viewed American history as an ever-evolving progression, with a crescendo of liberal reform completed largely through the political process. The progressives interpreted American history as a struggle between the majority and the privileged, and argued that reformers wanted to return government, society, and economic power back to the people through their reforms.¹⁹ Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington, and Frederick Jackson Turner were the most significant historians to write in the progressive tradition.²⁰ Although these three historians produced their most significant scholarship before the 1930s and thus offered little on the New Deal, their school of thought influenced a great number of historians writing in the early post–World War II era.

According to the progressive historians, the reforms of the New Deal were in fact a continuation of the nation’s liberal tradition—the demands of the people resulted in tangible social, economic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Historical Interpretations of the New Deal and the Great Depression
• Part I: Roosevelt’s New Deal Revolution
• Part II: The Fringes of the New Deal
• Part III: Legacies and Outcomes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index