The USA before the Second World War- 2 | UPSC Mains: World History PDF Download

Racial Discrimination And The Civil Rights Movement

• During the second half of the seventeenth century the colonists in Virginia began to import slaves from Africa in large numbers to work on the tobacco plantations. Slavery survived through the eighteenth century and was still firmly in place when the American colonies won their independence and the USA was born in 1776. In the North, slavery had mostly disappeared by 1800, when one in five of the total US population was African American. In the South it lingered on because the whole plantation economy – tobacco, sugar and cotton – was based on slave labour, and Southern whites could not imagine how they could survive without it. This was in spite of the fact that one of the founding principles of the USA was the idea of freedom and equality for everybody. This was clearly stated in the 1776 Declaration of Independence:
• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
• Yet when the Constitution was drawn up in 1787 it somehow succeeded in ignoring the issue of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln, who was opposed to slavery, was elected president in 1860, the eleven Southern states began to secede (withdraw) from the Union, so that they could continue slavery and maintain control over their own internal affairs. Thus the abolition of slavery and the question of states’ rights were the basic causes of the Civil War.

(b) ‘Black Reconstruction’ after the Civil War

• The Civil War between North and South (1861–5) was the most terrible conflict in American history, leaving some 620 000 men dead. As well as widespread damage, especially in the South, it also left behind deep political and social divisions. The victory of the North had two clear results: the Union had been preserved, and slavery had been brought to an end. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution outlawed slavery, laid down the principle of racial equality and gave all US citizens equal protection of the law. Any state which deprived any male citizens over 21 of the right to vote would be penalized. For a short time, black people in the South were able to vote; many African Americans were elected to state legislatures; in South Carolina they even won a small majority; 20 became members of Congress and two were elected to the Senate. Another great step forward was the introduction of free and racially mixed schools.
• The formerly dominant Southern whites found all this difficult to accept. They accused the black politicians of being incompetent, corrupt and lazy, though on the whole they were probably no more so than their white counterparts. Southern state legislatures soon began to pass what were known as the ‘Black Codes’; these were laws introducing all kinds of restrictions on the freedom of the former slaves, which as near as possible restored the old slavery laws. When black people protested there were brutal reprisals; clashes occurred, and there were race riots in Memphis, Tennessee, in which 46 blacks were killed (1866). In New Orleans later the same year, the police killed around 40 people and wounded 160, mostly blacks. Violence intensified in the late 1860s and early 1870s, much of it organized by the Ku Klux Klan. Union troops stayed on in the South at the end of the Civil War and were able to maintain some semblance of order. But gradually the federal government in Washington, anxious to avoid another war at all costs, began to turn a blind eye to what was happening.
• The real turning point came with the presidential election of November 1876. At the end of the year, with only three states in the South – Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana – still to count their votes, the Democrats looked like winning. However, if the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, won all three, he would become president. After long and secret discussions, a shady deal was worked out: Hayes made concessions to the white South, promising extensive federal cash investment for railways, and the withdrawal of Union troops. In effect it meant abandoning the former slaves and handing back political control of the South to the whites in return for the presidency. Hayes became president in March 1877, and the period known as Black Reconstruction was over.

(c) The Ku Klux Klan and the Jim Crow laws

In their campaign to prevent blacks from gaining equal civil rights, Southern whites used violence as well as legal methods. The violence was supplied by the Ku Klux Klan (‘Ku Klux’ from the Greek kuklos – a drinking bowl), which began as a secret society on Christmas Eve 1865, in Tennessee. They claimed that they were protecting whites who were being terrorized by former slaves, and they warned that they would take revenge. They carried out a campaign of threats and terror against blacks and against whites who were sympathetic to the black cause. Lynchings, beatings, whippings and tarring and feathering became commonplace. Their aims soon became more specific; they wanted to:

• terrorize blacks to such an extent that they would be afraid to exercise their votes;
• drive them from any land which they had been able to obtain;
• intimidate and demoralize them so that they would give up all attempts to win equality.

Ordinary law-abiding white citizens who might disapprove of the Klan’s activities were afraid to speak out or give evidence against its members. And so the Klan rampaged around the South in their night raids, dressed in white hoods and masks, and holding pseudo-religious ceremonies involving burning crosses. By the end of the 1870s, with its main aims apparently achieved, Klan activity decreased somewhat until the early 1920s. Even so, between 1885 and the US entry into the First World War in 1917, over 2700 African Americans were lynched in the South.

Legal weapons used by Southern whites to maintain their supremacy included the so-called Jim Crow laws passed by state legislatures soon after Hayes became president in 1877. These severely restricted black people’s rights: various devices were used to deprive them of their vote; they were only allowed to take the worst and lowest-paid jobs; they were forbidden to live in the best areas of towns. There was worse to come: blacks were excluded from schools and universities attended by whites, and from hotels and restaurants. Even trains and buses were to have separate sections for blacks and whites. Meanwhile in the North, black people were somewhat better off in the sense that they could at least vote, though they still had to put up with discrimination in housing, jobs and education. In the South, however, at the end of the century, white supremacy seemed unassailable.

Not surprisingly, many black leaders seemed to have given up hope. One of the best known figures, Booker T. Washington, who had been born a slave in Virginia, believed that the best way for blacks to cope was to accept the situation passively and work hard to achieve economic success. His ideas were set out in his ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech in 1895: only when African Americans demonstrated their economic abilities and became disciplined could they hope to win concessions from the ruling whites and make political progress. He stressed the importance of education and vocational training, and in 1881 became principal of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he developed into a major centre of black education.

(d) Civil rights in the early twentieth century

• Early in the new century black people began to organize themselves. There were something like 10 million African Americans in the USA and 9 million of them lived in the South, where they were downtrodden and discouraged. However, several outstanding new leaders emerged who were prepared to risk speaking out. W. E. B. Du Bois was educated in the North, was the first black man to take a Ph.D. degree at Harvard, and worked as a teacher in Atlanta. He was determined to fight for full civil and political rights. He opposed the tactics of Booker T. Washington, which he thought were too cautious and moderate; he dismissed the vocational education provided at Tuskegee, claiming that it was designed to keep young black people in the old rural South, instead of providing them with the training and skills necessary for success in the new urban centres of the North. Du Bois, together with William Monroe Trotter, who edited a newspaper called the Guardian in Boston, organized a conference over the border in Canada, near Niagara Falls. This led to the formation of the Niagara group (1905); its founding statement set the tone for its campaign:
• We refuse to allow the impressions to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. The voice of protest of ten million Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows so long as America is unjust.
• In 1910 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded, with Du Bois as one of its leaders and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. They aimed to fight segregation through legal actions and better education – by demonstrating their abilities and skills, black people would earn respect from the whites, and gradually, it was hoped, full civil rights would follow.
• A rather different approach was tried by another black leader, Marcus Garvey. Born in Jamaica, Garvey only moved to the USA in 1916, arriving in New York at the time of the great influx of black people who were hoping to escape from poverty in the South. He soon came to the conclusion that there was little chance of black people being treated as equals and enjoying full civil rights in the near future. So he advocated black nationalism, black pride and racial separation. Living and working in the black areas of Harlem, Garvey edited his own weekly newspaper, Negro World, and introduced his Universal Negro Improvement Association, which he had started in Jamaica in 1914. He was a forerunner of the black nationalism of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, even suggesting that a return to Africa might be the best future for the black people of white-supremacist America. This idea failed to catch on, and he turned his attention to business ventures. He founded a Black Factories Corporation and the Black Star Line, a steamship company owned and operated by blacks. This collapsed in 1921 and Garvey got into financial difficulties. He was convicted of fraud and then deported, and his black nationalist movement declined. He spent the last years of his life in London.
• At the time of the Red Scare just after the First World War, the Ku Klux Klan revived. Again it claimed self-defence as its main motive – the defence of the ‘Nordic Americans of the old stock … the embattled American farmer and artisans’ whose way of life was being threatened by hordes of fast-breeding immigrants. What worried them in the early 1920s was that the children of the immigrants who had entered the country between 1900 and 1914 were now coming up to voting age. The Klan rejected the ‘melting pot’ theory; they campaigned once more against black people, who had been moving in their thousands to live in the North, even though most of them were not exactly doing well during the ‘Roaring Twenties’. They also campaigned against Italians and Roman Catholics, and against Jews. The Klan spread to the North and by 1924 could boast not far short of 5 million members. There were more harassments, beatings and lynchings; black and white mobs fought each other and racial hatred seemed as deep-seated as ever. When the federal government limited immigration to 150 000 a year in 1924, the Klan claimed the credit. The organization declined in importance after 1925, following a series of financial and sexual scandals; by 1929 membership had fallen to around one million. However, this did not mean an improvement in the lives of black people, particularly as the country was soon plunged into the Great Depression.

The Great Depression Arrives, October 1929

(a) The Wall Street Crash, October 1929

• As 1929 opened, most Americans seemed blissfully unaware that anything serious was wrong with the economy. In 1928 President Coolidge told Congress: ‘The country can regard the present with satisfaction, and anticipate the future with optimism.’ Prosperity seemed permanent. The Republican Herbert C. Hoover won an overwhelming victory in the 1928 presidential election. Sadly the prosperity was built on suspect foundations and it could not last. ‘America the Golden’ was about to suffer a profound shock. In September 1929 the buying of shares on the New York stock exchange in Wall Street began to slow down. Rumours spread that the boom might be over, and so people rushed to sell their shares before prices fell too far. By 24 October the rush had turned into a panic and share prices fell dramatically. By 29 October – ‘Black Tuesday’ – thousands of people who had bought their shares when prices were high were ruined; the value of listed stocks fell catastrophically by around $30 billion.
• This disaster is always remembered as the Wall Street Crash. Its effects spread rapidly: so many people in financial difficulties rushed to the banks to draw out their savings that thousands of banks had to close. As the demand for goods fell, factories closed down and unemployment rose alarmingly. The great boom had suddenly turned into the Great Depression. It rapidly affected not only the USA, but other countries as well, and so it became known as the world economic crisis. The Wall Street Crash did not cause the depression; it was just a symptom of a problem whose real causes lay much deeper.

(b) What caused the Great Depression?

(i) Domestic overproduction
American industrialists, encouraged by high profits and helped by increased mechanization, were producing too many goods for the home market to absorb (in the same way as the farmers). This was not apparent in the early 1920s, but as the 1930s approached, unsold stocks of goods began to build up, and manufacturers produced less. Since fewer workers were required, men were laid off; and as there was no unemployment benefit, these men and their families bought less. And so the vicious circle continued.

(ii) Unequal distribution of income

• The enormous profits being made by industrialists were not being distributed equally among the workers. The average wage for industrial workers rose by about 8 per cent between 1923 and 1929, but during the same period, industrial profits increased by 72 per cent. An 8 per cent increase in wages (only 1.4 per cent in real terms) meant that there was not enough buying power in the hands of the general public to sustain the boom; they could manage to absorb goods produced for a limited time, with the help of credit, but by 1929 they were fast approaching the limit. Unfortunately manufacturers, usually super-corporations, were not prepared to reduce prices or to increase wages substantially, and so a glut of consumer goods built up.
• This refusal by the manufacturers to make some compromise was short-sighted to say the least; at the beginning of 1929 there were still millions of Americans who had no radio, no electric washing machine and no car because they could not afford them. If employers had allowed larger wage increases and been content with less profit, there is no reason why the boom could not have continued for several more years while its benefits were more widely shared. Even so, a slump was still not inevitable, provided the Americans could export their surplus products.

(iii) Falling demand for exports
However, exports began to fall away, partly because foreign countries were reluctant to buy American goods when the Americans themselves put up tariff barriers to protect their industries from foreign imports. Although the Fordney–McCumber tariff (1922) helped to keep foreign goods out, at the same time it prevented foreign states, especially those in Europe, from making much-needed profits from trade with the USA. Without those profits, the nations of Europe would be unable to afford American goods, and they would be struggling to pay their war debts to the USA. To make matters worse, many states retaliated by introducing tariffs against American goods. A slump of some sort was clearly on the way.

(iv) Speculation

The situation was worsened by a great rush of speculation on the New York stock market, which began to gather momentum about 1926. Speculation is the buying of shares in companies; people with cash to spare chose to do this for two possible motives:

• to get the dividend – the annual sharing-out of a company’s profits among its shareholders;
• to make a quick profit by selling the shares for more than they originally paid for them.

In the mid-1920s it was the second motive which most attracted investors: as company profits increased, more people wanted to buy shares; this forced share prices up and there were plenty of chances of quick profits from buying and selling shares. The average value of a share rose from $9 in 1924 to $26 in 1929. Share prices of some companies rose spectacularly: the stock of the Radio Corporation of America, for example, stood at $85 a share early in 1928 and had risen to $505 in September 1929, and this was a company which did not pay dividends.
Promise of quick profits encouraged all sorts of rash moves: ordinary people spent their savings or borrowed money to buy a few shares. Stockbrokers sold shares on credit; banks speculated in shares using the cash deposited with them. It was all something of a gamble; but there was enormous confidence that prosperity would continue indefinitely.
This confidence lasted well on into 1929, but when the first signs appeared that sales of goods were beginning to slow down, some better-informed investors decided to sell their shares while prices were still high. This caused suspicion to spread – more people than usual were trying to sell shares – something must be wrong! Confidence in the future began to waver for the first time, and more people decided to sell their shares while the going was good. And so a process of what economists call self-fulfilling expectation developed. This means that by their own actions, investors actually caused the dramatic collapse of share prices which they were afraid of.
By October 1929 there was a flood of people rushing to sell shares, but because confidence had been shaken, there were far fewer people wanting to buy. Share prices tumbled and unfortunate investors had to accept whatever they could get. One especially bad day was 24 October – ‘Black Thursday’ – when nearly 13 million shares were ‘dumped’ on the stock market at very low prices. By mid-1930 share prices were, on average, about 25 per cent of their peak level the previous year, but they were still falling. Rock bottom was reached in 1932, and by then the whole of the USA was in the grip of depression.

(c) How did the depression affect people?

1. To begin with, the stock market crash ruined millions of investors who had paid high prices for their shares. If investors had bought shares on credit or with borrowed money, their creditors lost heavily too, since they had no hope of receiving payment.
2. Banks were in a shaky position, having themselves speculated unsuccessfully. When, added to this, millions of people rushed to withdraw their savings in the belief that their cash would be safer at home, many banks were overwhelmed, did not have enough cash to pay everybody, and closed down for good. There were over 25 000 banks in the country in 1929, but by 1933 there were fewer than 15 000. This meant that millions of ordinary people who had had nothing to do with the speculation were ruined as their life savings disappeared.
3. As the demand for all types of goods fell, workers were laid off and factories closed. Industrial production in 1933 was only half the 1929 total, while unemployment stood at around 14 million. About a quarter of the total labour force was without jobs, and one in eight farmers lost all their property. There was a drop in living standards, with people queuing for bread, charity soup kitchens, evictions of tenants who could not afford the rent, and near-starvation for many people. The ‘great American dream’ of prosperity for everybody had turned into a nightmare. In the words of historian Donald McCoy: ‘the American people were affected as though a war had been fought from coast to coast’. There were no unemployment or sickness benefits to help out. Outside large cities, homeless people lived in camps nicknamed ‘Hoovervilles’ after the president who was blamed for the depression.
4. Many other countries, especially Germany, were affected because their prosperity depended to a large extent on loans from the USA. As soon as the crash came, the loans stopped, and the Americans called in the short-term loans they had already made. By 1931 most of Europe was in a similar plight. The depression had political results too; in many states – Germany, Austria, Japan and Britain – right-wing governments came to power when the existing regimes failed to cope with the situation.

(d) Who was to blame for the disaster?
At the time it was fashionable to blame the unfortunate President Hoover, but this is unfair. The origins of the trouble go much further back, and the Republican Party as a whole must share the blame. There were several measures the government could have taken to control the situation: they could have encouraged overseas countries to buy more American goods by lowering American tariffs instead of raising them. Decisive action could have been taken in 1928 and 1929 to limit the amount of credit which the stock market was allowing speculators. But their laissez-faire attitude would not allow such interference in private affairs.

(e) What did Hoover’s government do to ease the depression?

• Hoover tried to solve the problem by encouraging employers not to reduce wages and not to lay workers off. The government lent money to banks, industrialists and farmers to save them from bankruptcy, and urged state governors to create jobs by investing in public works schemes. After a promising beginning the policy began to falter: as the depression got worse, businesses started to break the agreement and lay men off. As for the states, they lacked sufficient funds to create any effective public works.
• Hoover’s attempts to help farmers were even less effective. The government began to buy up surplus grain, but this only encouraged them to produce even more, so that the government could not afford to continue the policy; the result – there was even more surplus grain, causing the price to fall further. In 1931 Hoover declared a one-year moratorium on war debts. This meant that foreign governments could miss one instalment of their debts to the USA in the hope that they would use the money saved to buy more American goods. However, this was a failure partly because at the same time the new Smoot–Hawley Tariff put import duties on agricultural produce, making them more expensive than home-grown goods, and so protect farmers from foreign competition. But this backfired: European countries retaliated by introducing their own tariffs, which prevented American farmers from exporting to Europe. Hoover’s efforts made little difference – American exports in 1932 were less than a third of the 1929 total.
• Hoover tried to address the problem of the mass closure of banks by setting up the National Credit Corporation. This was designed to persuade large banks to lend money to smaller banks that were in difficulties. But large banks were reluctant to lend money for fear that the smaller banks might collapse, and be unable to pay back the loan. More effective was another new organization – the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which was given the power to lend money to banks and provide cash for job-creation programmes. This was beginning to show results towards the end of 1932, but it was too late; the election was due in November 1932. A measure which would have been more helpful was the government making relief payments to individual families. Even in a crisis as serious as this, he was against relief payments to individuals because he believed in self-reliance and hard work, in other words, ‘rugged individualism’. The idea that it was the government’s job to provide for the suffering poor was complete anathema to him, because it would create what he called ‘a dependency culture’. It was no surprise when the Democrat candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt (‘FDR’), easily beat Hoover in the presidential election of November 1932 (see Illustration).

Illustration: The winner and the loser: Roosevelt waves to the cheering crowds, while defeated President Hoover looks downcast during their ride through Washington, March 1933

Roosevelt And The New Deal

The 51-year-old Roosevelt came from a wealthy New York family; educated at Harvard, he entered politics in 1910 and was Assistant Secretary to the Navy during the First World War. It seemed as though his career might be over when, at the age of 40, he was stricken with polio (1921), which left his legs completely paralysed. With tremendous determination he overcame his disability, though he was never able to walk unaided. He now brought the same determination to bear in his attempts to drag America out of the depression. He was dynamic, full of vitality and brimming with new ideas. He was a brilliant communicator – his radio talks (which he called his fireside chats) inspired confidence and won him great popularity. During the election campaign he had said: ‘I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.’ The phrase stuck, and his policies have always been remembered as ‘the New Deal’. Right from the beginning he brought new hope when he said in his inauguration speech: ‘Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. This nation asks for action, and action now. … I shall ask Congress for the power to wage war against the emergency.’

(a) What were the aims of the New Deal?
Basically Roosevelt had three aims:
relief: to give direct help to the poverty-stricken millions who were without food and homes;
recovery: to reduce unemployment, stimulate the demand for goods and get the economy moving again;
reform: to take whatever measures were necessary to prevent a repeat of the economic disaster.
It was obvious that drastic measures were needed, and Roosevelt’s methods were a complete change from those of the laissez-faire Republicans. He gathered advice from a small group of economists and university academics whom he called his Brain Trust. He was prepared to intervene in economic and social affairs as much as possible and to spend government cash to pull the country out of depression. The Republicans were always reluctant to take steps of this sort.

(b) What did the New Deal involve?
The measures which go to make up the New Deal were introduced over the years 1933 to 1940. Some historians have talked about a ‘First’ and a ‘Second’ New Deal starting in 1935, and even a ‘Third’, each with different characteristics. However, Michael Heale believes that this oversimplifies the subject. ‘The Roosevelt administration’, he writes, ‘was never governed by a single political ideology, and its components were always pulling in different directions. Broadly, however, it is fair to say that from 1935 the New Deal moved closer to the political left in that it stumbled into an uneasy alliance with organised labour and showed a greater interest in social reform.’ For the ‘first hundred days’ he concentrated on emergency legislation to deal with the ongoing crisis:

(i) Banking and financial systems

It was important to get the banking and financial systems working properly again. This was achieved by the government taking over the banks temporarily and guaranteeing that depositors would not lose their cash if there was another financial crisis. This restored confidence, and money began to flow into the banks again. The Securities Exchange Commission (1934) reformed the stock exchange; among other things, it insisted that people buying shares on credit must make a down payment of at least 50 per cent instead of only 10 per cent.

(ii) The Farmers’ Relief Act (1933) and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA)
It was important to help farmers, whose main problem was that they were still producing too much, which kept prices and profits low. Under the Act, the government paid compensation to farmers who reduced output, thereby raising prices. The AAA, under the control of the dynamic Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, was responsible for carrying out the policy. It had some success – by 1937 the average income of farmers had almost doubled. But its weakness was that it did nothing to help the poorer farmers, the tenant-farmers and the farm labourers, many of whom were forced to leave the land to seek a better life in the cities.

(iii) The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
Introduced in 1933, this was a popular Roosevelt idea to provide jobs for young men in conservation projects in the countryside. By 1940 about 2.5 million had ‘enjoyed’ a six-month spell in the CCC, which gave them a small wage ($30 a month, of which $25 had to be sent home to the family), as well as food, clothing and shelter.

(iv) The National Industrial Recovery Act (1933)
The most important part of the emergency programme, the National Industrial Recovery Act, was designed to get people back to work permanently, so that they would be able to buy more. This would stimulate industry and help the economy to function normally. The Act introduced the Public Works Administration (PWA), which organized and provided cash for the building of useful works – dams, bridges, roads, hospitals, schools, airports and government buildings – creating several million extra jobs. Another section of the Act set up the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which abolished child labour, introduced a maximum eight-hour working day and a minimum wage, and thus helped to create more employment. Although these rules were not compulsory, employers were pressured to accept them; those who did were privileged to use an official sticker on their goods showing a blue eagle and the letters ‘NRS’. The public was encouraged to boycott firms that refused to co-operate. The response was tremendous, with well over two million employers accepting the new standards.

(v) The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (1933)
Further relief and recovery were provided by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which provided $500 million of federal cash to enable the state governments to provide relief and soup kitchens.

(vi) The Works Progress Administration (WPA)
Founded in 1935, this funded a variety of projects such as roads, schools and hospitals (similar to the PWA but smaller-scale projects), and the Federal Theatre Project created jobs for playwrights, artists, actors, musicians and circus performers, as well as increasing public appreciation of the arts.

(vii) The Social Security Act (1935)
This introduced old-age pensions and unemployment insurance schemes, to be jointly financed by federal and state governments, employers and workers. However, this was not a great success at the time, because payments were usually not very generous; nor was there any provision made for sickness insurance. The USA was lagging well behind countries such as Germany and Britain in social welfare.

(viii) Working conditions
Two acts encouraged trade unions and helped improve working conditions.

• The Wagner Act (1935), the work of Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, gave unions a proper legal foundation and the right to bargain for their members in any dispute with management. It also set up the National Labour Relations Board, to which workers could appeal against unfair practices by management.
• The Fair Labour Standards Act (1938) introduced a maximum 45-hour working week as well as a minimum wage in certain low-paid trades, and made most child labour illegal.

(ix) Other measures
Also included in the New Deal were such measures as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which revitalized a huge area of rural America which had been ruined by soil erosion and careless farming (see Map 22.2). The new authority built dams to provide cheap electricity, and organized conservation, irrigation and afforestation to prevent soil erosion. Other initiatives included loans for householders in danger of losing their homes because they could not afford mortgage repayments; slum clearance and building of new houses and flats; increased taxes on the incomes of the wealthy; and trade agreements which at last reduced American tariffs in return for tariff reductions by the other party to the treaty (in the hope of increasing American exports). One of the very first New Deal measures in 1933 was the end of Prohibition; as ‘FDR’ himself remarked, ‘I think this would be a good time for beer.’

(c) Opposition to the New Deal
It was inevitable that such a far-reaching programme would arouse criticism and opposition from both right and left. Critics on the left thought that the New Deal didn’t go far enough, while those on the right were horrified at the lengths to which it went.

• Businessmen objected strongly to the growth of trade unions, the regulation of hours and wages, and increased taxation. These would encourage socialists and communists and might even lead to revolution. In their view, governments should not interfere so massively in economic affairs, because that would only stifle private enterprise with all the new rules and taxes.
• Some of the state governments resented the extent to which the federal government was interfering in what they considered to be internal state affairs.
• The Supreme Court claimed that the president was taking on too much power; it ruled that several measures (including NRA) were unconstitutional, and this held up their operation. The nine members were all elderly and were not Roosevelt appointees. However, the Supreme Court became more amenable during Roosevelt’s second term after he had appointed five more co-operative judges to replace those who had died or resigned.
• There was also opposition from socialists, who felt that the New Deal was not drastic enough and still left too much power in the hands of big business. One of the most vociferous critics was Huey Long, governor of Louisiana and a member of the US senate. He believed that governments should spend heavily wherever it was necessary to help the poor. In 1934 he set up a scheme in Louisiana called Share Our Wealth which planned to make sure that every family had at least $5000, a house and a car, and old-age pensions. This was to be financed by taxing the rich, and he urged Roosevelt to do something similar throughout the nation. Long was considering running for president in the 1936, but he was assassinated in September 1935.
• From about the end of 1936 there was opposition from right-wing members of his own Democratic Party. What upset them was that the New Deal led some of the new trade unions to strike. Both General Motors and US Steel were forced to give way by sit-down strikes, and this encouraged the formation of numerous new unions. Dissident Democrats joined the Republicans in Congress and blocked further important legislation.
• Some people poured scorn on the wide variety of new organizations, known by their initials. Ex-president Hoover remarked: ‘There are only four letters of the alphabet not now in use by the administration. When we establish the Quick Loan Corporation for Xylophones, Yachts and Zithers, the alphabet of our fathers will be exhausted.’ From then on the term ‘Alphabet Agencies’ stuck.

Map: The Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933

Nevertheless, Roosevelt was tremendously popular with the millions of ordinary Americans, the ‘forgotten men’, as he called them, who had benefited from his policies. He had won the support of trade unions and of many farmers and black people. Although the forces of the right did their best to remove him in 1936 and 1940, Roosevelt won a crushing victory in 1936 and another comfortable one in 1940.

(d) What did the New Deal achieve?
It has to be said that it did not achieve all that ‘FDR’ had hoped. Some of the measures failed completely or were only partially successful. The Farmers’ Relief Act, for example, certainly helped farmers, but it threw many farm labourers out of work. Nor did it do much to help farmers living in parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas; in the mid-1930s these areas were badly hit by drought and soil erosion, which turned them into a huge ‘dustbowl’ (see Map 22.1). Although unemployment was reduced to less than 8 million by 1937, it was still a serious problem. Part of the failure was due to the Supreme Court’s opposition. Another reason was that although he was bold in many ways, Roosevelt was too cautious in the amounts of money he was prepared to spend to stimulate industry. In 1938 he reduced government spending, causing another recession, which sent unemployment up to 10.5 million. The New Deal therefore did not rescue the USA from the depression; it was only the war effort which brought unemployment below the million mark in 1943.
Still, in spite of this, Roosevelt’s first eight years in office were a remarkable period. Never before had an American government intervened so directly in the lives of ordinary people; never before had so much attention been focused on an American president. And much was achieved.

• In the early days the chief success of the New Deal was in providing relief for the destitute and jobless, and in the creation of millions of extra jobs.
• Confidence was restored in the financial system and the government, and some historians think it may even have prevented a violent revolution.
• The public works schemes and the Tennessee Valley Authority provided services of lasting value.
• Welfare benefits such as the 1935 Social Security Act were an important step towards a welfare state. Although ‘rugged individualism’ was still a vital ingredient in American society, the American government had accepted that it had a duty to help those in need.
• Many of the other innovations were continued – national direction of resources and collective bargaining between workers and management became accepted as normal.
• Some historians believe that Roosevelt’s greatest achievement was to preserve what might be called ‘the American middle way’ – democracy and free enterprise – at a time when other states, like Germany and Italy, had responded to similar crises by turning to fascism. Federal government authority over the state governments had increased and Roosevelt had put in place the structures to enable Washington to manage the economy and social policy.

(e) The Second World War and the American economy

• It was the war that finally put an end to the depression. The USA entered the war in December 1941 after the Japanese had bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. However, the Americans had begun to supply Britain and France with aircraft, tanks and other armaments as soon as war broke out in Europe in September 1939. ‘We have the men, the skills, and above all the will’, said Roosevelt. ‘We must be the arsenal of democracy.’ Between June 1940 and December 1941, the USA provided 23 000 aircraft.
• After Pearl Harbor, production of armaments soared: in 1943, 86 000 aircraft were built, while in 1944 the figure was over 96 000. It was the same with ships: in 1939 American shipyards turned out 237 000 tons of shipping; in 1943 this had risen to nearly 10 million tons. In fact the Gross National Product (GNP) of the USA almost doubled between 1939 and 1945. In June 1940 there were still 8 million people out of work, but by the end of 1942 there was almost full employment. It was calculated that by 1945 the war effort had created 7 million extra jobs in the USA. In addition, about 15 million Americans served in the armed forces. Economically therefore, the USA did well out of the Second World War – there were plenty of jobs, wages rose steadily, and there was no decline in the standard of living as there was in Europe.