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CHAPTER 21 The New Deal, 1932–1940
This chapter concentrates on the history of the New Deal era, examining legislation, protest movements, and the
impact of the New Deal on minorities. The chapter opens with the story of the Grand Coulee Dam—a magnificent
piece of civil engineering, but one that flooded hundreds of acres of Indian hunting and farming land for which the
Indians were not compensated. Roosevelt’s New Deal accomplished significant achievements, but also had many
limitations. In his fireside chats, President Roosevelt spoke directly to Americans in their homes and mobilized
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: The Columbia River Project
II. The First New Deal
A. FDR and the Election of 1932
1. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) came from a privileged background but served as a symbol for the
ordinary man.
2. FDR promised a “new deal” for the American people, but his campaign was vague in explaining how he
was going to achieve that.
B. The Coming of the New Deal
1. Conservative and totalitarian leaders led the peoples of Europe in the 1930s.
2. On the other side of the Atlantic, Roosevelt saw his New Deal as an alternative to socialism on the left,
to Nazism on the right, and to the inaction of upholders of unregulated capitalism.
3. For advice, FDR relied heavily on a group of intellectuals and social workers who held key positions in
his administration.
4. The presence of these individuals reflected how Roosevelt drew on the reform traditions of the
Progressive era.
C. The Banking Crisis
1. FDR spent much of 1933 trying to reassure the public.
2. Roosevelt declared a bank holiday, temporarily halting all bank operations, and called Congress into
special session.
a. Emergency Banking Act
D. The NRA
1. An unprecedented flurry of legislation during the first three months of Roosevelt’s administration was a
period known as the Hundred Days.
2. The centerpiece of Roosevelt’s plan for combating the Depression was the National Industrial Recovery
Act, which established the National Recovery Administration (NRA).
3. The NRA reflected how, even in its early days, the New Deal reshaped understandings of freedom.
a. Section 7a
4. Hugh S. Johnson set standards for production, prices, and wages in the textile, steel, mining, and auto
industries.
a. The Blue Eagle
E. Government Jobs
1. The Hundred Days also brought the government into providing relief to those in need.
a. Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA)
b. Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
F. Public-Works Projects
1. Public Works Administration (PWA)
2. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
G. The New Deal and Agriculture
1. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) authorized the federal government to try to raise farm prices
by setting production quotas for major crops and paying farmers not to plant more.
5. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) focuses on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of
Wrath (1938), providing a glimpse into the migrant worker’s life on the road in California.
H. The New Deal and Housing
1. Home ownership had become a mark of respectability, but the Depression devastated the American
housing industry.
2. Hoover’s administration established a federally sponsored bank to issue home loans.
3. FDR moved energetically to protect homeowners from foreclosure and to stimulate new construction.
a. Home Owners Loan Corporation
b. Federal Housing Administration (FHA)
I. The Court and the New Deal
1. In 1935, the Supreme Court began to invalidate key New Deal laws.
a. National Recovery Administration (NRA)
b. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)
III. The Grassroots Revolt
A. Labor’s Great Upheaval
1. Previous depressions, like those of the 1870s and 1890s, had devastated the labor movement.
2. A cadre of militant labor leaders provided leadership to the labor upsurge.
B. The Rise of the CIO
1. The labor upheaval posed a challenge to the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
2. John Lewis led a walkout of the AFL that produced a new labor organization, the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO).
C. Labor and Politics
1. The labor upsurge altered the balance of economic power and propelled labor’s goal of a fairer, freer,
more equal America to the forefront of politics.
2. CIO leaders explained the Depression as the result of an imbalance between wealth and income.
D. Voices of Protest
1. Other popular movements of the mid-1930s also placed the question of economic justice on the political
agenda.
a. Upton Sinclair and the End Poverty in California movement (EPIC)
b. Huey Long and Share Our Wealth
c. Dr. Francis Townsend
E. Religion on the Radio
1. Religious leaders like Los Angeles’s Aimee Semple McPherson drew on radio and mass media to offer
their answers to the Depression.
IV. The Second New Deal
A. The WPA and the Wagner Act
2. Under Harry Hopkins’s direction, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) changed the physical face
of the United States.
3. Perhaps the most famous WPA projects were in the arts.
4. The Wagner Act
B. The American Welfare State
1. The centerpiece of the Second New Deal was the Social Security Act of 1935.
a. The Social Security Act launched the American version of the welfare state.
C. The Social Security System
1. Roosevelt himself preferred to fund Social Security by taxes on employers and workers.
V. A Reckoning with Liberty
A. FDR and the Idea of Freedom
1. Roosevelt was a master of political communication and used his fireside chats to great effect.
a. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes part of a 1934 radio address in which
President Roosevelt explained his support for government jobs programs and public-works projects.
4. As the 1930s progressed, proponents of the New Deal invoked the language of liberty with greater and
greater passion.
B. The Election of 1936
3. Roosevelt won a landslide reelection.
a. New Deal coalition
C. The Court Fight
1. FDR proposed to change the face of the Supreme Court for political reasons.
D. The End of the Second New Deal
1. The Fair Labor Standards bill banned goods produced by child labor from interstate commerce, set forty
cents as the minimum hourly wage, and required overtime pay for hours of work exceeding forty per
VI. The Limits of Change
A. The New Deal and American Women
1. Eleanor Roosevelt transformed the role of First Lady.
2. However, organized feminism, already in disarray during the 1920s, disappeared as a political force.
B. The Southern Veto
1. The power of the Solid South helped to mold the New Deal welfare state into an entitlement for white
2. The political left and black organizations lobbied for changes in Social Security.
C. The Stigma of Welfare
1. Blacks became more dependent on welfare because they were excluded from eligibility for other
programs.
D. The Indian New Deal
1. Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the administration launched an Indian New Deal.
2. It marked the most radical shift in Indian policy in the nation’s history.
E. The New Deal and Mexican-Americans
1. For Mexican-Americans, the Depression was a wrenching experience.
a. In 1935, Congress passed the Filipino Repatriation Act, offering free transportation to those born in
the Philippines and willing to return there.
F. Last Hired, First Fired
G. A New Deal for Blacks
1. FDR appointed several blacks to important federal positions.
a. Mary McLeod Bethune
2. The 1930s witnessed a historic shift in black voting patterns.
a. Shift to Democratic Party
H. Federal Discrimination
1. Federal housing policy revealed the limits of New Deal freedom.
VII. A New Conception of America
A. The Heyday of American Communism
2. The Communist Party’s commitment to socialism resonated with a widespread belief that the
B. Redefining the People
1. The Popular Front vision for American society was that the American way of life meant unionism and
social citizenship, not the unbridled pursuit of wealth.
3. The Popular Front forthrightly sought to promote the idea that the country’s strength lay in diversity,
tolerance, and the rejection of ethnic prejudice and class privilege.
C. Promoting Diversity
1. Popular Front culture presented a heroic but not uncritical picture of the country’s past.
a. Martha Graham
b. Earl Robinson
D. Challenging the Color Line
1. Popular Front culture moved well beyond New Deal liberalism in condemning racism as incompatible
with true Americanism.
2. The communist-dominated International Labor Defense mobilized popular support for black defendants
3. The CIO welcomed black members and advocated the passage of anti-lynching laws and the return of
voting rights to southern blacks.
E. Labor and Civil Liberties
2. Labor militancy helped to produce an important shift in the understanding of civil liberties.
3. In 1939, Attorney General Frank Murphy established a Civil Liberties Unit in the Department of
4. To counter, the House of Representatives established an Un-American Activities Committee in 1938 to
investigate disloyalty.
a. Smith Act
F. The End of the New Deal
3. A period of political stalemate followed the congressional election of 1938.
G. The New Deal in American History
1. Given the scope of the economic calamity it tried to counter, the New Deal seems in many ways quite
limited.
3. One thing the New Deal failed to do was generate prosperity.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• How did the New Deal reshape the lives of the American people?
• How did the New Deal create a new meaning for liberalism?
• Describe Roosevelt’s image and popularity during the 1930s. Why did Americans have such strong feelings
about him?
• Thinking back to previous chapters, what programs of the New Deal were first suggested by earlier radical
groups?
• What did the New Deal do for women? Blacks? Indians? Mexicans? Filipinos? Labor?
• Compare the First New Deal with the Second New Deal. How did the goals of the New Deal evolve over time?
• Think back to the Progressive era and describe the backgrounds of Roosevelt’s cabinet members. Discuss why
their different backgrounds mattered in terms of what kind of policies they developed and how the New Deal
came to be shaped.
• Who were Roosevelt’s major critics and what arguments did they make against the New Deal?
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
America from the Great Depression to World War II
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html
This Library of Congress’s American Memory site includes images from the Farm Security Administration and Office of War.
The collection includes images of rural life during the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and mobilization for World War II.
This site from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center hosts the audio of many of FDR’s fireside chats.
Federal Theater Project
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/fthome.html
This Library of Congress’s American Memory site has selections from the Federal Theater Project, 1935–1939.
Flint Sit-Down Strike
www.historicalvoices.org/flint/
This site includes an overview of the Flint Sit-Down Strike. Digitized audio files contain the voices of former sit-downers
reminiscing about their experiences.
Huey Long
https://www.hueylong.com/
An extensive site dedicated to everything Huey Long, including audio recordings of his speeches, images, letters, and time
lines.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Amenta, Edwin. When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006.
Bernanke, Ben. Essays on the Great Depression. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Carpenter, Joel A. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2009.
Hapke, Laura. Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1995.
Harris, J. William. Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America.
McElvaine, Robert. The Great Depression: America 1929–1941. New York: Times Books, 1984.
Patel, Kiran Klaus. The New Deal: A Global History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Perkins, Frances. The Roosevelt I Knew. New York: Viking Press, 1946.
Sitkoff, Harvard, ed. Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated. New York: Knopf, 1985.
Smith, Jason B. Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006.
Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
INTERACTIVE STUDENT ACTIVITIES
1. Photographic Analysis: The Images of Dorothea Lange
Show a series of images produced by photographer Dorothea Lange during the 1930s. Lange’s images can be accessed
1. How do the people in the images appear to you?
2. What challenges do the people in the images appear to be dealing with?
3. Does the photographer focus more on women and children or men in her images?
4. What is the goal or message of the photographer in taking the photographs?
5. What does the photographer leave out of the images?
6. Do these images remind you of anything happening in the U.S. today?
2. Roosevelt’s Critics: Group Debate
Organize the class into five groups, each focused on one aspect of criticism of Roosevelt’s policies: Huey Long and Southern
