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Chapter3RauchwayGreat_Depression_and_the_New_Deal_A_Very_Short_Intro.pdf

Chapter 3 Americans in the Depression

The United States endured depressions before the 1930s, but the Great Depression, in its breadth and duration, and in the immediacy of its chronicling, produced also a great compression. The newly interconnected country (Americans in their twenties could remember when there were still western territories, rather than fully fledged states) now had radio and newsreels throughout its towns to show itself how its people suffered. As the Depression lasted, it put the middle class more and more into the circumstances of the poor and encouraged empathy across class lines.

Americans in their forties could remember the last great depression, when the global upheaval of the middle 1890s led to frightening strikes and sent armies of the unemployed tramping the countryside, seeking work they could not find. In the midst of that depression, most voters cast their ballots against William Jennings Bryan, the Democrat who claimed to speak for the downtrodden. But Americans of this generation could remember also how the 1890s fell during an age of globalization, and remembered how so many of the country’s workers then had been immigrants, literally of another people. By the Great Depression, this was no longer so true. World War I slowed immigration almost to a halt, and restrictionist legislation of the 1920s pulled America’s golden door nearly shut. No longer did the factories seem to teem with newly arrived foreign workers. And so closed one of the gaps that had, a generation before, separated the middling sort from the working class.

The severity of the Depression’s misfortune also diminished the distance between the comfortable and the hard-up. So many moved so quickly from one category to another that the employed increasingly identified with their fellow countrymen who were out of work. The gap between income brackets shrank. And where once, not long before, middle-class Americans might reflexively have considered lazy anyone who was unemployed, where once they might have considered radical anyone who claimed the government owed them some assistance, in the 1930s they increasingly saw the suffering millions among them as people much like themselves, who had worked to build the country that seemed now to be falling apart. This diminishing distance between classes helps to explain why Americans embraced E. Y. Harburg’s song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”, repeatedly played throughout the Depression.

They used to tell me I was building a dream And so I followed the mob. When there was earth to plow or guns to bear I was always there right on the job . . . Once I built a railroad, I made it run, Made it race against time. Once I built a railroad, now it’s done

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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Brother, can you spare a dime?

As Harburg explained, “This is the man who says: I built the railroads. I built that tower. I fought your wars. . . . I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends?”1 Americans who were not themselves out of work—and they were the majority of the workforce—could have ignored this angry and anguished question, as they had at other times in the country’s history. But as times got harder, Americans who had something, however little, to spare accepted the justice of the claim, “showering dimes and quarters upon outstretched hands,” as the New York Times wrote early in 1933.2 The country that so easily and so recently divided along racial and ethnic lines now drew, even if slightly, closer together.

So quickly after the crash did the crisis grow to such an appalling extent that its full dimensions resisted comprehension. When the unemployment rate ran to around a quarter of the workforce in 1932, about 11.5 million Americans had no work. To put this in some perspective, we might imagine that nearly the entire population of New York, then the most populous state, had no jobs: that from the easternmost tip of Long Island to the shores of Lake Erie, from the Canadian border to Pennsylvania, nobody had work.

But this perspective does not give quite the right picture. Some of the people of New York— children, dependent wives—would ordinarily have held no formal jobs. And the 11.5 million out of work represented only the workers who had no paycheck. Many of them had families who depended on them for a living. So the 11.5 million who had no jobs represented something like thirty million Americans who had lost their source of income.3 Perhaps a quarter of the entire population, therefore, found itself without adequate means to buy shelter or food.4

Nor indeed do these numbers, as awful an impact as they make, tell us quite all we should know about the Depression’s scope. In unemployment’s shadow ran underemployment: those Americans lucky enough to keep their jobs often saw their hours and pay reduced. Employers wanted to keep their skilled workers if they could, so rather than lay people off, they urged their staff to share the burden. To many employees it seemed only fair. And so by the summer of 1932, more than half of American workers did their jobs part-time, keeping on average 59 percent of a full-time job and of full-time pay.5

1. These men stand in a New York City breadline in 1932.

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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Americans in need asked for help reluctantly, and when circumstances forced them to seek help, they went to those closest to them. But in the Depression, each of their customary sources of support failed them, one by one. As a New York City official explained in 1932, “when the breadwinner is out of a job he usually exhausts his savings if he has any. . . . He borrows from his friends and from relatives until they can stand the burden no longer. He gets credit from the corner grocery store and the butcher shop, and the landlord foregoes collecting the rent until interest and taxes have to be paid and something has to be done. All of these resources are finally exhausted over a period of time, and it becomes necessary for these people, who have never before been in want, to ask for assistance.”6

When family and neighbors failed, workers could sometimes get help from locally organized mutual assistance funds such as rainy-day plans, or widows-and-orphans money set aside by a union or civic group. Often, Americans set up such plans within their religious or ethnic communities, on the principle of pride, to guard against one of their own having to go to charities or, what felt even more degrading, public relief. So Polish Americans, German Americans, church parishes and congregations, and various other communities kept up aid agencies that tried to provide for the unlucky among them and tide them over until work came. “Let’s have pride enough not to sponge upon public support when Catholic charity is still able to care for its own interest,” one priest declared.7

But these networks of support, sufficient to the occasional idle day in a single industry, collapsed under the weight of need that now pressed down on them. So increasingly people turned in shame to public sources of relief, even though it cost them dearly, and sometimes they clung to their self-respect long after they should have, to save their lives, sought help. A doctor working in a free clinic remembered, “The poor got some care, could go to free dispensaries. The rich got good care because they could afford it. There was this big middle class that was not getting any care. The middle class got very much in the position of the poor people. . . . People of that status would find it very difficult to accept charity. . . . Every day . . . someone would faint on a streetcar. They’d bring him in, and they wouldn’t ask any questions . . . they knew what it was. Hunger. When he regained consciousness, they’d give him something to eat.”8

Historically, American cities had through their own treasuries provided relief to their poor, but soon even cities could not help their citizens. In 1932, a Detroit official put it this way:

Many essential public services have been reduced beyond the minimum point absolutely essential to the health and safety of the city. . . . The salaries of city employees have been twice reduced . . . and hundreds of faithful employees . . . have been furloughed. Thus has the city borrowed from its own future welfare to keep its unemployed on the barest subsistence levels. . . . A wage work plan which had supported 11,000 families collapsed last month because the city was unable to find funds to pay these unemployed—men who wished to earn their own support. For the coming year, Detroit can see no possibility of preventing wide-spread hunger and slow starvation through its own unaided resources.9

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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Sometimes municipal funds might find their way to the needy through nontraditional routes: in New York, where the Health Department found that one in five of the city’s schoolchildren suffered from malnutrition, public school teachers, threatened with pay cuts, paid into a fund from their own pockets for the relief of their pupils.10 As civic organizations and governments crumbled under the weight, often so did families. “A man is not a man without work,” one of the unemployed told an interviewer.11 Those men who felt differently—who made for themselves a place in the world outside the workplace, who as husbands and fathers and friends and hobbyists knew what was worthwhile to strive for— shouldered the burden of crisis more easily. But they were in the minority. As one sociologist wrote, “The average American has the feeling that work . . . is the only dignified way of life. . . . While theoretically, economic activities are supposed to be the means to the good life, as a matter of fact it is not the end, but the means themselves, that have the greater prestige”. 12

More often than not, men took this sense of duty to heart. They knew how closely their children watched them, how much hung on their ability to get even a little work, how much joy it could bring to a house, or at least how much sorrow it could hold off. As one man who had been a boy during the Depression remembered,

A lot of fathers—mine, among them—had a habit of taking off. They’d go to . . . look for work. . . . This left the family at home, waiting and hoping that the old man would find something. And there was always the Saturday night ordeal as to whether or not the old man would get home with his paycheck. . . . Heaven would break out once in a while, and the old man would get a week’s work . . . that smell of fresh sawdust on the carpenter’s overalls, and the fact that Dad was home, and there was a week’s wages. . . . That’s the good you remember. And then there was always the bad part. That’s when you’d see your father coming home with the toolbox on his shoulder. Or carrying it. That meant the job was over.13

Sometimes men who left to look for work never came back, finding homes in doorways or subways or the communities of shacks on the edges of cities or landfills that, soon enough, Americans learned to call “Hoovervilles.” Children who were old enough and independent might themselves leave, foraging on the road instead of relying on overburdened parents. Usually such tramps were young men prepared to fend for themselves, racing to catch boxcars and steal rides. Sometimes the railroad detectives turned a blind eye to their unscheduled human cargo, sometimes not. Sometimes other travelers helped, sometimes they did not. In all, maybe two million Americans made their homes on the road in the years after the Crash.14

When employers advertised jobs, they had their pick of workers and could indulge their preferences, or prejudices. Increasingly, they hired or kept on white men with work experience, leaving the young and old, the women, and the African Americans disproportionately represented among the unemployed. Before the Crash, as women first entered the workforce in significant numbers, Americans already found it easy to believe that if a woman worked, she was doing it for frivolous spending money— that properly, women

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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would rely on men who, as heads of households, would supply their wives and children with a living. In the labor glut of the Depression, employers—sometimes by policy, sometimes simply by habit—hired fewer married women and more readily dismissed those they already had on the rolls.15 Yet women increasingly sought work, mainly to keep families afloat, though sometimes to maintain a middle-class life in the face of the Depression.16 Women faced a harder market than their fathers, husbands, brothers, or sons. And if they had to leave their families, life on the road presented an even greater threat of physical exploitation than it posed to their male relations. Accounts of women out of work and without family tell of them establishing communities to protect themselves, sharing meager resources and small rooms, scheduling shifts for the use of beds and clothes. One politician remarked that the woman worker in America was “the first orphan in the storm.”17

2. Squatters’ shacks populate the banks of the Willamette River in this “Hooverville” settlement near Portland, Oregon.

If so, the black worker followed close behind her into the rough weather. In the cities of the United States, African Americans lost their jobs much more quickly than their white counterparts. In part they suffered a misfortune of historical timing: black Americans, long a rural population, had on average moved to cities less recently and had less opportunity to develop careers as skilled laborers than white Americans. But a comparative lack of skills accounted only partially for the high levels of African American unemployment. Black workers noticed that they were “last hired, first fired,” and that employers deliberately laid off black workers to replace them with white ones. “So general is this practice that one is warranted in suspecting that it has been adopted as a method of relieving unemployment of whites without regard to the consequences upon Negroes,” a National Urban League study concluded in 1931.18

These inequities in the job market ensured the Depression-era working class actually in work, or nearest to it, looked much more white, much more male, and overall much more uniform than the working classes of earlier eras. The laborers who held jobs had much visibly in common with one another, and the issues of cultural conflict that so consumed Americans of earlier eras diminished. The object of Americans’ solicitude became the imperiled white, male

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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head-of-household, whose hardship they could understand as the nation’s concern.19

These nationwide hardships crossed the lines between urban and rural populations to an unprecedented degree. Unemployment, as a cyclical problem, had plagued cities as long as there had been cities, and Americans had a folk tradition of returning to the countryside when the cities went into a slump. Farm jobs traditionally enjoyed a resistance to the problems that plagued cities, and in the Depression many Americans did seek out the security of a subsistence farm—in 1932 the farm population rose to the highest point it would reach between the two world wars.20 But a series of unfortunate events made sure that the countryside suffered the Great Depression as the cities did.

Farm incomes reached their peak around World War I, when the dangers of shipping and general scarcity drove up the price of agricultural produce. High prices inspired farmers to put more land under the plow. Newly available tractors let them do it quickly. Then in the postwar depression, farm prices fell sharply; even after they rose again in the middle 1920s, the prices of the goods farmers had to buy rose higher still. The fresh prevalence of farm machines made it cheaper to produce more agricultural goods on a large scale, and as tractors appeared, mules and men went away. “Tractored out” hands left the countryside to seek opportunity elsewhere.21 Even the new city prosperity hurt farmers: as urban Americans improved their circumstances, they chose their diets based on taste, rather than need. Once, a wider waistband had signaled health and success, but now thin was fashionable, and food producers’ income declined. Further, farmers, like other Americans, took on considerable debt in their expansion and mechanization, rendering them vulnerable to shock.22

When the Crash shook this system, the fragile supports for farmers collapsed. Farm income tumbled downward. Creditors forced farmers to sell their property to cover delinquent debt payments.23 Often, and increasingly, farmers and their neighbors tried to thwart attempts to dispossess them. They might band together and buy property at a delinquency auction, then return it for free to the owner, or they might threaten lawmen who sought forcibly to sell property.

The weather conspired with the man-made calamity. Beginning in 1931, rainfall on the Great Plains lessened until it dropped below the level necessary to sustain crops. Soon the earth would dry and crack so that it could no longer hold itself together, and great winds would simply blow it away.24

The South suffered from its continuing peculiarity. Since slavery, its people depended on poorly paid farm jobs to get by. Containing only about a quarter of the nation’s population, the South accounted for more than 40 percent of America’s farmworkers, and they were the worst- paid hands in the country.25 Often they were tenant farmers who owed their landlords a share of the crop they produced and had little control over their livelihoods. “In 1929, me and my husband were sharecroppers,” one woman recalled. “We made a crop that year, the owner takin’ all the crop. This horrible way of livin’ with almost nothin’ ”. 26

As both progress and disaster pushed people off the farms, they left, as able people throughout history have done, seeking better chances. As they did before the Depression, many migrants

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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went West, to California, where the job market might be, and the weather generally was, better. Luckier ones came by car: in 1931, more than 800,000 automobiles entered the Golden State.27 Less fortunate travelers came by train: in a single month of 1932, the Southern Pacific Railroad company, whose lines ran into and along the length of California, figured it had evicted 80,000 freight-hoppers from the cars it carried.28 Many of both kinds of migrants wound up encamped throughout California’s long valleys, living in tents or small cabins, picking crops for what passed for a living, surviving—or failing to—on beans and rice. Observers figured more than a quarter of the children in such camps suffered from malnutrition, and some of them died of it.29

The image of Americans living with almost nothing, driven by drought and storm from their homes, bent under hardship and persevering by will, soon seared itself into the minds of people all over the country. In later years, in reporters’ stories and in tales survivors told, in enduring photographs by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, and accounts by James Agee and Lorena Hickok, these pictures of poverty in the land of dreamed plenty came to represent the Depression.

But it is worth remembering too that they did not alone represent the Depression, and in the dispassionate view of history, the sudden affliction of the ordinarily affluent may have mattered more. For example, not all the luckless migrants belonged to the chronically poor or even the working class. Many simply found themselves dispossessed as a region’s economy succumbed, entire, to the collapse. “We were living in a very large house and making good money,” the son of a successful tractor salesman recalled, until “POW—Dad didn’t have a job anymore.”30

As the whole country trembled, if it did not quite crumble, even generally well-off Americans who rarely thought much or concretely about the lot of the poor had suddenly an occasion to think hard on the matter, even though they might not themselves lack work, even though, perversely, the Depression allowed such Americans to live better at lower cost, because sellers in desperation had so lowered their prices. Yet nobody could live quite without worry. They mended their shoe leather with cardboard and stitched pieces of bedsheets together.31 The recently introduced brand of adhesive cellophane, Scotch Tape, sold well to people trying to fix what they had, instead of buying new.32

The crisis developed further, seeming ever more systemic, ever more permanent, and Americans came increasingly to believe that the unfortunate could not, by themselves, bear responsibility for their plight, and that but for the grace of God almost any of the nation’s citizens, however prudent and hard-working, might find themselves out of luck one day. And as their own local communities proved inadequate to the catastrophe, they listened increasingly for national voices, which came to them over the radio.

One such voice belonged to Father Charles Coughlin, whose weekly radio broadcasts reached Americans nationwide.33 Coughlin began his radio career in a parish outside Detroit, taking to the airwaves in the middle 1920s to defy the local Ku Klux Klan. His talents and opinions on a widening variety of subjects won him an ever larger audience. People said you could walk for blocks in America’s cities when Coughlin was on the radio and never miss a word, as the

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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priest’s message drifted out his loyal listeners’ windows into the street. Speaking over a nationwide network in the Depression, he spoke increasingly about political matters.34

Coughlin spoke to a mainly middle-class audience, to people who liked things as they were before the Crash yet who did not own so much that they could insulate themselves from the material or psychological effects of the Depression.35 Coughlin attacked Communism but, as he told a congressional hearing, he thought the greatest force for Communism in the world was an intransigent capitalist like Henry Ford, who by denying his workers’ lesser, reasonable claim for relief risked a revolutionary claim to everything.36 By 1932, Coughlin and his listeners had reason firmly to put Herbert Hoover in the same intransigent category as Ford. In his last summer as president, Hoover set himself against a new claim for relief from a special category of Americans: war veterans.

In 1924 Congress had voted a special supplementary payment, or bonus, to veterans of World War I based on the length and location of service. The government issued certificates showing the amount owing to each veteran, who could collect either in 1945 or upon his death. As times grew leaner and veterans looked longingly at those sums due in the distant future, they thought perhaps the government might relent and pay them a little early. A bonus due them on their deaths would not do much good, so perhaps they could have it now. After all, Congress had just, at the president’s urging, created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which would channel as much as $2 billion to banks and railroads to keep them afloat. “If the government can pay $2 billion to the bankers and the railroads,” Coughlin wondered, “why cannot it pay the $2 billion to the soldiers?”37

Some former soldiers who thought likewise decided to go to Washington, DC, to stake their claim in person. The major, early organization came from Portland, Oregon, but before long news of the movement inspired other marchers, both singly and in groups. Washington police began to prepare for the arrival of twenty thousand men, who became known as the Bonus Army. The Secret Service infiltrated the march to look for threats and found “Generally speaking there were few Communists . . . and they had little effect on the men’s thinking. The veterans were Americans, down on their luck, but by no means ready to overthrow their government.”38 On June 7, thousands of soldiers paraded through the city in front of a hundred thousand cheering onlookers.39

Others among the capital’s defenders assessed the marchers differently. General Douglas MacArthur, then U.S. Army chief of staff, began gathering forces, including tanks, to defend the city against the vagabond threat that began to camp, with the help of city police, across the Anacostia River from the Capitol. Warned repeatedly that they might look like subversives, the marchers policed themselves vigorously, organizing courts and less formal groups to throw out Communists. But it did them no good. Congress adjourned without voting them relief, and the White House and the army grew increasingly concerned the longer they stayed. At the end of July, MacArthur resolved to, in his words, “break the back” of the bonus march with full military force. Soldiers marched out, fixed bayonets, and fired tear gas on the marchers and bystanders alike. Cavalry rode into the crowd; as Major George S. Patton recalled, “Bricks flew, sabers rose and fell with a comforting smack, and the mob ran.” 40 Afterward MacArthur

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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claimed he heard, as he generally did, cries of gratitude from the bystanders.41

MacArthur’s fans, if extant, were surely a minority. Newsreel footage of the clash between the armed and unarmed armies showed tanks rolling through Washington’s streets, the veterans’ camp burning, and smoke drifting past the Capitol dome. MacArthur and Hoover said they did not believe the men were, in the main, really veterans at all. But the images of American soldiers chasing poverty-stricken Americans petitioning their congressmen elicited the sympathy of viewers. “I felt myself one of them,” one woman said.42

In Albany, the governor of New York state and Democratic presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt read about the Bonus March in the New York Times. Looking at the coverage, he told an aide that they scarcely needed to take Hoover seriously as an opponent after this disaster. Roosevelt said he might feel sorry for Hoover if he did not already feel sorry for the marchers. Indeed, Roosevelt himself did not think the government could afford to pay the men a bonus— indeed, he would veto a bonus bill as president— but, he thought, the men still deserved some sympathetic attention. He thought for a while, smoking. Still, he said, the men making their claim on the government, abused by the administration, “made a theme for the campaign.”43

Notes 1. William L. Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 27; Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: New Press, 2000), 20–21.

2. “The Lyrical Mr. Harburg,” New York Times, 1/8/1933, X2. 3. Lester V. Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 1929–1941 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 34.

4. David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940: How Americans Lived through the “Roaring Twenties” and the Great Depression (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 208.

5. Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 35. 6. Ibid., 41. 7. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 218–21.

8. Terkel, Hard Times, 145. 9. Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 44.

10. “20.5% of City Pupils Are Found Underfed,” New York Times, 10/29/1932, 17.

11. Mirra Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 133.

12. Ibid., 82.

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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13. Terkel, Hard Times, 107–8.

14. James R. McGovern, And a Time for Hope: Americans in the Great Depression (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 10.

15. Claudia Dale Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

16. Winifred D. Wandersee Bolin, “The Economics of Middle-Income Family Life: Working Women During the Great Depression,” Journal of American History 65, no. 1 (1978): 70– 71.

17. William H. Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 71.

18. William A. Sundstrom, “Last Hired, First Fired? Unemployment and Urban Black Workers During the Great Depression,” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 2 (1992): 421.

19. See also Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 177.

20. Susan B. Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), series Da2; Peter Fearon, War, Prosperity, and Depression: The U.S. Economy, 1917–1945 (Oxford: Philip Allan, 1987), 176.

21. Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 224.

22. Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 56.

23. Ibid., 63.

24. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 11.

25. Kyvig, Daily Life, 211; Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 3.

26. Terkel, Hard Times, 232.

27. Starr, Endangered Dreams, 23.

28. Ibid., 226.

29. Ibid., 229.

30. James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 16.

31. Manchester, Glory and the Dream, 35. Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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32. Kyvig, Daily Life, 227.

33. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), 92.

34. Ibid., 94.

35. Ibid., 197–98.

36. Ibid., 102.

37. Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, The Bonus Army: An American Epic (New York: Walker and Company, 2004), 51.

38. Ibid., 82.

39. “7,000 in Bonus Army Parade in Capital, Orderly but Grim,” New York Times, June 8, 1932, 1.

40. Dickson and Allen, Bonus Army, 176.

41. Ibid., 174.

42. Ibid., 193.

43. Rexford Guy Tugwell, The Brains Trust (New York: Viking, 1968), 357–59.

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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3. GDP and Unemployment. Unemployment as a percentage of the civilian labor force, measured on the vertical axis, and real GDP in millions of 1996 dollars, measured on the right vertical axis.

Rauchway, E. (2008). Great depression and the new deal : A very short introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from washington on 2020-03-23 12:04:28.

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