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The Great Depression & New Deal, 1929-1941

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Origins and Causes

  • Extreme wealth inequalities
  • Ballooning stock market
  • Over reliance on unprotected loans
  • Too much speculation & borrowing
  • Overproduction and uneven distribution capabilities
  • Stock Market crash was a symptom
  • Banks lacked money, people lost savings, debts were called in, no cash
  • Production stopped, workers fired, no $, consumption declined, no profits, more workers fired

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President Hoover

  • Herbert Hoover
  • Progressive
  • War Reconstruction
  • Opposed direct federal aid
  • Self-help & volunteerism
  • Self-help cooperatives

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“Hoover’s America”

  • Anti-tax views & opposition to gov’t support deepened depression
  • Texas legislature vetoed a bond measure for relief
  • Oklahoma governor William Murray called out the national guard to enforce segregation in OK City
  • Colorado Senator Ed Costigan wanted federal government to help states in relief efforts

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Hoovervilles

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Seattle, 1931

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The Bonus Army/March

  • World War One veterans
  • Gov’t denied their pensions
  • Marched on Washington, 1932
  • Congregated around White House
  • Gen. Douglas MacArthur
  • Military evicted them from D.C.
  • Deep anger at gov’t
  • Deep class divisions
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqevdBZCbcQ

Roosevelt and the New Deal

  • Frederick Delano Roosevelt (FDR)
  • Programs to address the Depression
  • “Relief, Recovery, Reform”
  • Debt spending
  • Consume our way out of the depression
  • Role of government

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Immediate Responses, 1933

  • Federal Emergency Relief Act
  • Federal funds for relief
  • National Industrial Recovery Act
  • Fair work and competition codes
  • Administration to enforce codes
  • Guaranteed labor’s right to organize

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New Deal Programs

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Tennessee Valley Authority

Flood control, Electricity, Irrigation, work

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Works Progress Administration
WPA

  • Biggest agency
  • 1935 employed 8 million and

$2 billion fund

  • Bridges, reservoirs, irrigation, sewage, schools, playgrounds, education, training
  • Work Programs paid minimum wages, pulled them off charity and soup lines
  • “We Work Again”
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk0SpTOi9Aw

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1935 Social Security Act

  • Safety net for all Americans
  • Percentage of paycheck
  • Based on shorter life-span
  • Intended to supplement (not replace) income
  • Less inclined to “retire”

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Financial System

  • Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)
  • Insured individual bank deposits
  • Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
  • Regulated trading practices in stocks and bonds

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Problems with New Deal

  • Relief based on race: Tucson scaled payments based on race
  • Favored large industries and business
  • Hurt some small farmers
  • Local agencies administered relief and ran programs

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Propaganda/Education

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Water and the West

  • Bureau of Reclamation
  • Hoover Dam
  • Water for L.A., Imperial Valley, Phoenix, and power for region
  • Central Valley Project harnessed the Sacramento River
  • Water storage, irrigation, hydro-electricity
  • Federal-corporate alliance
  • $2.5 billion by 1935

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Hoover Dam

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Grand Coulee Dam

  • Columbia River, 1941
  • Largest concrete structure in the world
  • Created a 150 mile lake
  • Too much power
  • Bonneville Power Administration
  • Powered 70% of Northwest

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The Dust Bowl

  • Economic and environmental disaster
  • Overproduction, monocrops
  • Plowed up grasses for farms to meet the needs of a booming wheat market
  • Soil exhaustion, soil erosion
  • Drought and winds
  • 1935: Blew winds from CO and NE, blackened the sky across the plains, into the East and Atlantic Ocean

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Responses

  • Killed millions of animals, burned millions of tons of food
  • Taylor Grazing Act
  • Federal control of grazing

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Migrants: Okies

  • Poor whites and sharecroppers
  • Evicted from OK, TX, MI, ARK
  • Going to CAL
  • L.A. Police Chief “bum blockade”

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Mexican and Okie Farmworkers

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Mexican Repatriation

  • Mexican & Mexican Americans sent to Mexico
  • Nearly 1 million
  • L.A. County deported 12,000
  • Colorado deported 20,000

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The Indian New Deal

  • John Collier
  • Progressive
  • Pueblos
  • Preserve cultures

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The Indian New Deal

  • Multi-faceted legislation
  • Education
  • Politics
  • Religion
  • Land
  • Culture
  • Language

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Indian Reorganization Act

  • IRA, 1934
  • Economic & political assistance
  • Business Councils
  • Tribal Constitutions
  • BIA, Interior
  • Over half rejected it

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Women

  • Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Work & aid
  • Patriotic home economics conserve, recycle, help America “as a woman”

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African Americans

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“Share the Wealth”

Public Art and Culture

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Federal Theatre Project

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Writer’s & Theater Project

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WPA Posters

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Travel through the West

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New Deal Work Mural

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End of the Depression

  • Federal spending on an unprecedented level failed to stop it
  • The largest entrance of the federal government into the American economy
  • Made the federal government into a “broker state” between labor and capital
  • Social programs and “safety net”
  • Brought fed gov’t into the lives of nearly all Westerners
  • WWII ended the Depression

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Comparisons with the Present?

  • Wealth inequalities
  • Deregulation
  • Bad Home mortgages
  • Massive individual debt
  • Inflated costs & uncontrolled speculative investments in commodities
  • Collapse of investment-debt-loan system
  • A Vicious Cycle:
  • Retraction of loans, increase in job losses, fall in investments, layoffs, decline in consumption, reduced production, layoffs, no consumption…