home |
many pasts |
evidence |
www.history |
blackboard |
reference
talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us
talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:25:00 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Ellen Noonan
Subject: Opening Statement from Alan Brinkley
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Dear Forum Subscribers,
I am very grateful for the opportunity to participate in this forum on the
teaching of the Great Depression and the New Deal. I have been
teaching and writing in this field for many years, and I=92m sure that at
least some other participants in this forum have as well. But I hope
the conversations that will emerge this month will also help scholars
and teachers who are new to this period of American history.
The purpose of this Forum, as I see it, is to help us find new ways of
thinking about a period that has remained largely contained within a
single, powerful paradigm for more than a generation. One might
trace the origins of that paradigm to Arthur Schlesinger=92s three
volumes of The Age of Roosevelt (1958-1961) or to William
Leuchtenburg=92s Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963),
which is still widely used by those who teach the 1930s. It offers a
picture of a nation encountering an unparalleled social and economic
crisis; of an ineffectual government response to the crisis during the
Hoover administration; of growing radicalism and dissidence and
instability; and then the arrival of a triumphant New Deal that restored
confidence, stopped the downward spiral, created important new
national programs and institutions, and reshaped American politics
so as to make the Democrats the dominant party and the liberalism
shaped by the New Deal the dominant creed for more than three
decades. The idea of a "New Deal Order" still frames the way we think
about both past and present politics.
There is no need to repudiate this paradigm, which helps explain
many things about the 1930s, to argue that there is a great deal more
to be said about the 1930s than this. There is, first, more to be said
about the New Deal itself =96 which had many lives and contained many
ideals, and whose historical image has often been flattened out so
that only those impulses that prevailed and survived remain visible.
The lost impulses of the New Deal; the once-live options that were
ultimately abandoned; the vivid imaginings and bold experiments that
ultimately came to naught; and the process by which all these things
competed with what became the more enduring legacies of the
Roosevelt years: this is an important and still incomplete part of the
history of the 1930s that deserves attention.
Even more important than that, however, are the many aspects of the
social, cultural, intellectual, and even political life of America in the
1930s that are not effectively represented in the New Deal-centered
scholarship that has dominated the field. We have had significant
new scholarly work in recent years on the impact of the Great
Depression in many previously unexplored areas. Scholars have
examined radicals, conservatives, and dissidents who opposed =96 or
offered political alternatives to =96 the New Deal. There have been
significant new histories of African Americans, Native Americans,
Latinos, and other minorities who were simultaneously beneficiaries
and victims of the policies of the Roosevelt administration. The rise of
new forms of cultural history have brought attention to patterns of
popular culture and the survival of consumerist values in the midst of
great economic dislocation. Labor historians have chronicled the
emergence of the modern labor movement in response not only to
the Depression and New Deal labor laws, but also a transformation in
working-class culture. Demographic and environmental historians
have studied the vast migrations, that depleted some regions (notably
the Dust Bowl and the agrarian South) and helped launch others into
a new demographic and economic era (California, in particular). The
impact of the Depression on communities, on the lives of families, on
the role of women, and on children has also been a subject of
interesting literature. The artistic and literary life of the 1930s has
spawned significant scholarly attention. And the American
Communist Party and the Popular Front have emerged as major
factors in the reinterpretation of this era.
Studying an era, as opposed to examining a theme or field =96 teaching
the 1930s as opposed to teaching labor history or the history of race
and ethnicity or the history of labor =96 presents both special challenges
and special opportunities. On the one hand, there is literally nothing
that happened in the 1930s that is not potentially relevant to the
inquiry, and so historians face the considerable challenge of selection
and integration. How do we take the disparate aspects of the history
of this era and weave them together into a narrative coherent enough
for our students to understand? On the other hand, we have the great
opportunity to make connections across fields and issues, to try to
provide some piece of the kind of revised and expanded synthetic
narrative that our profession has been struggling to produce for a
generation.
I look forward to joining you in discussing this extraordinary period in
American history over the next few weeks.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 15:19:10 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Alisa Giardinelli
Subject: ex-slave narratives
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
I am interested in hearing how people think the ex-slave narratives that
were collected by the Federal Writers Project (as well as those collected
in earlier 20th cen. initiatives) should be used. While they don't meet
contemporary oral history standards, they still offer important information
about life under slavery and emancipation. But what does the collection say
about the New Deal, and how does treating it as a product of the New Deal
affect their use? Also, can they be used to help understand how the
history of slavery informs contemporary society?
Thanks,
Alisa Giardinelli
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 15:59:49 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: David Hanson
Subject: Re: ex-slave narratives
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; types="text/plain,text/html";
boundary="=====================_25455854==_.ALT"
--=====================_25455854==_.ALT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
I find the slave narratives very useful. They bring the slave experience "to
life" in a way that standard history does not. There is a nice chapter on
this
in Davidson and Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection
(McGraw-Hill). (My students often say it's the best chapter in the book.)
The
authors emphasize that oral history is like any other form of historical
information, it can be revealing and powerful but I can be tricky, too. Much
depends on who is doing the interviewing and how the interviews are
conducted.
They show how a person who lived the life of a slave may be consciously or
unconsciously inclined to shade the story to please the interviewer
(especially
a white interviewer). So, just as historians and students need to analyze
historical documents and data carefully, they also need to use narratives with
a measure of caution.
I don't get the point of Alisa's question about what the FWP says about the
New
Deal.
Dave Hanson
At 03:19 PM 4/2/01 -0700, you wrote:
>I am interested in hearing how people think the ex-slave narratives that
>were collected by the Federal Writers Project (as well as those collected
>in earlier 20th cen. initiatives) should be used. While they don't meet
>contemporary oral history standards, they still offer important information
>about life under slavery and emancipation. But what does the collection say
>about the New Deal, and how does treating it as a product of the New Deal
>affect their use? Also, can they be used to help understand how the
>history of slavery informs contemporary society?
>
>Thanks,
>Alisa Giardinelli
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
>
--=====================_25455854==_.ALT
Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
I find the slave narratives very useful. They bring the slave
experience "to life" in a way that standard history does
not. There is a nice chapter on this in Davidson and Lytle,
After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection
(McGraw-Hill). (My students often say it's the best chapter in the book.) The authors emphasize that oral history is like any other form of historical information, it can be revealing and powerful but I can be tricky, too. Much depends on who is doing the interviewing and how the interviews are conducted. They show how a person who lived the life of a slave may be consciously or unconsciously inclined to shade the story to please the interviewer (especially a white interviewer). So, just as historians and students need to analyze historical documents and data carefully, they also need to use narratives with a measure of caution.
I don't get the point of Alisa's question about what the FWP says about the New Deal.
Dave Hanson
At 03:19 PM 4/2/01 -0700, you wrote:
>I am interested in hearing how people think the ex-slave narratives that
>were collected by the Federal Writers Project (as well as those collected
>in earlier 20th cen. initiatives) should be used. While they don't meet
>contemporary oral history standards, they still offer important information
>about life under slavery and emancipation. But what does the collection say
>about the New Deal, and how does treating it as a product of the New Deal
>affect their use? Also, can they be used to help understand how the
>history of slavery informs contemporary society?
>
>Thanks,
>Alisa Giardinelli
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
>
--=====================_25455854==_.ALT--
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 16:04:22 -0800
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Nancy Zens
Subject: Re: ex-slave narratives
Comments: cc: owner-depression-newdealforum@ashp.listserv.cuny.edu
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
I read Alicia's question to mean what the slave narratives show about the
1930s or before. I found many instances where slaves were living in small
shacks, without heat, without medical help, with no one to cook meals or
help with chores that were too difficult. When such a person made
positive remarks about slavery, they were not only telling the interviewer
what the white wanted to hear, but making a bitter comparison about the
reality of "freedom".
Nancy Zens, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 22:59:11 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Ed Glassman
Subject: New Deal History Day Project
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854";
x-mac-creator="4D4F5353"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
I have three middle school students who have created a documentary on FDR and the New Deal. They are in need of knowledge concerning apponents to the
new deal at that time period. Also, would there be anyone out there who can serve as a primary source for them to interview?
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 10:32:40 -0500
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Rein Conrad
Subject: Re: ex-slave narratives
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Since the writers were employed by a New Deal program, some interviewers
might unconsciously have displayed a bias in favor of New Deal liberalism
when they asked their questions. The New Deal was conscious, however, of
the propaganda benefits that might be obtained by employing writers and
artists and how their work could reflect favorably on New Deal programs
while exposing social ills.
Conrad Rein
----- Original Message -----
From: Alisa Giardinelli
To:
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 5:19 PM
Subject: ex-slave narratives
> I am interested in hearing how people think the ex-slave narratives that
> were collected by the Federal Writers Project (as well as those collected
> in earlier 20th cen. initiatives) should be used. While they don't meet
> contemporary oral history standards, they still offer important
information
> about life under slavery and emancipation. But what does the collection
say
> about the New Deal, and how does treating it as a product of the New Deal
> affect their use? Also, can they be used to help understand how the
> history of slavery informs contemporary society?
>
> Thanks,
> Alisa Giardinelli
>
> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
>
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 11:44:31 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "Roy A. Rosenzweig"
Subject: Re: New Deal History Day Project
In-Reply-To: <3AC966AE.D4307DD5@qwest.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
A few quick suggestions:
1. A very important book on this topic is, of course, Alan
Brinkley's fine study, *Voices of Protest* on Father Coughlin and
Huey Long, who became key critics of the New Deal.
2. A relatively old book that covers various critics of FDR
is George Wolfskill and John Hudson, All But the People: Franklin D.
Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-39. It has cartoons and poems, which
middle school students could use.
3. There is a web site of FDR cartoons, which include many
critical of FDR at http://www.nisk.k12.ny.us/fdr/FDRcartoons.html
4. Our History Matters site has many documents related to the
New Deal; go to http://historymatters.gmu.edu/search.taf You will get
narrower results if you enter the phrase "new deal" in quotes in the
keyword field.
5. In lieu of new interviews, they can use interviews that
are published in collections like Terkel's Hard Times.
Roy
At 10:59 PM -0700 4/2/01, Ed Glassman wrote:
>I have three middle school students who have created a documentary
>on FDR and the New Deal. They are in need of knowledge concerning
>apponents to the
>new deal at that time period. Also, would there be anyone out there
>who can serve as a primary source for them to interview?
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web
>site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for
>teaching U.S. History.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 11:08:19 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: David Hanson
Subject: Re: ex-slave narratives
In-Reply-To: <001701c0bc53$520d1370$7301a8c0@bellsouth.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Conrad Rein makes a good point and seems to have nailed what Alisa
Giardinelli was thinking. But having read many of the narratives and also
listened to some that were recorded, I can say that the interviewers mostly
asked former slaves to talk about what it was like, how they were treated,
what the food and housing was like, things like that--a few leading
questions perhaps, but it's hard to find "liberal bias" in the interviewing
and editing. Besides, they collected tons of transcripts and no one in the
White House (to my knowledge) was combing through them for propaganda
material. There was much more pressing work to do.
A better case might be made for projects like Dorothea Lange's
photojournalism. Lange was one of many photographers hired by the Farm
Security Administration. As Lange confided in her accompanying narrative
about the "Migrant Mother" photos, she and the subject (Florence Thompson)
had an "understanding" about the message they wanted to convey. But that
is not to say that the photos were fake--Thompson really was a homeless
widow with little kids and so on. The point is that Lange often had a
"liberal" social message in her photography. She had an eye out for scenes
that would help make the case that displaced farm workers needed help from
the government.
Dave Hanson
At 10:32 AM 4/3/01 -0500, you wrote:
>Since the writers were employed by a New Deal program, some interviewers
>might unconsciously have displayed a bias in favor of New Deal liberalism
>when they asked their questions. The New Deal was conscious, however, of
>the propaganda benefits that might be obtained by employing writers and
>artists and how their work could reflect favorably on New Deal programs
>while exposing social ills.
>
>Conrad Rein
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Alisa Giardinelli
>To:
>Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 5:19 PM
>Subject: ex-slave narratives
>
>
>> I am interested in hearing how people think the ex-slave narratives that
>> were collected by the Federal Writers Project (as well as those collected
>> in earlier 20th cen. initiatives) should be used. While they don't meet
>> contemporary oral history standards, they still offer important
>information
>> about life under slavery and emancipation. But what does the collection
>say
>> about the New Deal, and how does treating it as a product of the New Deal
>> affect their use? Also, can they be used to help understand how the
>> history of slavery informs contemporary society?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Alisa Giardinelli
>>
>> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
>http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
>>
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
>
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 09:05:03 -0700
Reply-To: "Donald W. Whisenhunt"
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "Donald W. Whisenhunt"
Subject: Re: New Deal History Day Project
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
I know it is not in good taste to plug one's own book, but I think these
students would benefit from reading some of the original poetry in my book,
Poetry of the People: Poems to the President, 1929-1945 (Bowling Green,
Ohio: Popular Press, 1996). This book was not widely reviewed, probably
because it is catalogued under literature instead of history, a true error.
The poems are all original and therefore are original sources. One section
deals with opposition and attacks on FDR and the New Deal in verse.
I hope this helps.
Donald W. Whisenhunt
----- Original Message -----
From: Ed Glassman
To:
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 10:59 PM
Subject: New Deal History Day Project
> I have three middle school students who have created a documentary on FDR
and the New Deal. They are in need of knowledge concerning apponents to the
> new deal at that time period. Also, would there be anyone out there who
can serve as a primary source for them to interview?
>
> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 11:20:54 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: David Hanson
Subject: Re: New Deal History Day Project
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Good reply from Roy R. at George Mason U. Going to contemporary
documentary evidence of the New Deal's critics seems like a better route
than having kids interview a 90-year-old about his/her criticisms of the
New Deal. (Studs Terkel has collected a wealth of interviews.) This goes
to the heart of oral history. The information gained from an interview is
only as good as the skills of the interviewer and the reliability of the
interview subject. (Nothing wrong with having kids talk their grandparents
about history, of course.)
Dave Hanson
At 11:44 AM 4/3/01 -0400, you wrote:
>A few quick suggestions:
> 1. A very important book on this topic is, of course, Alan
>Brinkley's fine study, *Voices of Protest* on Father Coughlin and
>Huey Long, who became key critics of the New Deal.
> 2. A relatively old book that covers various critics of FDR
>is George Wolfskill and John Hudson, All But the People: Franklin D.
>Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-39. It has cartoons and poems, which
>middle school students could use.
> 3. There is a web site of FDR cartoons, which include many
>critical of FDR at http://www.nisk.k12.ny.us/fdr/FDRcartoons.html
> 4. Our History Matters site has many documents related to the
>New Deal; go to http://historymatters.gmu.edu/search.taf You will get
>narrower results if you enter the phrase "new deal" in quotes in the
>keyword field.
> 5. In lieu of new interviews, they can use interviews that
>are published in collections like Terkel's Hard Times.
>Roy
>
>
>
>At 10:59 PM -0700 4/2/01, Ed Glassman wrote:
>>I have three middle school students who have created a documentary
>>on FDR and the New Deal. They are in need of knowledge concerning
>>apponents to the
>>new deal at that time period. Also, would there be anyone out there
>>who can serve as a primary source for them to interview?
>>
>>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web
>>site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for
>>teaching U.S. History.
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
>
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 09:50:50 -0800
Reply-To: ahoffman@lausd.k12.ca.us
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Abraham Hoffman
Subject: Re: ex-slave narratives
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Robert Sprague, Florence Thompson's grandson-in-law, tells a different
version of the encounter between Florence and Dorothea Lange, as printed
in California Journal, June 1999, p. 42:
"A shiny new car pulled into the entrance, stopped about 10 yards in
front of Florence and a well-dressed woman got out with a camera. She
started taking Florence's picture. With each picture, the woman would
step closer. Florence thought to herself: 'Pay her no mind. The woman
thinks I'm quaint and wants to take my picture.'"
Presumably Sprague obtained Florence's "thought" through interviews with
her. The point is that Lange started taking the pictures before they
spoke. The article notes that a conversation then ensued in which
"Lange promised that Florence's name would never be used but that the
photographs could help others in a similar plight. The conversation
apparently lasted only a matter of minutes. Only five frames were
snapped before Lange climbed back into her car and drove away."
This version of the meeting between Lange and Thompson seems quite
different from one which asserts that they had an "understanding" prior
to the taking of the pictures, a view that strongly implies the pictures
were somehow faked. Thompson wasn't conveying any message, even if
Lange had one. In any event, the picture remains what it always has
been: a classic statement of the worst and best of the Great
Depression.
Abraham Hoffman
David Hanson wrote:
>
> Conrad Rein makes a good point and seems to have nailed what Alisa
> Giardinelli was thinking. But having read many of the narratives and also
> listened to some that were recorded, I can say that the interviewers mostly
> asked former slaves to talk about what it was like, how they were treated,
> what the food and housing was like, things like that--a few leading
> questions perhaps, but it's hard to find "liberal bias" in the interviewing
> and editing. Besides, they collected tons of transcripts and no one in the
> White House (to my knowledge) was combing through them for propaganda
> material. There was much more pressing work to do.
>
> A better case might be made for projects like Dorothea Lange's
> photojournalism. Lange was one of many photographers hired by the Farm
> Security Administration. As Lange confided in her accompanying narrative
> about the "Migrant Mother" photos, she and the subject (Florence Thompson)
> had an "understanding" about the message they wanted to convey. But that
> is not to say that the photos were fake--Thompson really was a homeless
> widow with little kids and so on. The point is that Lange often had a
> "liberal" social message in her photography. She had an eye out for scenes
> that would help make the case that displaced farm workers needed help from
> the government.
>
> Dave Hanson
>
> At 10:32 AM 4/3/01 -0500, you wrote:
> >Since the writers were employed by a New Deal program, some interviewers
> >might unconsciously have displayed a bias in favor of New Deal liberalism
> >when they asked their questions. The New Deal was conscious, however, of
> >the propaganda benefits that might be obtained by employing writers and
> >artists and how their work could reflect favorably on New Deal programs
> >while exposing social ills.
> >
> >Conrad Rein
> >
> >
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: Alisa Giardinelli
> >To:
> >Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 5:19 PM
> >Subject: ex-slave narratives
> >
> >
> >> I am interested in hearing how people think the ex-slave narratives that
> >> were collected by the Federal Writers Project (as well as those collected
> >> in earlier 20th cen. initiatives) should be used. While they don't meet
> >> contemporary oral history standards, they still offer important
> >information
> >> about life under slavery and emancipation. But what does the collection
> >say
> >> about the New Deal, and how does treating it as a product of the New Deal
> >> affect their use? Also, can they be used to help understand how the
> >> history of slavery informs contemporary society?
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Alisa Giardinelli
> >>
> >> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
> >http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
> >>
> >
> >This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
> http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
> >
>
> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 21:02:37 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Brad DeLong
Subject: Re: Opening Statement from Alan Brinkley
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
>...to help us find new ways of
>thinking about a period that has remained largely contained within a
>single, powerful paradigm for more than a generation. One might
>trace the origins of that paradigm to Arthur Schlesinger=92s three
>volumes of The Age of Roosevelt...
>
>There is no need to repudiate this paradigm, which helps explain
>many things about the 1930s, to argue that there is a great deal more
>to be said about the 1930s than this...
I would have thought that now more than ever it is important to teach
the Paradigm. One of the principal things happening in the U.S.
today--and not happening in Europe, or happening in Europe to a much
smaller degree--is the slow erosion of the social insurance system
the seeds of which were planted by the New Deal. Briefly, the Great
Depression convinced America's middle class that it had powerful
interests in common with the working poor, and that a government that
was based on and promoted social solidarity was a good thing. As a
result, for half a century after the Great Depression the United
States was a European-style social democracy (if an anemic one).
But anyone looking further back than 1930 has to be struck at how
marginal and marginalized the currents in the U.S. aking to
European-style social democracy were. As Werner Sombart pointed out,
there really was no "socialism" worthy of the name in America at the
turn of the century.
And looking at America today I at least cannot be struck at how, as
the memory of the Great Depression finally passes, American political
culture is reverting to this earlier pattern--call it the celebration
of entrepreneurial energy, call it social darwinist, call it the
market society, call it the Gilded Age, call it the worship of the
abomination of the Golden Calf of Laissez-Faire, call it what you
will.
It seems to me that one of the master keys to making sense of
American political culture today and over the past seventy years is
to recognize that the Great Depression and New Deal placed an overlay
of social democracy and the social insurance system on top of an
older, very different politico-cultural pattern. It seems to me that
we do our students no good service if we do not focus on this master
key.
Brad DeLong
--
-----------------------------------
Professor J. Bradford DeLong
Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
delong@econ.berkeley.edu
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/
-----------------------------------
"In one way only can we influence these hidden currents-by setting in
motion those forces of instruction and imagination which change
opinion. The assertion of truth, the unveiling of illusion, the
dissipation of hate, the enlargement and instruction of men's hearts
and minds, must be our means..."
--John Maynard Keynes
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 10:29:23 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "Nancy L. Zens"
Subject: Depression questions
There are several questions that I hope this forum will address.
1. One interpretation of the Hoover/Roosevelt terms in office, Hoover was
the blind, elite, ultra conservative who was out of his depth and out of
touch with the American people. This was proved by his own generation when
he failurd to be reelected. Roosevelt brought the fresh ideas and
successful approach needed to end the misery caused by the Great Depression.
I have encountered other interpretations that saw Hoover as the realist,
with the economic background to successfully end the depression, who chose
to do that work rather than waste taxpayer time during such a crisis by
diverting his attentions to running for office. The successful New Deal
programs, especially most of those used during Roosevelt's miracle 100
days, had been developed during the last part of the Hoover term in office
and were ready to launch when Roosevelt took office. This would suggest
that Roosevelt took the credit for his predecessors work (normal in
politics). Roosevelt's own approach, using a "kitchen cabinet" to come up
with programs that were given approval with little oversight resulted in
programs that cancelled each other out or actually lengthened the
depression.
Which interpretation, or is there a realistic new approach, that explains
the actions and programs of these two Presidents?
2. It is my understanding that New Deal programs that provided employment
were managed on a state level with some federal oversight. Does the
reality fit the New Deal ideals or does it more closely conform to the
older local political model of perks like jobs being handed out for the
greatest political benefit? What prompts this questions is that I
remember reading that several of the Southern States never submitted
their "Slave Narrative" information to the federal government despite
repeated demands that this be done, and that this is the reason that the
initial volumes of the Slave Narratives did not include some of the states
with the highest black populations. I recall the excitement when some of
these narratives were found in courthouse basements, and the subsequent
publishing of the material.
3. Was the most compelling basis for New Deal programs like CCC, WPA, and
PWA the national concern over the political developments in Italy, Germany,
Spain, and Japan, and fears of similar solutions to the crises of the
depression appearing in the US?
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 10:22:53 -0500
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Colin Gordon
Subject: Re: Opening Statement from Alan Brinkley
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Alan is right to question the traditional paradigm, but we need to
distinguish between the Schlesingerian model and the "New Deal order" model
-- the former is little more than a variant on the old Presidential
synthesis; the latter (as exemplified by the work of Hawley, Brinkley,
Brown, Argersinger and many others) offers a more capacious understanding
of a broader political response to the economic crisis which a) does not
cling to FDR's 1932 election as the era's key watershed, and b) does
accomodate the social and cultural history which Alan cites.
In this respect, I would second Brad DeLong's argument that "the
paradigm"is both appropriate and compelling for two reasons. First, the
Depression (and War) years represent a still-remarkable "big bang" of
state-building and institutional innovation. This is, to my mind, an
uncontroverial position upon which both celebrants of the New Deal (like
Schlesinger) and critics of the New Deal (left and right) substantially
agree. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the political innovations
(and failures) of the 1930s decisively shaped the social history of the era
as well: the modern labor movement emerged amidst the promises of the NRAs
section 7a and the NLRA; the injustice and inequity of New Deal concessions
to the South provided a sparkplug for the modern civil rights movement;
radical responses -- from Detroit to English AK to Scottsboro -- were keyed
by the limits or failures of federal power; the social and economic status
of women (see Gordon, Mettler, Storrs and others) in the Depression decade
was both defined and represented in debates over social insurance and labor
law.
The New Deal paradigm remains an important teaching tool, in part because
it captures the intensity (and disarray) of political change, and in part
because it reflects contemporary popular struggles to define or establish
basic rights and obligations during an era of such compelling political
change. The problem is not an emphasis on the New Deal per se, but the
Schlesingerian assumptions that the political response to the Depression
can be neatly contained by the FDR years; that the New Deal can be
explained by debates within Roosevelt's inner circle; and that all of the
serious alternatives or threats to the New Deal lay to the right.
Colin Gordon
University of Iowa
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 18:46:20 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "Noonan, Ellen"
Subject: 1930s Resources on History Matters
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.20010404102253.00704c24@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Mime-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
As Roy Rosenzweig mentioned in a previous post, there are a great many
resources on History Matters (http://historymatters.gmu.edu) related to =
the
Depression and New Deal, easily accessed through the site=B9s search
functions. In the Many Pasts section of the site, you can find primary
documents relating to strikes and labor organizing, the Indian
Reorganization Act, letters to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins about
worker safety and letters to President Roosevelt about lynching, the =
Federal
Theatre Project (and its congressional critics), the "Memorial Day =
Massacre"
at Republic Steel, the "Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde," FDR=B9s =
court-packing
attempt, and much more. Audio resources in Many Pasts include southern
folksongs collected by the Library of Congress, a radio broadcast of =
Joe
Louis knocking out Max Schmeling, FDR=B9s first inaugural address, and =
oral
history remembrances from farmers and workers.
WWW.History contains links to other sites, most notably the New Deal =
Network
(http://newdeal.feri.org), a terrific and comprehensive site with =
primary
documents and great teaching resources. The vast American Memory =
collections
contain photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945, selections from the =
Federal
Theatre Project, selections from Smithsonian folklore collections, WPA
posters, and, just added, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the =
Federal
Writers' Project, 1936-1938. And, of course, there=B9s also the FDR =
Cartoon
Archive.=20
For students, the Digital Blackboard contains, among others, lessons =
using
the WPA "Life Histories" to compare life in the 1930s to life in the =
1990s
and a role-playing exercise that teaches about the Tennessee Valley
Authority.=20
Finally, Making Sense of Evidence contains "Every Picture Tells A =
Story:
Documentary Photography and the Great Depression" an interactive =
exercise
that allows viewers to examine how some of the photos of the Farm =
Security
Administration's Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were created, which =
photos
were selected for publications, and how they were changed for public
presentation.
If you=B9ve used any of these resources, or plan to, please post and =
describe
how you=B9ve used them.
Ellen Noonan
=20
Ellen Noonan
American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
365 Fifth Avenue, Rm. 7301.10
New York, NY 10016
(212) 817-1969
enoonan@gc.cuny.edu
=20
> From: Colin Gordon
> Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
>
> Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 10:22:53 -0500
> To: DEPRESSION-NEWDEALFORUM@ASHP.LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
> Subject: Re: Opening Statement from Alan Brinkley
>=20
> Alan is right to question the traditional paradigm, but we need to
> distinguish between the Schlesingerian model and the "New Deal order" =
model
> -- the former is little more than a variant on the old Presidential
> synthesis; the latter (as exemplified by the work of Hawley, =
Brinkley,
> Brown, Argersinger and many others) offers a more capacious =
understanding
> of a broader political response to the economic crisis which a) does =
not
> cling to FDR's 1932 election as the era's key watershed, and b) does
> accomodate the social and cultural history which Alan cites.
>=20
> In this respect, I would second Brad DeLong's argument that "the
> paradigm"is both appropriate and compelling for two reasons. First, =
the
> Depression (and War) years represent a still-remarkable "big bang" of
> state-building and institutional innovation. This is, to my mind, an
> uncontroverial position upon which both celebrants of the New Deal =
(like
> Schlesinger) and critics of the New Deal (left and right) =
substantially
> agree. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the political =
innovations
> (and failures) of the 1930s decisively shaped the social history of =
the era
> as well: the modern labor movement emerged amidst the promises of =
the NRAs
> section 7a and the NLRA; the injustice and inequity of New Deal =
concessions
> to the South provided a sparkplug for the modern civil rights =
movement;
> radical responses -- from Detroit to English AK to Scottsboro -- were =
keyed
> by the limits or failures of federal power; the social and economic =
status
> of women (see Gordon, Mettler, Storrs and others) in the Depression =
decade
> was both defined and represented in debates over social insurance and =
labor
> law.
>=20
> The New Deal paradigm remains an important teaching tool, in part =
because
> it captures the intensity (and disarray) of political change, and in =
part
> because it reflects contemporary popular struggles to define or =
establish
> basic rights and obligations during an era of such compelling =
political
> change. The problem is not an emphasis on the New Deal per se, but =
the
> Schlesingerian assumptions that the political response to the =
Depression
> can be neatly contained by the FDR years; that the New Deal can be
> explained by debates within Roosevelt's inner circle; and that all of =
the
> serious alternatives or threats to the New Deal lay to the right.
>=20
> Colin Gordon
> University of Iowa
>=20
> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site =
at
> http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. =
History.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 21:12:54 -0500
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Wyatt Evans
Subject: Forum and reference works on New Deal/Great Depression
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
From: C. Wyatt Evans, < wyevans@blast.net >
DATE: 4 April 2001, TIME: 8:52 PM
This semester is my first at teaching the Depression and New Deal, and the
course has so far been productive- from what I can tell- for the students,
and it certainly has been productive for me. Given the recent tilt in the
stock market, my two older retired students find the potential analogies
between past and present riveting. The younger students respond as well to
the relevancy of the New Deal to their own lives, although they tend to have
less interest in the legislative/legal/historical bases of the ND programs.
The discussion of paradigms launched by Professor Brinkley has been very
useful for me, as have Brad De Long and Colin Gordon's replies. For the
moment however, I have a much more prosaic question to pose: Is there
currently in print a dictionary or other print reference source on the New
Deal/Depression ? Ellen Noonan's post on web resources is useful, but what
about print reference works?
The only historical dictionary I found is James Olson's 1985 (Greenwood
Press) _Historical Dictionary of the New Deal_. Are there any others out
there and still in print?
Sincerely,
Wyatt Evans
Adjunct Professor, Fairleigh-Dickinson University
Ph.D. Candidate, Drew University
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 22:53:35 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "Roy A. Rosenzweig"
Subject: Re: Forum and reference works on New Deal/Great Depression
In-Reply-To: <000201c0bd7f$c07a2320$af86a2cf@computer>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
In addition to Olson, there is also: Otis L. Graham & Meghan Wander,
Franklin D. Roosevelt: His Life and Times: An Encyclopedic View.
Roy
>
>The discussion of paradigms launched by Professor Brinkley has been very
>useful for me, as have Brad De Long and Colin Gordon's replies. For the
>moment however, I have a much more prosaic question to pose: Is there
>currently in print a dictionary or other print reference source on the New
>Deal/Depression ? Ellen Noonan's post on web resources is useful, but what
>about print reference works?
>
>The only historical dictionary I found is James Olson's 1985 (Greenwood
>Press) _Historical Dictionary of the New Deal_. Are there any others out
>there and still in print?
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Wyatt Evans
>Adjunct Professor, Fairleigh-Dickinson University
>Ph.D. Candidate, Drew University
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web
>site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for
>teaching U.S. History.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 19:20:50 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Brad DeLong
Subject: Re: 1930s Resources on History Matters
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
>As Roy Rosenzweig mentioned in a previous post, there are a great many
>resources on History Matters (http://historymatters.gmu.edu) related to the
>Depression and New Deal... If you've used any of these resources, or
>plan to, please post and describe
>how you've used them.
>
>Ellen Noonan
Alas! I haven't taught any economic history this year. I've been
stuck teaching macroeconomics...
Brad DeLong
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 19:25:30 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Brad DeLong
Subject: Re: Opening Statement from Alan Brinkley
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.20010404102253.00704c24@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
>Alan is right to question the traditional paradigm, but we need to
>distinguish between the Schlesingerian model and the "New Deal order" model
>-- the former is little more than a variant on the old Presidential
>synthesis; the latter (as exemplified by the work of Hawley, Brinkley,
>Brown, Argersinger and many others) offers a more capacious understanding
>of a broader political response to the economic crisis which a) does not
>cling to FDR's 1932 election as the era's key watershed, and b) does
>accomodate the social and cultural history which Alan cites.
We do need a better way to think about the New Deal, and how it
became what it became. The line I use in my Economics 210a class (in
the thirty minutes we have to devote to the New Deal) is that over
the course of eight years Roosevelt tried everything, and the things
that worked were devaluation, fiscal expansion, the NLRA, Social
Security, and antitrust (to some degree). But the process by which
the extraordinary range of initiatives attempted turned into the
European social democracy lite that was the effective New Deal is not
something that I understand well, or can teach quickly enough for my
students to get it...
>The problem is not an emphasis on the New Deal per se, but the
>Schlesingerian assumptions that the political response to the Depression
>can be neatly contained by the FDR years; that the New Deal can be
>explained by debates within Roosevelt's inner circle; and that all of the
>serious alternatives or threats to the New Deal lay to the right.
>
What big vote-getters do you see as lying to Roosevelt's left?
Brad DeLong
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 19:48:57 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Brad DeLong
Subject: Re: Depression questions
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
>I have encountered other interpretations that saw Hoover as the realist,
>with the economic background to successfully end the depression, who chose
>to do that work rather than waste taxpayer time during such a crisis by
>diverting his attentions to running for office. The successful New Deal
>programs, especially most of those used during Roosevelt's miracle 100
>days, had been developed during the last part of the Hoover term in office
>and were ready to launch when Roosevelt took office.
Unless the U.S. truly was unique, the most successful aspects of the
New Deal as far as depression-fighting was concerned were probably
those that were most successful in other countries--the policies that
Barry Eichengreen's _Golden Fetters_ characterizes as devaluation and
abandonment of the gold standard, fiscal expansion, and monetary
expansion (low interest rates).
Hoover was very, very attached to the gold standard, very opposed to
devaluation, and very, very, very opposed to fiscal expansion. He was
walking down the same road as Chancellor Bruening in Germany, and no
one has ever been able to point to any country that successfully
surmounted the Depression by walking down that road. (Of course, that
hasn't stopped the Hayekians from claiming that the problem was that
they didn't follow the road far *enough*--that they should have made
the Depression deeper and nastier in order to "purify" the economy of
faulty investments that needed to be "liquidated."
In fact, the inaction of the United States government during the
1929-33 slide into the Great Depression is both astonishing and
puzzling when viewed from any of the perspectives economists hold
today. All points of view today hold that governments should strive
to provide a stable environment in which the private economy can
operate, and should do this by keeping some broad nominal aggregate
measure of spending or liquidity on a stable growth path. For
monetarist economists, the measure to be stabilized is some
definition of the nominal money supply. For Keynesians, the
appropriate aggregate is
total nominal demand itself.
As the conduct of economic policy while a depression is pending is
concerned, these differences of opinion are relatively minor, for
they all teach one central lesson: the central bank should pour
reserves and liquidity into the banking system as fast as possible in
order to keep the money stock and demand from collapsing during
depressions. Above all, the central bank should not aggravate
depressions by
unexpectedly imposing contractionary policy on an already weakening economy.
This, however, was not the policy followed during the Great
Depression. The Federal Reserve did not push reserves into the
banking system during the 1929-33 decline. It passively stood by
while the nominal money stock fell by a third. The federal government
did not increase its spending while allowing its tax revenues to
fall. Instead, strenuous efforts were made to balance the budget and
keep it balanced.
These policies were disastrous. They certainly did not stop the
contraction in economic activity. They may well have severely
aggravated it, and presumably played an important role in making the
1929-41 depression into the Great Depression. Alternatives were
considered. Factions within the Federal Reserve system did argue for
expanding liquidity during the downslide. They were overruled by
those who thought
that the economy needed to go through a period of "liquidation" in
order to lay the groundwork for renewed expansion. "Liquidationists"
pointed to the short (but sharp) 1921 recession, argued that it had
laid the groundwork for prosperity in the 1920's, and pushed for
similar deflationary policies-which they mistakenly hoped would
assist the release of capital and labor from unproductive activities,
and lay the groundwork for a similar boom in the 1930's.
The current of mind that underlay "liquidationism" was not a freak
belief held by central bankers and makers of policy alone. Such a
"liquidationist" theory of the function of depressions was in fact a
common position for economists to take before the Keynesian
Revolution, and was held and advanced by economists as eminent as
Hayek, Robbins, and Schumpeter. In squeezing an already-weak economy,
the makers of American economic policy were to some degree acting as
John Maynard Keynes believed that policy makers always act: they were
"madmen in authority" obeying voices in the air which were to some
degree echoes of academic debates. Academic economics gave policy
makers a warrant for their destructive depression-era policies.
Contemplating in retrospect the wreck of his country's economy and his own
presidency, Herbert Hoover wrote bitterly in his memoirs about those
who had advised him, and convinced him during the downslide that
inaction was the best policy:
"The 'leave-it-alone liquidationists' headed by Secretary of the
Treasury Mellon=8Afelt that government must keep its hands off and let
the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula:
'Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate
real estate'.=8AHe held that even panic was not altogether a bad thing.
He said: 'It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs
of living and high living will come down. People will work harder,
live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising
people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people'."
But "liquidationism" was not the creation and responsibility of a
cabal of cabinet members headed by Andrew Mellon. The Hoover
administration's and the Federal Reserve's unwillingness to use
policy to prop up aggregate demand during the slide into the
Depression was approved by the most eminent economists of the day.
=46rom Harvard, Seymour Harris argued that just because the banking
system was near collapse was no reason for the Federal Reserve to buy
bonds for cash: "Open market operations are not
the most effective method of dealing with=8A bank failures, any more
than the proper way of filling numerous small holes on the surface of
the earth is to flood the earth with water." Also from Harvard,
Joseph Schumpeter argued that there was a "presumption against
remedial measures which work through money and credit.=8A policies of
this class are particularly apt to=8Aproduce additional trouble for the
future."
Similar calls to avoid attempts to use economic policy to ameliorate
the depression came from many
other eminent economists: Dennis Robertson, Friedrich Hayek, Lionel
Robbins, and others. "Liquidationism" saw itself, in Robbins' words,
as "a point of view=8A[that was] the heritage of generations
of subtle and disinterested thought" and that saw much further to the
core of what was going on in the economy than other perspectives.
The best short summary of the "liquidationist" position can be found
in Hayek's 1944 _Road to Serfdom_, where he argues that a full
employment policy is an evil:
"This problem [of unemployment]=8Ais one which will always be with us
so long as the economic system has to adopt itself to continuous
changes. There will always be a possible maximum of employment...
which can be achieved by monetary expansion.=8A But=8A [this has the]
effect of holding up those redistributions of labor between
industries made necessary by=8A changed circumstances.=8A [Such a]
policy... is certain in the end to defeat its own purposes=8A and lower
productivity.
The economy *needs* the high unemployment of a depression--even of a
Great Depression--so that it can redistribute labor to more
productive industries. And to attempt to eliminate high depression
unemployment through government policy slows down economic growth
because it destroys the economy's ability to shift labor between
sectors.
This doctrine-that in the long run the Great Depression would turn
out to have been "good medicine" for the economy, and that proponents
of stimulative policies were shortsighted enemies of the public
welfare-drew anguished cries of dissent. For example, the British
economist Ralph Hawtrey scorned those who, like Robbins, wrote at the
nadir of the Great Depression that the greatest danger the economy
faced was inflation. To call for more liquidation and deflation was,
Hawtrey said, "to cry, 'Fire! Fire!' in Noah's flood." Milton
=46riedman (1974) recalls that at Knight, Simons, and Viner's Chicago
such dangerous nonsense was not taught, but he understood why at
Harvard-where such nonsense was taught-bright young graduate student
economists might rebel, reject their teachers' macroeconomics, and
become
Keynesians. In Friedman's view Keynesianism might be false, but it
was not insane, and not as false
as what graduate students were being taught by the likes of Schumpeter.
John Maynard Keynes himself (1931) tried to discredit the
"liquidationist view" with the rhetoric of ridicule. He called it an
"imbecility" to argue that the "wonderful outburst of productive
energy" during the boom of 1924-29 had made the Great Depression
inevitable. He spoke of Hayek, Robbins, Schumpeter, and their fellow
travelers as:
"austere and puritanical souls [who] regard [the Great Depression]...
as an inevitable and a desirable nemesis on=8A "overexpansion" as they
call it.... It would, they feel, be a victory for the mammon of
unrighteousness if so much prosperity was not subsequently balanced
by universal bankruptcy. We need, they say, what they politely call a
'prolonged liquidation' to put us right. The liquidation, they tell
us, is not yet complete. But in time it will be. And when sufficient
time has elapsed for the completion of the liquidation, all will be
well with us again."
By now I have gone very far afield, and much more into the details of
economic thought and policy than probably anybody else wants to read.
But I do want to stress that much is lost when you emphasize the
continuity between the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. There
was institutional and some ideological continuity. But the gap
between Andrew Mellon and, say, Mariner Eccles yawned wider than the
Grand Canyon...
Brad DeLong
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 08:29:54 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: amblack
Subject: Re: 1930s Resources on History Matters
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
There is no one "perfect" source for New Deal references; however, I suggest
you check out 3 sources:
Franklin D Roosevet: His Life and Times (An Encyclopedia) ed by Otis Graham
and Meghan Robinson Wander (Da Capo)
The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia ed by Muarine Beasley et al (Greenwood
Press)
and the website for
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers (www.gwu.edu/~erpapers) which expands weekly --
our goal is within the next 2 years to have all the My Day columns on line as
well as 100 or so of her articles -- we also will post syllabi -- curricula
tied to her papers -- and audio and video of ER discussing political issues
and human rights policy.
Allida Black
>=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Original Message From Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>As Roy Rosenzweig mentioned in a previous post, there are a great many
>resources on History Matters (http://historymatters.gmu.edu) related to the
>Depression and New Deal, easily accessed through the site=B9s search
>functions. In the Many Pasts section of the site, you can find primary
>documents relating to strikes and labor organizing, the Indian
>Reorganization Act, letters to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins about
>worker safety and letters to President Roosevelt about lynching, the Federal
>Theatre Project (and its congressional critics), the "Memorial Day Massacre"
>at Republic Steel, the "Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde," FDR=B9s court-packing
>attempt, and much more. Audio resources in Many Pasts include southern
>folksongs collected by the Library of Congress, a radio broadcast of Joe
>Louis knocking out Max Schmeling, FDR=B9s first inaugural address, and oral
>history remembrances from farmers and workers.
>
>WWW.History contains links to other sites, most notably the New Deal Network
>(http://newdeal.feri.org), a terrific and comprehensive site with primary
>documents and great teaching resources. The vast American Memory collections
>contain photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945, selections from the Federal
>Theatre Project, selections from Smithsonian folklore collections, WPA
>posters, and, just added, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal
>Writers' Project, 1936-1938. And, of course, there=B9s also the FDR Cartoon
>Archive.
>
>For students, the Digital Blackboard contains, among others, lessons using
>the WPA "Life Histories" to compare life in the 1930s to life in the 1990s
>and a role-playing exercise that teaches about the Tennessee Valley
>Authority.
>
>Finally, Making Sense of Evidence contains "Every Picture Tells A Story:
>Documentary Photography and the Great Depression" an interactive exercise
>that allows viewers to examine how some of the photos of the Farm Security
>Administration's Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were created, which photos
>were selected for publications, and how they were changed for public
>presentation.
>
>If you=B9ve used any of these resources, or plan to, please post and describe
>how you=B9ve used them.
>
>
>Ellen Noonan
>
>
>
>
>Ellen Noonan
>American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
>365 Fifth Avenue, Rm. 7301.10
>New York, NY 10016
>(212) 817-1969
>enoonan@gc.cuny.edu
>
>
>
>
>> From: Colin Gordon
>> Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
>>
>> Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 10:22:53 -0500
>> To: DEPRESSION-NEWDEALFORUM@ASHP.LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
>> Subject: Re: Opening Statement from Alan Brinkley
>>
>> Alan is right to question the traditional paradigm, but we need to
>> distinguish between the Schlesingerian model and the "New Deal order" model
>> -- the former is little more than a variant on the old Presidential
>> synthesis; the latter (as exemplified by the work of Hawley, Brinkley,
>> Brown, Argersinger and many others) offers a more capacious understanding
>> of a broader political response to the economic crisis which a) does not
>> cling to FDR's 1932 election as the era's key watershed, and b) does
>> accomodate the social and cultural history which Alan cites.
>>
>> In this respect, I would second Brad DeLong's argument that "the
>> paradigm"is both appropriate and compelling for two reasons. First, the
>> Depression (and War) years represent a still-remarkable "big bang" of
>> state-building and institutional innovation. This is, to my mind, an
>> uncontroverial position upon which both celebrants of the New Deal (like
>> Schlesinger) and critics of the New Deal (left and right) substantially
>> agree. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the political innovations
>> (and failures) of the 1930s decisively shaped the social history of the era
>> as well: the modern labor movement emerged amidst the promises of the NRAs
>> section 7a and the NLRA; the injustice and inequity of New Deal concessions
>> to the South provided a sparkplug for the modern civil rights movement;
>> radical responses -- from Detroit to English AK to Scottsboro -- were keyed
>> by the limits or failures of federal power; the social and economic status
>> of women (see Gordon, Mettler, Storrs and others) in the Depression decade
>> was both defined and represented in debates over social insurance and labor
>> law.
>>
>> The New Deal paradigm remains an important teaching tool, in part because
>> it captures the intensity (and disarray) of political change, and in part
>> because it reflects contemporary popular struggles to define or establish
>> basic rights and obligations during an era of such compelling political
>> change. The problem is not an emphasis on the New Deal per se, but the
>> Schlesingerian assumptions that the political response to the Depression
>> can be neatly contained by the FDR years; that the New Deal can be
>> explained by debates within Roosevelt's inner circle; and that all of the
>> serious alternatives or threats to the New Deal lay to the right.
>>
>> Colin Gordon
>> University of Iowa
>>
>> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
>> http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
Allida Black
Research Professor of History
Project Director and Editor
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers
The George Washington University
(202) 242-6721
(202) 242-6730 (fax)
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 15:39:46 +0100
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "r.j.sandilands"
Subject: Re: Depression questions
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
May I add a few words to Brad DeLong's excellent brief on the chasm that
yawned between the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations' approach to the
Great Depression. He contrasted the nihilism of the "liquidationists"
(including Joseph Schumpeter and Seymour Harris at Harvard) with the
activism of some eminent Chicago economists such as Jacob Viner.
Viner was appointed special adviser to Henry Morgenthau Jr. at the US
Treasury in November 1933. Morgenthau asked Viner to assemble the best
young brains he could find in the fields of monetary theory, public finance
and banking legislation, give them an absolutely free rein and see what
they could come up with. One bright suggestion, it was thought, would
justify the whole effort. Thus the Freshman Brain Trust was born in the
summer of 1934. Two of its most eminent members were Harry Dexter White who
rose to be Assistant Treasury Secretary, and Lauchlin Currie who drafted
the Banking Act of 1935 that was designed to ensure that the disastrous
mistakes of 1929-32 (well described by Brad DeLong) would not be repeated.
(Currie later served as FDR's special White House adviser on economic
affairs, 1939-45.)
In January 1932 Currie and White (along with Paul T. Ellsworth) wrote a
33-page Harvard Memorandum on Depression Policy that vigorously attacked
the nihilism of the "liquidationists" (these included their senior
colleagues Schumpeter, Gottfried Haberler and the department head, Harold
Burbank). None of these junior staff gained tenure. There was, however, one
senior Harvard professor, John H Williams, who expounded similar views at a
conference in Chicago later that month on "Gold and Monetary
Stabilization". Williams played a major part in drafting the famous set of
activist recommendations wired to President Hoover from the conference over
the signatures of 24 economists (12 from Chicago, including Viner, Knight
and Simons).
Lauchlin Currie's 1931-34 Harvard publications largely anticipated the
Friedman-Schwartz (1963) diagnosis of the calamatously passive Federal
Reserve policy in 1929-32. His key complaint was that the Fed was so
transfixed by the behaviour of the stock market (which they deemed to be
"unproductive" uses of credit) that they reined in the money supply even as
the real economy was turning down in mid-1929, and then did nothing to
prevent the collapse of the money supply as the banks called in their loans.
The philosophy that guided the Fed (shades of the Austrian approach) was
that bank credit should be extended only for "productive" purposes,
preferably in the form of supposedly "self-liquidating" short-term
commercial loans. The problem was that in good times business seemed to
have good collateral and good short-term commercial prospects, so the banks
were then keen to expand their lending and the Fed to accommodate these
"needs". Vice versa in bad times.
This of course was a sure-fire recipe for pro-cyclical monetary policy -
the reverse of good sense. But it was the Hooverian conventional wisdom,
and Brad DeLong is right to emphasise the sea change between it and New
Deal and "Keynesian" (or US "Curried-Keynesian") thinking on the role of
the modern state in counter-cyclical stabilization policy through fiscal
and monetary means.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 15:51:55 +0100
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "r.j.sandilands"
Subject: Re: Depression questions
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
[Dear Moderator: I forgot to sign my piece -- I am sending it again with my
"signature" -- Roger Sandilands]
May I add a few words to Brad DeLong's excellent brief on the chasm that
yawned between the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations' approach to the
Great Depression. He contrasted the nihilism of the "liquidationists"
(including Joseph Schumpeter and Seymour Harris at Harvard) with the
activism of some eminent Chicago economists such as Jacob Viner.
Viner was appointed special adviser to Henry Morgenthau Jr. at the US
Treasury in November 1933. Morgenthau asked Viner to assemble the best
young brains he could find in the fields of monetary theory, public finance
and banking legislation, give them an absolutely free rein and see what
they could come up with. One bright suggestion, it was thought, would
justify the whole effort. Thus the Freshman Brain Trust was born in the
summer of 1934. Two of its most eminent members were Harry Dexter White who
rose to be Assistant Treasury Secretary, and Lauchlin Currie who drafted
the Banking Act of 1935 that was designed to ensure that the disastrous
mistakes of 1929-32 (well described by Brad DeLong) would not be repeated.
(Currie later served as FDR's special White House adviser on economic
affairs, 1939-45.)
In January 1932 Currie and White (along with Paul T. Ellsworth) wrote a
33-page Harvard Memorandum on Depression Policy that vigorously attacked
the nihilism of the "liquidationists" (these included their senior
colleagues Schumpeter, Gottfried Haberler and the department head, Harold
Burbank). None of these junior staff gained tenure. There was, however, one
senior Harvard professor, John H Williams, who expounded similar views at a
conference in Chicago later that month on "Gold and Monetary
Stabilization". Williams played a major part in drafting the famous set of
activist recommendations wired to President Hoover from the conference over
the signatures of 24 economists (12 from Chicago, including Viner, Knight
and Simons).
Lauchlin Currie's 1931-34 Harvard publications largely anticipated the
Friedman-Schwartz (1963) diagnosis of the calamatously passive Federal
Reserve policy in 1929-32. His key complaint was that the Fed was so
transfixed by the behaviour of the stock market (which they deemed to be
"unproductive" uses of credit) that they reined in the money supply even as
the real economy was turning down in mid-1929, and then did nothing to
prevent the collapse of the money supply as the banks called in their loans.
The philosophy that guided the Fed (shades of the Austrian approach) was
that bank credit should be extended only for "productive" purposes,
preferably in the form of supposedly "self-liquidating" short-term
commercial loans. The problem was that in good times business seemed to
have good collateral and good short-term commercial prospects, so the banks
were then keen to expand their lending and the Fed to accommodate these
"needs". Vice versa in bad times.
This of course was a sure-fire recipe for pro-cyclical monetary policy -
the reverse of good sense. But it was the Hooverian conventional wisdom,
and Brad DeLong is right to emphasise the sea change between it and New
Deal and "Keynesian" (or US "Curried-Keynesian") thinking on the role of
the modern state in counter-cyclical stabilization policy through fiscal
and monetary means.
Roger Sandilands
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, UK
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 10:37:46 -0500
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Rein Conrad
Subject: Re: Forum and reference works on New Deal/Great Depression
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
I don't know if it will be available to you in time to help this semester,
but the
Encyclodedia of the Great Depression and the New Deal
should be coming out this spring. For further information contact:
Dr. James Ciment
Encyclopedia of the Great Depression and New Deal
151 First Avenue #79
New York City NY 10003
James Ciment
E-mail Address(es):
cimentjd@igc.org
----- Original Message -----
From: Wyatt Evans
To:
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 9:12 PM
Subject: Forum and reference works on New Deal/Great Depression
> From: C. Wyatt Evans, < wyevans@blast.net >
> DATE: 4 April 2001, TIME: 8:52 PM
>
> This semester is my first at teaching the Depression and New Deal, and the
> course has so far been productive- from what I can tell- for the students,
> and it certainly has been productive for me. Given the recent tilt in the
> stock market, my two older retired students find the potential analogies
> between past and present riveting. The younger students respond as well to
> the relevancy of the New Deal to their own lives, although they tend to
have
> less interest in the legislative/legal/historical bases of the ND
programs.
>
> The discussion of paradigms launched by Professor Brinkley has been very
> useful for me, as have Brad De Long and Colin Gordon's replies. For the
> moment however, I have a much more prosaic question to pose: Is there
> currently in print a dictionary or other print reference source on the New
> Deal/Depression ? Ellen Noonan's post on web resources is useful, but what
> about print reference works?
>
> The only historical dictionary I found is James Olson's 1985 (Greenwood
> Press) _Historical Dictionary of the New Deal_. Are there any others out
> there and still in print?
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Wyatt Evans
> Adjunct Professor, Fairleigh-Dickinson University
> Ph.D. Candidate, Drew University
>
> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
>
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 15:04:43 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Christopher Baylor
Subject: Re: Depression questions
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Here are some more thoughts on the Roosevelt/Hoover contrast. Andrew Mellon may have advised Hoover to liquidate, but I am under the impression that Hoover acted according to his own understanding of economics rather than Mellon's. Barber's From New Era to New Deal shows that Herbert Hoover was more of an activist than many instructors give him credit for. He met with businessmen and urged them not to cut wages, and urged state and local governments to spend more on public works projects. Furthermore, Hoover's RFC made loans to businesses and state/local governments to encourage spending. This leads me to believe that Hoover was trying to increase aggregate demand and avoid liquidation, although his measures were not as bold as Roosevelt's.
Although Roosevelt did not follow this policy while president, he urged keeping a balanced budget in the 1932 election.
Chris Baylor
Quincy College
>From: Brad DeLong
>Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
>To: DEPRESSION-NEWDEALFORUM@ASHP.LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
>Subject: Re: Depression questions
>Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 19:48:57 -0700
>
>>I have encountered other interpretations that saw Hoover as the
>>realist,
>>with the economic background to successfully end the depression,
>>who chose
>>to do that work rather than waste taxpayer time during such a
>>crisis by
>>diverting his attentions to running for office. The successful New
>>Deal
>>programs, especially most of those used during Roosevelt's miracle
>>100
>>days, had been developed during the last part of the Hoover term in
>>office
>>and were ready to launch when Roosevelt took office.
>
>Unless the U.S. truly was unique, the most successful aspects of the
>New Deal as far as depression-fighting was concerned were probably
>those that were most successful in other countries--the policies
>that
>Barry Eichengreen's _Golden Fetters_ characterizes as devaluation
>and
>abandonment of the gold standard, fiscal expansion, and monetary
>expansion (low interest rates).
>
>Hoover was very, very attached to the gold standard, very opposed to
>devaluation, and very, very, very opposed to fiscal expansion. He
>was
>walking down the same road as Chancellor Bruening in Germany, and no
>one has ever been able to point to any country that successfully
>surmounted the Depression by walking down that road. (Of course,
>that
>hasn't stopped the Hayekians from claiming that the problem was that
>they didn't follow the road far *enough*--that they should have made
>the Depression deeper and nastier in order to "purify" the economy
>of
>faulty investments that needed to be "liquidated."
>
>In fact, the inaction of the United States government during the
>1929-33 slide into the Great Depression is both astonishing and
>puzzling when viewed from any of the perspectives economists hold
>today. All points of view today hold that governments should strive
>to provide a stable environment in which the private economy can
>operate, and should do this by keeping some broad nominal aggregate
>measure of spending or liquidity on a stable growth path. For
>monetarist economists, the measure to be stabilized is some
>definition of the nominal money supply. For Keynesians, the
>appropriate aggregate is
>total nominal demand itself.
>
>As the conduct of economic policy while a depression is pending is
>concerned, these differences of opinion are relatively minor, for
>they all teach one central lesson: the central bank should pour
>reserves and liquidity into the banking system as fast as possible
>in
>order to keep the money stock and demand from collapsing during
>depressions. Above all, the central bank should not aggravate
>depressions by
>unexpectedly imposing contractionary policy on an already weakening
>economy.
>
>This, however, was not the policy followed during the Great
>Depression. The Federal Reserve did not push reserves into the
>banking system during the 1929-33 decline. It passively stood by
>while the nominal money stock fell by a third. The federal
>government
>did not increase its spending while allowing its tax revenues to
>fall. Instead, strenuous efforts were made to balance the budget and
>keep it balanced.
>
>These policies were disastrous. They certainly did not stop the
>contraction in economic activity. They may well have severely
>aggravated it, and presumably played an important role in making the
>1929-41 depression into the Great Depression. Alternatives were
>considered. Factions within the Federal Reserve system did argue for
>expanding liquidity during the downslide. They were overruled by
>those who thought
>that the economy needed to go through a period of "liquidation" in
>order to lay the groundwork for renewed expansion. "Liquidationists"
>pointed to the short (but sharp) 1921 recession, argued that it had
>laid the groundwork for prosperity in the 1920's, and pushed for
>similar deflationary policies-which they mistakenly hoped would
>assist the release of capital and labor from unproductive
>activities,
>and lay the groundwork for a similar boom in the 1930's.
>
>The current of mind that underlay "liquidationism" was not a freak
>belief held by central bankers and makers of policy alone. Such a
>"liquidationist" theory of the function of depressions was in fact a
>common position for economists to take before the Keynesian
>Revolution, and was held and advanced by economists as eminent as
>Hayek, Robbins, and Schumpeter. In squeezing an already-weak
>economy,
>the makers of American economic policy were to some degree acting as
>John Maynard Keynes believed that policy makers always act: they
>were
>"madmen in authority" obeying voices in the air which were to some
>degree echoes of academic debates. Academic economics gave policy
>makers a warrant for their destructive depression-era policies.
>
>Contemplating in retrospect the wreck of his country's economy and
>his own
>presidency, Herbert Hoover wrote bitterly in his memoirs about those
>who had advised him, and convinced him during the downslide that
>inaction was the best policy:
>
>"The 'leave-it-alone liquidationists' headed by Secretary of the
>Treasury Mellon felt that government must keep its hands off and let
>the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula:
>'Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate
>real estate'. He held that even panic was not altogether a bad
>thing.
>He said: 'It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs
>of living and high living will come down. People will work harder,
>live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising
>people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people'."
>
>But "liquidationism" was not the creation and responsibility of a
>cabal of cabinet members headed by Andrew Mellon. The Hoover
>administration's and the Federal Reserve's unwillingness to use
>policy to prop up aggregate demand during the slide into the
>Depression was approved by the most eminent economists of the day.
>From Harvard, Seymour Harris argued that just because the banking
>system was near collapse was no reason for the Federal Reserve to
>buy
>bonds for cash: "Open market operations are not
>the most effective method of dealing with bank failures, any more
>than the proper way of filling numerous small holes on the surface
>of
>the earth is to flood the earth with water." Also from Harvard,
>Joseph Schumpeter argued that there was a "presumption against
>remedial measures which work through money and credit. policies of
>this class are particularly apt to produce additional trouble for
>the
>future."
>
>Similar calls to avoid attempts to use economic policy to ameliorate
>the depression came from many
>other eminent economists: Dennis Robertson, Friedrich Hayek, Lionel
>Robbins, and others. "Liquidationism" saw itself, in Robbins' words,
>as "a point of view [that was] the heritage of generations
>of subtle and disinterested thought" and that saw much further to
>the
>core of what was going on in the economy than other perspectives.
>
>The best short summary of the "liquidationist" position can be found
>in Hayek's 1944 _Road to Serfdom_, where he argues that a full
>employment policy is an evil:
>
>"This problem [of unemployment] is one which will always be with us
>so long as the economic system has to adopt itself to continuous
>changes. There will always be a possible maximum of employment...
>which can be achieved by monetary expansion. But [this has the]
>effect of holding up those redistributions of labor between
>industries made necessary by changed circumstances. [Such a]
>policy... is certain in the end to defeat its own purposes and
>lower
>productivity.
>
>The economy *needs* the high unemployment of a depression--even of a
>Great Depression--so that it can redistribute labor to more
>productive industries. And to attempt to eliminate high depression
>unemployment through government policy slows down economic growth
>because it destroys the economy's ability to shift labor between
>sectors.
>
>This doctrine-that in the long run the Great Depression would turn
>out to have been "good medicine" for the economy, and that
>proponents
>of stimulative policies were shortsighted enemies of the public
>welfare-drew anguished cries of dissent. For example, the British
>economist Ralph Hawtrey scorned those who, like Robbins, wrote at
>the
>nadir of the Great Depression that the greatest danger the economy
>faced was inflation. To call for more liquidation and deflation was,
>Hawtrey said, "to cry, 'Fire! Fire!' in Noah's flood." Milton
>Friedman (1974) recalls that at Knight, Simons, and Viner's Chicago
>such dangerous nonsense was not taught, but he understood why at
>Harvard-where such nonsense was taught-bright young graduate student
>economists might rebel, reject their teachers' macroeconomics, and
>become
>Keynesians. In Friedman's view Keynesianism might be false, but it
>was not insane, and not as false
>as what graduate students were being taught by the likes of
>Schumpeter.
>
>John Maynard Keynes himself (1931) tried to discredit the
>"liquidationist view" with the rhetoric of ridicule. He called it an
>"imbecility" to argue that the "wonderful outburst of productive
>energy" during the boom of 1924-29 had made the Great Depression
>inevitable. He spoke of Hayek, Robbins, Schumpeter, and their fellow
>travelers as:
>
>"austere and puritanical souls [who] regard [the Great
>Depression]...
>as an inevitable and a desirable nemesis on "overexpansion" as they
>call it.... It would, they feel, be a victory for the mammon of
>unrighteousness if so much prosperity was not subsequently balanced
>by universal bankruptcy. We need, they say, what they politely call
>a
>'prolonged liquidation' to put us right. The liquidation, they tell
>us, is not yet complete. But in time it will be. And when sufficient
>time has elapsed for the completion of the liquidation, all will be
>well with us again."
>
>By now I have gone very far afield, and much more into the details
>of
>economic thought and policy than probably anybody else wants to
>read.
>But I do want to stress that much is lost when you emphasize the
>continuity between the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. There
>was institutional and some ideological continuity. But the gap
>between Andrew Mellon and, say, Mariner Eccles yawned wider than the
>Grand Canyon...
>
>
>Brad DeLong
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web
>site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for
>teaching U.S. History.
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 18:27:30 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Alan Brinkley
Subject: Re: Is there a value to the New Deal paradigm?
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.20010404102253.00704c24@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Brad DeLong and Colin Gordon have both commented on my reference to a New
Deal paradigm -- which I described as the traditional liberal view of the
New Deal first presented historically by Arthur Schlesinger and sustained
(with some revision) by a generation and more of other historians, perhaps
most notably William Leuchtenburg. That paradigm has lost much, although
not all, of its power within the academy, but it remains very strong in
non-academic liberal circles and helps sustain an attachment to traditional
liberal hopes.
Brad DeLong argues that we should, in fact, defend the paradigm. And as a
political matter, if one believes, as I do, that the return to free-market
orthodoxy is a mistaken and even disastrous political choice, he may be
right. Using the New Deal, which is, on the whole, still viewed reasonably
favorably by most Americans who have any opinion about it, to help sustain
or restore liberal strength today is a worthwhile thing to do.
But I am much less convinced of the value of defending the paradigm on
scholarly grounds. There is, of course, some truth in it, and we should not
repudiate the whole because of weaknesses in some of its parts. But that
paradigm simply does not any longer have the explanatory power that it once
did. It leaves too much out; it flattens out what is in fact a very
complicated and controversial political and social landscape; and it doesn't
answer many of the most important questions about either the Great
Depression of the New Deal.
Colin Gordon has noted that there is a related, but rather different,
"paradigm," which he calls the "New Deal Order" argument. And I agree that
there is now a good deal of scholarship that continues (appropriately) to
see the New Deal as a central event in the history of the state but that
offers a much more complicated picture of what the New Deal actually did and
actually was. Colin's own important work is part of that effort. So is
much of mine. And Brad DeLong's second posting suggests that he too uses
aspects of this second "paradigm" as well.
But what I was really hoping to suggest in my opening statement is that the
real burden of the "New Deal paradigm," in either of its forms, is in making
the New Deal the central, and at times the only, focus of attention of
scholars and teachers when they teach or write about the Great Depression.
There is, of course, now a very large literature on the 1930s that examines
aspects of social, cultural, intellectual, economic, and even political
history without direct reference to the New Deal. And it seems to me that
one thing people working in this field ought to be trying to do is to think
of an intepretive model of the 1930s that makes room for this newer
scholarship and positions the New Deal within a larger framework, one in
which it would likely seem somewhat less dominant and determinative than it
often now does.
Alan Brinkley
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 18:36:52 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Alan Brinkley
Subject: Re: Did Hoover create the New Deal?
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0000_01C0BDFF.61FAA420"
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_0000_01C0BDFF.61FAA420
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Herbert Hoover has certainly received a bad rap from history. He was not,
during his presidency, the insensitive and stubborn reactionary that New
Dealers later portrayed him as being (and that to some degree he actually
later became). He was an active and innovative president, and some of his
efforts helped lay the groundwork for some aspects of the New Deal. For
example, the Agricultural Marketing Act was an important first step toward
the AAA, even if it did not itself do very much good. The RFC was an
important part of New Deal spending and public works policies. Hoover's
advocacy, beginning long before his presidency, of trade associationalism
helped lay the groundwork for the AAA.
But as other contributors to this forum have already suggested, it would be
a very large leap to move from that to the belief that Hoover was actually
the founder of the New Deal and that FDR essentially stole credit for it
from him.
The single most important difference between Hoover and Roosevelt, and a
very critical difference, was that Hoover was a man of deep and unshakeable
principle and Roosevelt was not. That might make Hoover seem more admirable
as a person, but it made him much less effective as a president. Hoover
believed he understood economic laws and was rigidly defensive of orthodox
thinking about such things as the gold standard, government spending,
balanced budgets, and the like (even if he bent his orthodoxy slightly from
time to time). Roosevelt had a few broad principles -- the importance of
preserving capitalism, for example -- but on almost all specific policy
questions, he was willing to make almost any accommodation that he thought
might work. He was willing to keep alive or build on those Hoover
initiatives that he thought were valuable. He was also willing to do any
number of things that Hoover would never have contemplated -- abandoning the
gold standard, deflating the dollar, supporting organized labor, creating
massive federal relieve and jobs programs, building a social security
system, regulating the securities markets, insuring bank deposits, etc.,
etc., etc. Eventually, it led FDR to embrace at least some aspects of
Keynesianism.
Hoover may not deserve the opprobrium he has often received, but neither
does he deserve credit for the important changes the New Deal imposed on
American government and American economic life.
------=_NextPart_000_0000_01C0BDFF.61FAA420
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Herbert Hoover has certainly received a bad =
rap from=20
history. He was not, during his presidency, the insensitive and =
stubborn=20
reactionary that New Dealers later portrayed him as being (and that to =
some=20
degree he actually later became). He was an active and innovative=20
president, and some of his efforts helped lay the groundwork for some =
aspects of=20
the New Deal. For example, the Agricultural Marketing Act was an =
important=20
first step toward the AAA, even if it did not itself do very much =
good. =20
The RFC was an important part of New Deal spending and public works=20
policies. Hoover's advocacy, beginning long before his presidency, =
of=20
trade associationalism helped lay the groundwork for the=20
AAA.
But as=20
other contributors to this forum have already suggested, it would be a =
very=20
large leap to move from that to the belief that Hoover was actually the =
founder=20
of the New Deal and that FDR essentially stole credit for it from=20
him.
The=20
single most important difference between Hoover and Roosevelt, and =
a very=20
critical difference, was that Hoover was a man of deep and unshakeable =
principle=20
and Roosevelt was not. That might make Hoover seem more admirable =
as=20
a person, but it made him much less effective as a president. =
Hoover=20
believed he understood economic laws and was rigidly defensive of =
orthodox=20
thinking about such things as the gold standard, government spending, =
balanced=20
budgets, and the like (even if he bent his orthodoxy slightly from time =
to=20
time). Roosevelt had a few broad principles -- the importance of=20
preserving capitalism, for example -- but on almost all specific policy=20
questions, he was willing to make almost any accommodation that he =
thought might=20
work. He was willing to keep alive or build on those Hoover=20
initiatives that he thought were valuable. He was also willing to =
do any=20
number of things that Hoover would never have contemplated -- abandoning =
the=20
gold standard, deflating the dollar, supporting organized labor, =
creating=20
massive federal relieve and jobs programs, building a social security =
system,=20
regulating the securities markets, insuring bank deposits, etc., etc.,=20
etc. Eventually, it led FDR to embrace at least some aspects of=20
Keynesianism.
Hoover=20
may not deserve the opprobrium he has often received, but neither does =
he=20
deserve credit for the important changes the New Deal imposed on =
American=20
government and American economic =
life.
------=_NextPart_000_0000_01C0BDFF.61FAA420--
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 16:31:45 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Brad DeLong
Subject: Re: Is there a value to the New Deal paradigm?
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
>Brad DeLong argues that we should, in fact, defend the paradigm. And as a
>political matter, if one believes, as I do, that the return to free-market
>orthodoxy is a mistaken and even disastrous political choice, he may be
>right. Using the New Deal, which is, on the whole, still viewed reasonably
>favorably by most Americans who have any opinion about it, to help sustain
>or restore liberal strength today is a worthwhile thing to do.
>But I am much less convinced of the value of defending the paradigm on
>scholarly grounds. There is, of course, some truth in it, and we should not
>repudiate the whole because of weaknesses in some of its parts. But that
>paradigm simply does not any longer have the explanatory power that it once
>did. It leaves too much out; it flattens out what is in fact a very
>complicated and controversial political and social landscape; and it doesn't
>answer many of the most important questions about either the Great
>Depression of the New Deal...
It does depend on what you are trying to do...
If you are trying to teach the era of the Great Depression as an age
equally close to God as our own, then yes, of course, the paradigm is
much too simple and flattening.
But if you're teaching a course on the politico-economic history of
the world in the twentieth century, one of the primary eras you want
to focus on is the great post-WWII social-democratic Keynesian boom
in the North Atlantic economies. If *that* is the age equally close
to God--and if you don't have time to look at the Great Depression in
detail--then I think that the paradigm helps students learn what they
need to know to understand 1945-1975...
:-)
Brad DeLong
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 18:09:03 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Pete Haro
Subject: Re: Did Hoover create the New Deal?
Mime-version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="MS_Mac_OE_3069338943_610355_MIME_Part"
> THIS MESSAGE IS IN MIME FORMAT. Since your mail reader does not understand
this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.
--MS_Mac_OE_3069338943_610355_MIME_Part
Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
Dear Forum Participants: I find the efforts to rehabilitate the image of
Herbert Hoover fascinating. In particular, Professor Brinkley's claim that
he has received "a bad rap". However, in 1931, Hoover publicly stated that
"prosperity is just around the corner" and "what the country needs is a
good, big laugh. There seems to be a condition of hysteria. If someone could
get off a good joke every ten days, I think that our troubles would be
over." In addition, he also stated that "many persons have left their jobs
for the more profitable one of selling apples." What should his image be in
light of these statements? Insensitive? Unable to comprehend the seriousness
of the economic calamity? I would be interested in hearing your opinions.
Sincerely,
Peter Haro
Southwestern College
----------
From: Alan Brinkley
To: DEPRESSION-NEWDEALFORUM@ASHP.LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
Subject: Re: Did Hoover create the New Deal?
Date: Thu, Apr 5, 2001, 3:36 PM
Herbert Hoover has certainly received a bad rap from history. He was not,
during his presidency, the insensitive and stubborn reactionary that New
Dealers later portrayed him as being (and that to some degree he actually
later became). He was an active and innovative president, and some of his
efforts helped lay the groundwork for some aspects of the New Deal. For
example, the Agricultural Marketing Act was an important first step toward
the AAA, even if it did not itself do very much good. The RFC was an
important part of New Deal spending and public works policies. Hoover's
advocacy, beginning long before his presidency, of trade associationalism
helped lay the groundwork for the AAA.
But as other contributors to this forum have already suggested, it would be
a very large leap to move from that to the belief that Hoover was actually
the founder of the New Deal and that FDR essentially stole credit for it
from him.
The single most important difference between Hoover and Roosevelt, and a
very critical difference, was that Hoover was a man of deep and unshakeable
principle and Roosevelt was not. That might make Hoover seem more admirable
as a person, but it made him much less effective as a president. Hoover
believed he understood economic laws and was rigidly defensive of orthodox
thinking about such things as the gold standard, government spending,
balanced budgets, and the like (even if he bent his orthodoxy slightly from
time to time). Roosevelt had a few broad principles -- the importance of
preserving capitalism, for example -- but on almost all specific policy
questions, he was willing to make almost any accommodation that he thought
might work. He was willing to keep alive or build on those Hoover
initiatives that he thought were valuable. He was also willing to do any
number of things that Hoover would never have contemplated -- abandoning the
gold standard, deflating the dollar, supporting organized labor, creating
massive federal relieve and jobs programs, building a social security
system, regulating the securities markets, insuring bank deposits, etc.,
etc., etc. Eventually, it led FDR to embrace at least some aspects of
Keynesianism.
Hoover may not deserve the opprobrium he has often received, but neither
does he deserve credit for the important changes the New Deal imposed on
American government and American economic life.
--MS_Mac_OE_3069338943_610355_MIME_Part
Content-type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
Re: Did Hoover create the New Deal?
Dear Forum Participants: I find the efforts to rehabilitate the image of He=
rbert Hoover fascinating. In particular, Professor Brinkley's claim that he =
has received "a bad rap". However, in 1931, Hoover publicly stated=
that "prosperity is just around the corner" and "what the co=
untry needs is a good, big laugh. There seems to be a condition of hysteria.=
If someone could get off a good joke every ten days, I think that our troub=
les would be over." In addition, he also stated that "many persons=
have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples." W=
hat should his image be in light of these statements? Insensitive? Unable to=
comprehend the seriousness of the economic calamity? I would be interested =
in hearing your opinions.
Sincerely,
Peter Haro
Southwestern College
----------
From: Alan Brinkley <ab65@COLUMBIA.EDU>
To: DEPRESSION-NEWDEALFORUM@ASHP.LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
Subject: Re: Did Hoover create the New Deal?
Date: Thu, Apr 5, 2001, 3:36 PM
Herbert=
Hoover has certainly received a bad rap from history. He was not, dur=
ing his presidency, the insensitive and stubborn reactionary that New Dealer=
s later portrayed him as being (and that to some degree he actually later be=
came). He was an active and innovative president, and some of his effo=
rts helped lay the groundwork for some aspects of the New Deal. For ex=
ample, the Agricultural Marketing Act was an important first step toward the=
AAA, even if it did not itself do very much good. The RFC was an impo=
rtant part of New Deal spending and public works policies. Hoover's ad=
vocacy, beginning long before his presidency, of trade associationalism help=
ed lay the groundwork for the AAA.
But as other contributors to this forum have already suggested, it would be=
a very large leap to move from that to the belief that Hoover was actually =
the founder of the New Deal and that FDR essentially stole credit for it fro=
m him.
The single most important difference between Hoover and Roosevelt, and a ve=
ry critical difference, was that Hoover was a man of deep and unshakeable pr=
inciple and Roosevelt was not. That might make Hoover seem more admira=
ble as a person, but it made him much less effective as a president. H=
oover believed he understood economic laws and was rigidly defensive of orth=
odox thinking about such things as the gold standard, government spending, b=
alanced budgets, and the like (even if he bent his orthodoxy slightly from t=
ime to time). Roosevelt had a few broad principles -- the importance o=
f preserving capitalism, for example -- but on almost all specific policy qu=
estions, he was willing to make almost any accommodation that he thought mig=
ht work. He was willing to keep alive or build on those Hoover initiat=
ives that he thought were valuable. He was also willing to do any numb=
er of things that Hoover would never have contemplated -- abandoning the gol=
d standard, deflating the dollar, supporting organized labor, creating massi=
ve federal relieve and jobs programs, building a social security system, reg=
ulating the securities markets, insuring bank deposits, etc., etc., etc. &nb=
sp;Eventually, it led FDR to embrace at least some aspects of Keynesianism. =
Hoover may not deserve the opprobrium he has often received, but neither do=
es he deserve credit for the important changes the New Deal imposed on Ameri=
can government and American economic life.
--MS_Mac_OE_3069338943_610355_MIME_Part--
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 21:34:23 -0500
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Wyatt Evans
Subject: Re: Forum and reference works on New Deal/Great Depression
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
FROM: C. Wyatt Evans, < wyevans@blast.net >
DATE: 5 April 2001 TIME: 9:27 PM
Thanks to all for the replies on New Deal/Great Depression
dictionaries/encyclopedias. I'm looking forward to seeing the forthcoming
work mentioned by Rein Conrad.
Sincerely,
Wyatt Evans
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 20:49:02 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: David Hanson
Subject: Re: Did Hoover create the New Deal?
In-Reply-To: <200104060104.SAA01784@snipe.prod.itd.earthlink.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; types="text/plain,text/html";
boundary="=====================_26871872==_.ALT"
--=====================_26871872==_.ALT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
I agree. It certainly is much easier to find examples of Hoover's
insensitivity and ineptitude than it is to make the case that he was an
underrated "activist" whose economic policies were the basis for FDR's New
Deal. I think the evidence is pretty clear that Hoover did very little to
abate the crisis, and when he did act it was either the wrong things... or too
little, too late.
Hoover created the New Deal? The very idea is enough to start both FDR and
Hoover spinning in their graves.
David Hanson
Professor of History
Virginia Western
At 06:09 PM 4/5/01 -0700, you wrote:
>
> Dear Forum Participants: I find the efforts to rehabilitate the image of
> Herbert Hoover fascinating. In particular, Professor Brinkley's claim
that he
> has received "a bad rap". However, in 1931, Hoover publicly stated that
> "prosperity is just around the corner" and "what the country needs is a
good,
> big laugh. There seems to be a condition of hysteria. If someone could get
> off a good joke every ten days, I think that our troubles would be over." In
> addition, he also stated that "many persons have left their jobs for the
more
> profitable one of selling apples." What should his image be in light of
these
> statements? Insensitive? Unable to comprehend the seriousness of the
economic
> calamity? I would be interested in hearing your opinions.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Peter Haro
> Southwestern College
--=====================_26871872==_.ALT
Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
I agree. It certainly is much easier to find examples of Hoover's
insensitivity and ineptitude than it is to make the case that he was an
underrated "activist" whose economic policies were the basis
for FDR's New Deal. I think the evidence is pretty clear that
Hoover did very little to abate the crisis, and when he did act it was
either the wrong things... or too little, too late.
Hoover created the New Deal? The very idea is enough to start both
FDR and Hoover spinning in their graves.
David Hanson
Professor of History
Virginia Western
At 06:09 PM 4/5/01 -0700, you wrote:
Dear Forum Participants: I find the efforts to
rehabilitate the image of Herbert Hoover fascinating. In particular,
Professor Brinkley's claim that he has received "a bad rap".
However, in 1931, Hoover publicly stated that "prosperity is just
around the corner" and "what the country needs is a good, big
laugh. There seems to be a condition of hysteria. If someone could get
off a good joke every ten days, I think that our troubles would be
over." In addition, he also stated that "many persons have left
their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples." What
should his image be in light of these statements? Insensitive? Unable to
comprehend the seriousness of the economic calamity? I would be
interested in hearing your opinions.
Sincerely,
Peter Haro
Southwestern College
--=====================_26871872==_.ALT--
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 10:31:31 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "Nancy L. Zens"
Subject: Did Hoover Create the New Deal
Regarding Hoover's insensitive language about the seriousness of the
Depression in peoples' lives, isn't one of the jobs of the President to
promote confidence, even if there is a very real problem, in order to
prevent public panic? I have never seen Hoover described as charismatic or
humorous, yet didn't he have a dry sense of humor? Could words that are
insenitive, even cruel sounding in modern ears, have been an attempt at
levity? It may not have come off as a joke since it was from the
President, but he certainly would not be the first person to float a joke
and have it be misunderstood as something else entirely. His comments on
laughing being beneficial to the spirit, to give one the courage to
continue working on difficult solutions sounds like old folk wisdom from
that time, and also seems to match some of the new medical reports on the
benefits of laughter and positive attitude. To those who are experts of
this decade, I am asking if my guess that some of Hoover's speaking problem
was the inability to put across a joke in public.
I have seen many of Will Rogers' jokes and Hollywood comedies make fun out
of conditions during the Depression, yet even the people of the day called
this humor, even when it is insensitive.
Nancy Zens
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 10:25:54 -0500
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Colin Gordon
Subject: Re: Is there a value to the New Deal paradigm?
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
I agree entirely with Alan's point below. Certainly the central lesson of
recent history on this era is that the New Deal neither exhausted all the
political alternatives nor represented all the political aspirations. At
the same time, I am struck by the ways in which social movements
(broadly-defined) of the era used the New Deal as a benchmark. The
emergence of the CIO rested largely on the meaning workers and their unions
gave to the NRA and later the NLRA. Labor politics were either largely
satisfied (in the work of Liz Cohen and others) by the New Deal Democratic
Party or (in the work of Peter Rachleff and others) frustrated by it.
Civil rights activism North and South drew heavily on the legal and
political logic of new federal policy and spending -- captured, for
example, in the NYA's reaction to the NRA or the SCU's reaction to the AAA.
And the broader battle over social citizenship -- joined by maternalists,
progressives, advocates for the elderly, unionists, civil rights activists,
etc -- was organized largely around the promise and the limits of federal
relief, social insurance, and wage policies (see especially Linda Gordon
and Alice Kessler Harris on the SSA, Landon Storrs and Suzanne Mettler on
the FLSA).
Having said this, I think Alan's distinction between the political and
scholarly and pedagogical utility of the New Deal paradigm is important. I
find the script outlined above most useful as a classroom tool. It does
not follow that the trajectory of public policy in the 1930s should remain
the "master narrative" around which scholarship is organized.
Colin Gordon
>But what I was really hoping to suggest in my opening statement is that the
>real burden of the "New Deal paradigm," in either of its forms, is in making
>the New Deal the central, and at times the only, focus of attention of
>scholars and teachers when they teach or write about the Great Depression.
>There is, of course, now a very large literature on the 1930s that examines
>aspects of social, cultural, intellectual, economic, and even political
>history without direct reference to the New Deal. And it seems to me that
>one thing people working in this field ought to be trying to do is to think
>of an intepretive model of the 1930s that makes room for this newer
>scholarship and positions the New Deal within a larger framework, one in
>which it would likely seem somewhat less dominant and determinative than it
>often now does.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 10:40:04 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: David Hanson
Subject: Re: Did Hoover Create the New Deal
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
It is true, from what I have read, that Hoover could be engaging and witty
on a personal level. (He did not have the charm and charisma of FDR, of
course.) And in his role as president during the economic crisis, I don't
believe he was mean-spirited or unsympathetic to the plight of the
unemployed. He just came across that way.
But he was narrow-minded, rigid and stubborn. Equally important, his
political skills were that of an engineer and administrator who had never
run for office until 1928. He often said the wrong things. But his
actions (or inaction) spoke volumes, too. Hoover was caught in his own
ideological straightjacket and unable to develop a game plan for the
unprecedented situation facing the nation.
But I agree with Nancy, it's not that Hoover's motives were bad. His heart
was in the right place. But good intentions are not enough. Hoover's
verbal attacks on FDR and the New Deal--during and long after the
Depression--make it clear that he was quite serious about his rigidly
reactionary philosophy on matters of fiscal and monetary policy, the
presidency, social justice, and personal responsibility.
David Hanson
At 10:31 AM 4/6/01 -0400, you wrote:
>Regarding Hoover's insensitive language about the seriousness of the
>Depression in peoples' lives, isn't one of the jobs of the President to
>promote confidence, even if there is a very real problem, in order to
>prevent public panic? I have never seen Hoover described as charismatic or
>humorous, yet didn't he have a dry sense of humor? Could words that are
>insenitive, even cruel sounding in modern ears, have been an attempt at
>levity? It may not have come off as a joke since it was from the
>President, but he certainly would not be the first person to float a joke
>and have it be misunderstood as something else entirely. His comments on
>laughing being beneficial to the spirit, to give one the courage to
>continue working on difficult solutions sounds like old folk wisdom from
>that time, and also seems to match some of the new medical reports on the
>benefits of laughter and positive attitude. To those who are experts of
>this decade, I am asking if my guess that some of Hoover's speaking problem
>was the inability to put across a joke in public.
>I have seen many of Will Rogers' jokes and Hollywood comedies make fun out
>of conditions during the Depression, yet even the people of the day called
>this humor, even when it is insensitive.
>Nancy Zens
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
>
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 13:50:13 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Alan Brinkley
Subject: Re: Hoover the humorist
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
I'm not an expert on Hoover's personality, and I'm perfectly willing to
accept that he may have had a dry wit. I would be very surprised, however,
if the public comments he made during his presidency, which seemed at the
time and have seemed to many since, so remote and insensitive were a failed
attempt at humor. And I would, in fact, think even less of Hoover if that
were the case -- because it would have been a kind of humor demeaning to the
people who were its object.
Alan Brinkley
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 11:05:09 -0700
Reply-To: "Donald W. Whisenhunt"
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "Donald W. Whisenhunt"
Subject: Re: Hoover the humorist
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
I have been interested in the comments about Hoover's personality, his
humor, and his wit. In addition, I was intriqued by Nancy Zens' comments
about a duty of the president to maintain, or in Hoover's case, restore,
confidence. I spent quite a bit of time in my books, The Depression in
Texas: The Hoover Years (Garland, 1983), and Poetry of the People: Poems to
the President, 1929-1935 (Popular Press, 1996), dealing with the issue of
confidence. Hoover tried valiantly to restore confidence, but he did it
mostly by saying "Have Confidence" when he exhibited gloom himself.
Interestingly, in an interview (I believe it was Literary Digest in 1931,
but I can't locate the citation at the moment), Hoover told the reporter
that what the country needed to restore confidence was a good uplifting,
patriotic poem. I'm convinced that this comment caused the deluge of poems
that Hoover received shortly thereafter, some of which were pretty bad
poetry, but which did indicate the public listened and responded.
The contrast with FDR is striking when he tried to restore confidence--and
succeeded to some extent--by simply acting confident ("We have nothing to
fear but fear itself") instead of trying to convince people to have
confidence.
Donald W. Whisenhunt
----- Original Message -----
From: Alan Brinkley
To:
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 10:50 AM
Subject: Re: Hoover the humorist
> I'm not an expert on Hoover's personality, and I'm perfectly willing to
> accept that he may have had a dry wit. I would be very surprised,
however,
> if the public comments he made during his presidency, which seemed at the
> time and have seemed to many since, so remote and insensitive were a
failed
> attempt at humor. And I would, in fact, think even less of Hoover if that
> were the case -- because it would have been a kind of humor demeaning to
the
> people who were its object.
>
> Alan Brinkley
>
> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 16:57:10 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Christopher Baylor
Subject: Re: Depression questions
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
My apologies if I sent this before; I haven't received it, so I am guessing there was a problem.
Here are some more thoughts on the Roosevelt/Hoover contrast. Andrew Mellon may have advised Hoover to liquidate, but I am under the impression that Hoover acted according to his own understanding of economics rather than Mellon's. Barber's From New Era to New Deal shows that Herbert Hoover was more of an activist than many instructors give him credit for. He met with businessmen and urged them not to cut wages, and urged state and local governments to spend more on public works projects. Furthermore, Hoover's RFC made loans to businesses and state/local governments to encourage spending. This leads me to believe that Hoover was trying to increase aggregate demand and avoid liquidation, although his measures were not as bold as Roosevelt's.
Although Roosevelt did not follow this policy while president, he urged keeping a balanced budget in the 1932 election.
Chris Baylor
Quincy College
>From: Brad DeLong
>Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
>To: DEPRESSION-NEWDEALFORUM@ASHP.LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
>Subject: Re: Depression questions
>Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 19:48:57 -0700
>
>>I have encountered other interpretations that saw Hoover as the
>>realist,
>>with the economic background to successfully end the depression,
>>who chose
>>to do that work rather than waste taxpayer time during such a
>>crisis by
>>diverting his attentions to running for office. The successful New
>>Deal
>>programs, especially most of those used during Roosevelt's miracle
>>100
>>days, had been developed during the last part of the Hoover term in
>>office
>>and were ready to launch when Roosevelt took office.
>
>Unless the U.S. truly was unique, the most successful aspects of the
>New Deal as far as depression-fighting was concerned were probably
>those that were most successful in other countries--the policies
>that
>Barry Eichengreen's _Golden Fetters_ characterizes as devaluation
>and
>abandonment of the gold standard, fiscal expansion, and monetary
>expansion (low interest rates).
>
>Hoover was very, very attached to the gold standard, very opposed to
>devaluation, and very, very, very opposed to fiscal expansion. He
>was
>walking down the same road as Chancellor Bruening in Germany, and no
>one has ever been able to point to any country that successfully
>surmounted the Depression by walking down that road. (Of course,
>that
>hasn't stopped the Hayekians from claiming that the problem was that
>they didn't follow the road far *enough*--that they should have made
>the Depression deeper and nastier in order to "purify" the economy
>of
>faulty investments that needed to be "liquidated."
>
>In fact, the inaction of the United States government during the
>1929-33 slide into the Great Depression is both astonishing and
>puzzling when viewed from any of the perspectives economists hold
>today. All points of view today hold that governments should strive
>to provide a stable environment in which the private economy can
>operate, and should do this by keeping some broad nominal aggregate
>measure of spending or liquidity on a stable growth path. For
>monetarist economists, the measure to be stabilized is some
>definition of the nominal money supply. For Keynesians, the
>appropriate aggregate is
>total nominal demand itself.
>
>As the conduct of economic policy while a depression is pending is
>concerned, these differences of opinion are relatively minor, for
>they all teach one central lesson: the central bank should pour
>reserves and liquidity into the banking system as fast as possible
>in
>order to keep the money stock and demand from collapsing during
>depressions. Above all, the central bank should not aggravate
>depressions by
>unexpectedly imposing contractionary policy on an already weakening
>economy.
>
>This, however, was not the policy followed during the Great
>Depression. The Federal Reserve did not push reserves into the
>banking system during the 1929-33 decline. It passively stood by
>while the nominal money stock fell by a third. The federal
>government
>did not increase its spending while allowing its tax revenues to
>fall. Instead, strenuous efforts were made to balance the budget and
>keep it balanced.
>
>These policies were disastrous. They certainly did not stop the
>contraction in economic activity. They may well have severely
>aggravated it, and presumably played an important role in making the
>1929-41 depression into the Great Depression. Alternatives were
>considered. Factions within the Federal Reserve system did argue for
>expanding liquidity during the downslide. They were overruled by
>those who thought
>that the economy needed to go through a period of "liquidation" in
>order to lay the groundwork for renewed expansion. "Liquidationists"
>pointed to the short (but sharp) 1921 recession, argued that it had
>laid the groundwork for prosperity in the 1920's, and pushed for
>similar deflationary policies-which they mistakenly hoped would
>assist the release of capital and labor from unproductive
>activities,
>and lay the groundwork for a similar boom in the 1930's.
>
>The current of mind that underlay "liquidationism" was not a freak
>belief held by central bankers and makers of policy alone. Such a
>"liquidationist" theory of the function of depressions was in fact a
>common position for economists to take before the Keynesian
>Revolution, and was held and advanced by economists as eminent as
>Hayek, Robbins, and Schumpeter. In squeezing an already-weak
>economy,
>the makers of American economic policy were to some degree acting as
>John Maynard Keynes believed that policy makers always act: they
>were
>"madmen in authority" obeying voices in the air which were to some
>degree echoes of academic debates. Academic economics gave policy
>makers a warrant for their destructive depression-era policies.
>
>Contemplating in retrospect the wreck of his country's economy and
>his own
>presidency, Herbert Hoover wrote bitterly in his memoirs about those
>who had advised him, and convinced him during the downslide that
>inaction was the best policy:
>
>"The 'leave-it-alone liquidationists' headed by Secretary of the
>Treasury Mellon felt that government must keep its hands off and let
>the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula:
>'Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate
>real estate'. He held that even panic was not altogether a bad
>thing.
>He said: 'It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs
>of living and high living will come down. People will work harder,
>live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising
>people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people'."
>
>But "liquidationism" was not the creation and responsibility of a
>cabal of cabinet members headed by Andrew Mellon. The Hoover
>administration's and the Federal Reserve's unwillingness to use
>policy to prop up aggregate demand during the slide into the
>Depression was approved by the most eminent economists of the day.
>From Harvard, Seymour Harris argued that just because the banking
>system was near collapse was no reason for the Federal Reserve to
>buy
>bonds for cash: "Open market operations are not
>the most effective method of dealing with bank failures, any more
>than the proper way of filling numerous small holes on the surface
>of
>the earth is to flood the earth with water." Also from Harvard,
>Joseph Schumpeter argued that there was a "presumption against
>remedial measures which work through money and credit. policies of
>this class are particularly apt to produce additional trouble for
>the
>future."
>
>Similar calls to avoid attempts to use economic policy to ameliorate
>the depression came from many
>other eminent economists: Dennis Robertson, Friedrich Hayek, Lionel
>Robbins, and others. "Liquidationism" saw itself, in Robbins' words,
>as "a point of view [that was] the heritage of generations
>of subtle and disinterested thought" and that saw much further to
>the
>core of what was going on in the economy than other perspectives.
>
>The best short summary of the "liquidationist" position can be found
>in Hayek's 1944 _Road to Serfdom_, where he argues that a full
>employment policy is an evil:
>
>"This problem [of unemployment] is one which will always be with us
>so long as the economic system has to adopt itself to continuous
>changes. There will always be a possible maximum of employment...
>which can be achieved by monetary expansion. But [this has the]
>effect of holding up those redistributions of labor between
>industries made necessary by changed circumstances. [Such a]
>policy... is certain in the end to defeat its own purposes and
>lower
>productivity.
>
>The economy *needs* the high unemployment of a depression--even of a
>Great Depression--so that it can redistribute labor to more
>productive industries. And to attempt to eliminate high depression
>unemployment through government policy slows down economic growth
>because it destroys the economy's ability to shift labor between
>sectors.
>
>This doctrine-that in the long run the Great Depression would turn
>out to have been "good medicine" for the economy, and that
>proponents
>of stimulative policies were shortsighted enemies of the public
>welfare-drew anguished cries of dissent. For example, the British
>economist Ralph Hawtrey scorned those who, like Robbins, wrote at
>the
>nadir of the Great Depression that the greatest danger the economy
>faced was inflation. To call for more liquidation and deflation was,
>Hawtrey said, "to cry, 'Fire! Fire!' in Noah's flood." Milton
>Friedman (1974) recalls that at Knight, Simons, and Viner's Chicago
>such dangerous nonsense was not taught, but he understood why at
>Harvard-where such nonsense was taught-bright young graduate student
>economists might rebel, reject their teachers' macroeconomics, and
>become
>Keynesians. In Friedman's view Keynesianism might be false, but it
>was not insane, and not as false
>as what graduate students were being taught by the likes of
>Schumpeter.
>
>John Maynard Keynes himself (1931) tried to discredit the
>"liquidationist view" with the rhetoric of ridicule. He called it an
>"imbecility" to argue that the "wonderful outburst of productive
>energy" during the boom of 1924-29 had made the Great Depression
>inevitable. He spoke of Hayek, Robbins, Schumpeter, and their fellow
>travelers as:
>
>"austere and puritanical souls [who] regard [the Great
>Depression]...
>as an inevitable and a desirable nemesis on "overexpansion" as they
>call it.... It would, they feel, be a victory for the mammon of
>unrighteousness if so much prosperity was not subsequently balanced
>by universal bankruptcy. We need, they say, what they politely call
>a
>'prolonged liquidation' to put us right. The liquidation, they tell
>us, is not yet complete. But in time it will be. And when sufficient
>time has elapsed for the completion of the liquidation, all will be
>well with us again."
>
>By now I have gone very far afield, and much more into the details
>of
>economic thought and policy than probably anybody else wants to
>read.
>But I do want to stress that much is lost when you emphasize the
>continuity between the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. There
>was institutional and some ideological continuity. But the gap
>between Andrew Mellon and, say, Mariner Eccles yawned wider than the
>Grand Canyon...
>
>
>Brad DeLong
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web
>site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for
>teaching U.S. History.
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 17:18:42 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Alan Brinkley
Subject: Re: Hoover the activist
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_000B_01C0BEBD.A10AA660"
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_000B_01C0BEBD.A10AA660
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
It's interesting to me that so much of the discussion on this Forum so far
has been about Hoover. I don't think that would have been the case twenty,
or even ten, years ago, and I don't know what it says about our time that we
are so interested in him again.
I think it's important to distinguish between the criticisms of Hoover for
being passive and reactionary (which he wasn't) and the criticisms of him
for being ideologically limited and insufficiently flexible and imaginate
(which he was). Hoover and FDR both believed in a balanced budget, but FDR
was willing to put aside that conviction in favor of other goals, while
Hoover was much more resolutely committed to it, even if unsuccessfully.
But an even bigger difference between them was in their views of the proper
role of the state. Hoover was a genuine activist, but almost always on
behalf of voluntary arrangements among non-governmental actors (business,
labor, consumers). FDR was willing to use the creative and coercive powers
of the state in ways that Hoover never was.
That wasn't always a good thing. Hoover refused to give legal sanction to
the cartelization schemes of Swope and others and insisted that the trade
associations he was promoting and exhorting do nothing that resembled price
fixing. FDR, of course, created a government agency -- the NRA -- that was
designed precisely to facilitate cartelization and to suspend antitrust
prohibitions. And it might well be argued that the economy would have done
better had there been no NRA.
But FDR was also willing to contemplate many other kinds of government
intervention that Hoover was reluctant to consider, and many of them were,
in fact, effective -- some in improving economic performance, others in
simply helping people survive in the face of hard times. Hoover promoted
some new state activities to be sure, the RFC being the most prominent. And
he had been an advocate of at least some kind of countercyclical government
spending since at least the early 1920s, although as president he was
unwilling to commit the federal government to that policy.
It was Hoover's obduracy on relief, in particular, that strikes most of his
critics as most damning. That was also one of his biggest contrasts with
FDR.
Alan Brinkley
------=_NextPart_000_000B_01C0BEBD.A10AA660
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
It's=20
interesting to me that so much of the discussion on this Forum so far =
has been=20
about Hoover. I don't think that would have been the case twenty, =
or even=20
ten, years ago, and I don't know what it says about our time that we are =
so=20
interested in him again.
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "r.j.sandilands"
Subject: "Confidence" vs profit prospects
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Donald Whisenhunt writes that "Hoover tried valiantly to restore
confidence, but he did it mostly by saying 'Have Confidence' when he
exhibited gloom himself."
But even if Hoover had all of FDR's charm and buoyancy this would have been
of trivial importance in reviving the economy so long as he persisted with
his puritanical belief in the virtues of thrift, balanced budgets, a
deflationist gold standard, a quiescent Fed, and protectionist tariffs.
Business confidence revived after 1933 not by FDR's smile but by brighter
profit prospects. Profits depended on the abandonment of "golden fetters",
and on devaluation and deficit spending financed by an expansionist Fed.
When fiscal policy went into reverse at the beginning of 1937 private
investment collapsed again. In November of that year, in the midst of
severe deflation, Treasury Secretary Henry 'The Morgue' Morgenthau was
calling for a balanced budget to restore confidence. Neither that nor FDR's
fireside chats did anything for the economy.
It was not until April 1938 that Roosevelt finally rejected Morgenthau's
calls for further fiscal "prudence", let his humanitarian instincts prevail
again, and asked Congress for $3 billion (a very large sum at the time) for
relief, public works, housing and assistance to state and local governments.
That's what turned profits, hence confidence, around. (And then so too,
with a vengeance, did the war!)
Roger Sandilands
Department of Economics
University of Strathclyde, UK
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 12:21:06 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "Stephanie L. Batiste"
Subject: Cultural aspects
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
I'm researching African American film and theater during the Depression
Era. Having spent time with archival materials and texts on the Federal
Theater, I know that it supported "multicultural" projects through its
facilitation of community theater. I'm wondering what anyone is using to
teach or research cultural production of minority groups and people of
color during the period besides major Popular Front texts and material on
WPA projects. I'm interested in more obscure manifestations of how "the
people" would have responded to the Depression and New Deal through
expressive culture.
This question derives in part from an interest in how thirties cultural
production does or doesn't impact the culture of next decades? In what
ways can expressive culture shed light on how people responded to and
interacted with this cultural moment? What knowledge of cultural
production might interfere with the ability to so successfully teach the
Depression Era as a bounded cultural period? What continuities exist on
various levels in society? To what degree can cultural expressions from
during and after the thirties enable us to measure the impact of the larger
political and social movements that dominate our conception of the
period?
--Stephanie L. Batiste
The George Washington University
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 11:23:55 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Jeff Singleton
Subject: Teaching the New Deal: Beyond Alphabet Soup
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
The Rise and Fall of the Teaching of the New Deal Era: Beyond Alphabet Soup
When I was a student in U.S. history courses the New Deal Era was a time for=
memorizing. We used to make long lists of "alphabet soup" agencies (NRA,
CCC, AAA, WPA, PWA), studying them intensively in the hours before the exam=
.
Those of us who were good at this sort of thing remembered most of the list
until the exam was over. Those of us who weren=92t, forgot the list before t=
he
exam.
My own disillusionment with the traditional New Deal pedagogy was caused not=
so much by the influence of the social history movement, as might be
expected, but rather my experience as a political/policy historian. In
working on unemployment relief policy in the early depression for my PhD, I
found that the Americanists on my committee, quite knowledgeable about most
subjects, were, to say the least, not entirely clear about the differences
between the various New Deal relief agencies (FERA, CCC, CWA, FSRC, WPA).
In my research, I also found that many public officials, including New
Dealers, often had difficulty distinguishing among these programs. Indeed,
the difference between WPA and PWA was the source of an all-out battle at th=
e
highest levels of the Roosevelt administration in mid-1935. The blurring of
the distinction between the CWA and the FERA is an important moment in my
recently published book, The American Dole (sorry for the shameless self-
promotion).
I suspect many teachers of the New Deal period seek to avoid the alphabet
soup experience, with mixed success. Most of us, even the most ardent
advocates of social/multicultural history, recognize that there are some
important policy issues that need to be dealt with when this point in the
U.S. history survey comes. Most historians =96 especially the leftish libera=
ls
among us=96 are quite enamored with the New Deal=92s policy experimentalism =
and
we want to give our students a sense of it.
What are we to do? Professor Brinkley rightly notes that the schema which
dominates texts -and probably teaching,-on the era has not advanced much
beyond the Schlesinger-Leuchtenberg paradigm. I would agree but also note
that a significant amount of depression-era social history now hangs,
somewhat uneasily, on this scaffolding. Wanting to deal with women, blacks
and workers gives us even less time to explain the Federal Surplus Relief
Corporation. Now Professor Brinkley urges us to consider such things as
environmental history. HELP!
In my particular case, the practical problems teaching this part of the
survey are compounded by a rather intense belief that the contemporary
approach does not do justice to the recent research in political/ policy
history. For example the work of feminist historians such as Linda Gordon o=
n
the American welfare state and of institutionalists like Theda Skocpol,
Margaret Weir and Ed Amenta has barely been digested by the best history
texts.
I can get quite overwrought about this problem, not simply because it is my=
field but because the subjects of this research bear on contemporary social
policy debates of tremendous significance. I must note that many of the best=
texts that I use now contain several pages on the impact of the depression o=
n
various classes, races and genders (a good thing) and a measly paragraph or
two on the Social Security Act (a bad thing). There tends to be even less on=
the federalization of means-tested welfare, the role of the Federal Reserve,=
the rise of Keynesianism, the history of public employment, the evolution of=
modern liberalism, business cycles and so forth. I do not wish to ignite a
debate over the relative merits of political versus social history, but
something is amiss here.
The point of all his is that, from my own personal experience, the teaching
of the New Deal era is in a bit of a state of crisis which reflects the
broader trends in the profession =96 the lack of a compelling synthesis to
replace (or supplement) the old paradigms, the uneasy marriage between
political and social history, and the bewildering amount of very important
new research in a range of fields that cries to be included in the cannon. I=
suspect that most of us deal with this problem by focusing on "themes" which=
we value but this is not entirely satisfying and gets away from Professor
Brinkley=92s call for a history of the depression as a whole.
How do other teachers deal with the issues I have raised? I have my own
solution but would like to hear from others.
Jeff Singleton
Boston College
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 17:27:17 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Alan Brinkley
Subject: Re: Teaching the New Deal: Beyond Alphabet Soup
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
I certainly sympathize with Jeff Singleton's concerns about, on the one
hand, ensuring that students understand the important policy issues that are
embedded in the history of New Deal "alphabet agencies", and on the other
hand, the tremendous pressure on teachers of survey courses to include so
many different things that they don't have enough time for anything.
My suggestion that scholars of this period try to look beyond the New Deal
itself at the many other aspects of the history of the 1930s was not meant
to be a prescription for everyone (or even necessarily for anyone) as a
template for the survey course. Every instructor must make choices from
among many options in deciding what to teach in the survey course, and I
would fault no one for choosing to concentrate on the history of the New
Deal itself.
But I would also not fault teachers who wished to treat the New Deal in a
briefer and more schematic way and devote more attention to other aspects of
the period -- which also have strong claims to our attention.
I think in this discussion we should be trying not to design anyone's survey
course but to lay out a series of options from which teachers can choose
when they make the decisions only they can make about how to teach.
Alan Brinkley
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 10:07:09 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Joshua Brown
Subject: Teaching the New Deal
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
I'd appreciate comments from list members regarding useful resources for
teaching the New Deal, the Great Depression, and the 1930s:
* What books have you found useful for teaching the 1930s in the U.S.
history survey?
* What digital resources -- both online and CD-ROM -- have you found
particularly helpful?
* What films -- documentary, dramatic, comedic, and archival -- have you
used?
Thanks--
P. Padlin
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 14:55:09 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: abh9h
Organization: American Studies Programs
Subject: Re: Teaching the New Deal
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------748A782D2E97225BC57E9B4F"
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--------------748A782D2E97225BC57E9B4F
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Joshua:
For online resources, there is of course the NewDeal Network itself:
http://newdeal.feri.org/
the FDR museum:
http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/
The Census Browser:
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/
Life hitories from LOC:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html
UMD Art Gallery Exhibition of WPA Mural Studies:
http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/ARHU/Depts/ArtGal/.WWW/permcol/tour/mural/mural19.htm
And then there's the 1930s project here at the University of Virginia:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/front.html
In addition to the resources you'll find there now, we will have an
additional 10 projects, as well as a large selection of radio programs,
and a detailed timeline of the 30s by June 1.
alan
alan
Joshua Brown wrote:
>
> I'd appreciate comments from list members regarding useful resources for
> teaching the New Deal, the Great Depression, and the 1930s:
>
> * What books have you found useful for teaching the 1930s in the U.S.
> history survey?
>
> * What digital resources -- both online and CD-ROM -- have you found
> particularly helpful?
>
> * What films -- documentary, dramatic, comedic, and archival -- have you
> used?
>
> Thanks--
>
> P. Padlin
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
>
> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
--------------748A782D2E97225BC57E9B4F
Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii;
name="abh9h.vcf"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Description: Card for abh9h
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="abh9h.vcf"
begin:vcard
n:Howard;Alan B.
x-mozilla-html:FALSE
org:The University of Virginia
adr:;;;;;;
version:2.1
email;internet:abh9h@virginia.edu
title:Director American Studies Program
fn:Alan B. Howard
end:vcard
--------------748A782D2E97225BC57E9B4F--
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 14:42:18 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Jules Tygiel
Subject: Re: Teaching the New Deal
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, Joshua Brown wrote:
> I'd appreciate comments from list members regarding useful resources for
> teaching the New Deal, the Great Depression, and the 1930s:
>
> * What books have you found useful for teaching the 1930s in the U.S.
> history survey?
For many years, I used Robert McElvaine's The Great Depression.
Once one gets past the anachronistic anti-Reaganism, it is a good read and
covers most of the major points from a classically liberal Keynesian
perspective.
This year I am using David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear for both
the Great Depression and World War II. My initial reaction to this book
was that it is surprisingly conventional. In using it to teach, howveer,
I have come to appreciate its subtleties more. It does a very good job on
the major New Deal legislation and a wonderful job of using FDR's speeches
to flesh out his agenda. I have, needless to say, excised several hundred
pages from the reading assignments.
The other book that I use for the 1930s is James Goodman, Stories
of Scottsboro. It works extremely well on many levels--introducing the
students to lifein the segregated South, the role of the Communist Party,
and the rationale for modern rights-based liberalism.
> * What digital resources -- both online and CD-ROM -- have you found
> particularly helpful?
Please check out my on-line syllabus:
http://bss.sfsu.edu/tygiel/Hist427/427s2001online.html
I have included many speeches, radio shows, documents, etc. that i use in
class and students also must use in their papers. I also ahve an Internet
Research assignment using the American Memory Connections.
> * What films -- documentary, dramatic, comedic, and archival -- have you
> used?
In addition to the online resources above, I show the first twenty minutes
of Modern Times and, more for the 1920s, scenes from the Jazz Singer and
Birth of A Nation.
JULES TYGIEL
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY
SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY
1600 HOLLOWAY AVENUE
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94127
415-338-1119
tygiel@sfsu.edu
http://bss.sfsu.edu/tygiel
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 17:15:49 -0600
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Jonathon Lever
Subject: Re: Teaching the New Deal
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
> Joshua Brown wrote:
> >
> > I'd appreciate comments from list members regarding useful resources for
> > teaching the New Deal, the Great Depression, and the 1930s:
> >
> > * What books have you found useful for teaching the 1930s in the U.S.
> > history survey?
> >
> > * What digital resources -- both online and CD-ROM -- have you found
> > particularly helpful?
> >
> > * What films -- documentary, dramatic, comedic, and archival -- have you
> > used?
> >
> > Thanks--
> >
> > P. Padlin
As far as films go, the History Channel had a good overview of most
aspects of the depression a couple of years ago, and I believe the tapes are
on sale at the history channel store. Another good one I use with my high
school students is the American Experience, The Dust Bowl. It does a good
job of showing the causes of the dust bowl, the impact on the life of the
people as well as some coverage of the impact on the economy as a whole (not
so much of this last part, but it does make a nice lead into the economics
of agriculture and the impact on the causes of the depression.).
Jon Lever
Green River HS
Green River, WY
> > _________________________________________________________________
> > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
> >
> > This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 21:39:12 EDT
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Maureen Murphy
Subject: Re: Teaching the New Deal
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
On the high school level, I have used the classic film "Grapes of Wrath" with
Henry Fonda. Other than objecting to "black and white" the kids felt they
learned a lot from the film.
I have the students take the different agencies and interview them for a
radio show as a person whose life was affected by the agency (people who work
for the CCC, WPA or a famous person from the era like Harry Hopkins or Grant
Wood or Marian Anderson). The students make up interview questions and test
questions. It's more fun for high school students to hear a person
interviewed than just hearing facts about an agency.
Maureen Murphy
Hoover High School
Des Moines, Iowa
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 08:07:14 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: patricia raub
Subject: Re: Teaching the New Deal
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
As I am teaching the Thirties as a distance-learning course this semester,
I have quite a lot of links that I ask students to visit. Some of these
links have already been mentioned by other contributors to this discussion;
others have not. See
http://studentweb.providence.edu/~praub/descript--30s-dl.html
When I teach the Thirties as a classroom course, I generally use clips from
various American Experience documentaries, including SURVIVING THE
DUSTBOWL, RIDING THE RAILS, THE RADIO PRIEST, HARRY HOPKINS, THE BONUS
ARMY, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, and FDR. Now there is also SCOTTSBORO: AN
AMERICAN TRAGEDY. SIT DOWN AND FIGHT: WALTER REUTHER AND THE UAW has a
good 10-minute section on the GM sitdown strike. The more recent of these
documentaries have accompanying web sites on
http://www.pbs.org/neighborhoods/history/
In addition to the American Experience videos, I also use parts of the
Blackside seven-part series, THE GREAT DEPRESSION (See
http://breakthrough.blackside.com/blackside/BlacksideFilms/Depressionfilm.ht
ml for a description of the segments.)
This semester I've assigned a paper on CRADLE WILL ROCK, which brings up
many issues and topics relating to the Depression era, although I feel the
film itself is uneven.
I have also shown sections of OUR DAILY BREAD, and I show THE PLOW THAT
BROKE THE PLAIN in its entirety (25 minutes), even though students often
have a hard time relating to its style today.
I am bringing my distance-learning class on-campus next Saturday for a
Frank Capra festival, and I plan to show all of MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, as
well as clips from several other Capra movies.
Patricia Raub
Providence College
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 08:50:25 -0400
Reply-To: cpitton@ae21.org
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Charity Pitton
Subject: Re: Teaching the New Deal
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="------------08DABBFDDEA34D54C8948B0C"
--------------08DABBFDDEA34D54C8948B0C
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
On this same goal of trying to involve high school students, I've used The Idiot's Guide to 20th Century History as a text. They'll read it for the
title, if nothing else.
Maureen Murphy wrote:
> On the high school level, I have used the classic film "Grapes of Wrath" with
> Henry Fonda. Other than objecting to "black and white" the kids felt they
> learned a lot from the film.
>
> I have the students take the different agencies and interview them for a
> radio show as a person whose life was affected by the agency (people who work
> for the CCC, WPA or a famous person from the era like Harry Hopkins or Grant
> Wood or Marian Anderson). The students make up interview questions and test
> questions. It's more fun for high school students to hear a person
> interviewed than just hearing facts about an agency.
>
> Maureen Murphy
> Hoover High School
> Des Moines, Iowa
>
> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
--------------08DABBFDDEA34D54C8948B0C
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
On this same goal of trying to involve high school students, I've used
The Idiot's Guide to 20th Century History as a text. They'll
read it for the title, if nothing else.
Maureen Murphy wrote:
On the high school level, I have used the classic
film "Grapes of Wrath" with
Henry Fonda. Other than objecting to "black and white" the kids
felt they
learned a lot from the film.
I have the students take the different agencies and interview them for
a
radio show as a person whose life was affected by the agency (people
who work
for the CCC, WPA or a famous person from the era like Harry Hopkins
or Grant
Wood or Marian Anderson). The students make up interview questions
and test
questions. It's more fun for high school students to hear a person
interviewed than just hearing facts about an agency.
Maureen Murphy
Hoover High School
Des Moines, Iowa
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site
at http://historymatters.gmu.edu
for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
--------------08DABBFDDEA34D54C8948B0C--
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 09:02:01 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: KRS
Subject: Oral History
In the past when I taught about the Great Depression and New Deal, I
had often included an oral history assignment. Are others finding that
1930s oral history is getting too hard for students to do? What other
assignments on New Deal and Great Depression have others had
success with?
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 06:56:18 -0700
Reply-To: ahoffman@lausd.k12.ca.us
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Abraham Hoffman
Subject: Re: Oral History
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
I have had a great deal of success with what I believe is a cheat-proof
assignment. Every student in the class is handed a slip of paper on
which is written a date: February 23, 1934, March 9, 1934, etc. No two
dates are the same, and they usually are not in the same month. The
students are to go to the library, look up the date on microfilm for a
major newspaper (I require the Los Angeles Times), and photocopy a
series of relevant pages, including the main news front page, sports
page, comics page, movie page, editorial page, a page with a department
store ad, and three classified ad pages: autos, homes, and employment.
The students are to imagine they have been transported by a time machine
to that date in history and have obtained a newspaper so as to orient
themselves as to what is going on. I also require them to look up a
book review in a magazine appearing in the month of their date,
photocopy the review, then find the book and photocopy the title page
(this separates the very good students from the rest of the herd).
The student write a narrative describing their visit to the past
and what they thought about what was going on in the world of February
37, 1934, or whatever their date is. They also are to write a summary
of each of the photocopied pages. Everything is put together in a
folder.
Some of the student comments about this assignment are unexpected, such
as their never having used microfilm machines, much less using them to
look up an old newspaper. African American students have expressed
anger at the comics page, especially the comic strip Gasoline Alley,
which featured a black mammy character drawn in very stereotypical
fashion (this has created some very interesting class discussions).
Most students have said this assignment was very interesting, some the
most interesting work they have done, mainly because they had to do
it--with each assignment different, no one can copy from anyone else!
Best of all, as a teacher I find the assignments fun to look at. The
student narratives indicate awareness about life during the Great
Depression years as seen in the front-page articles but also in the
prices for homes and autos in the classified section, and the blatant
racism in the want ads. Some students get very imaginative in their
narratives. One in particular, apparently influenced by the Terminator
movies, claimed that in traveling through time to get to his date he had
to go in the nude, and the first thing he did was to steal some clothing
off a clothesline. This sort of creativity wasn't asked for, but it
does indicate to me the students had some fun with their work. I
included an oral presentation component in the assignment and was
impressed by the number of times students said, "I learned..."
Abraham Hoffman
Los Angeles Valley College
KRS wrote:
>
> In the past when I taught about the Great Depression and New Deal, I
> had often included an oral history assignment. Are others finding that
> 1930s oral history is getting too hard for students to do? What other
> assignments on New Deal and Great Depression have others had
> success with?
>
> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 07:02:35 -0700
Reply-To: ahoffman@lausd.k12.ca.us
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Abraham Hoffman
Subject: Re: Teaching the New Deal
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
May I add to this list of films the motion picture "Our Daily Bread,"
commercially available on videocassette and seldom seen on even TCM or
AMC because of its controversial content. Also "Wild Boys of the Road,"
"I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang," and the modern film "Bound for
Glory" about Woody Guthrie.
Abraham Hoffman
Los Angeles Valley College
Maureen Murphy wrote:
>
> On the high school level, I have used the classic film "Grapes of Wrath" with
> Henry Fonda. Other than objecting to "black and white" the kids felt they
> learned a lot from the film.
>
> I have the students take the different agencies and interview them for a
> radio show as a person whose life was affected by the agency (people who work
> for the CCC, WPA or a famous person from the era like Harry Hopkins or Grant
> Wood or Marian Anderson). The students make up interview questions and test
> questions. It's more fun for high school students to hear a person
> interviewed than just hearing facts about an agency.
>
> Maureen Murphy
> Hoover High School
> Des Moines, Iowa
>
> This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 10:12:15 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "Nancy L. Zens"
Subject: Oral History
I just finished reading an excellent work based on oral history
T. H. Watkins THE HUNGRY YEARS: A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF THE GREAT
DEPRESSION, Henry Holt, 1999.
It uses the oral histories with the sensitivity and professionalism that is
missing in work done by Studs Terkel
Nancy Zens
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 07:38:19 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Gloria Sesso
Subject: Re: Oral History
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0-2026969897-987086299=:30183"
--0-2026969897-987086299=:30183
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
"Nancy L. Zens" wrote:
I just finished reading an excellent work based on oral history
T. H. Watkins THE HUNGRY YEARS: A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF THE GREAT
DEPRESSION, Henry Holt, 1999.
It uses the oral histories with the sensitivity and professionalism that is
missing in work done by Studs Terkel
Nancy Zens
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
Let me second the use of The Hungry Years. I use excerpts in my class to discuss the impact of the Great Depression.
Gloria Sesso
---------------------------------
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Personal Address - Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail.
--0-2026969897-987086299=:30183
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
"Nancy L. Zens" <nzens@COCC.EDU> wrote:
I just finished reading an excellent work based on oral history
T. H. Watkins THE HUNGRY YEARS: A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF THE GREAT
DEPRESSION, Henry Holt, 1999.
It uses the oral histories with the sensitivity and professionalism that is
missing in work done by Studs Terkel
Nancy Zens
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
Let me second the use of The Hungry Years. I use excerpts in my class to discuss the impact of the Great Depression.
Gloria Sesso
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Personal Address -
Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail.
--0-2026969897-987086299=:30183--
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 11:49:20 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Alan Brinkley
Subject: New Deal Teaching and New Deal Scholarship
In-Reply-To: <3AD5A490.85741E91@ao.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0011_01C0C346.9C996700"
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_0011_01C0C346.9C996700
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Reading the many entries on teaching the 1930s, I'm struck by the apparent
disconnect between the exchanges so far about New Deal scholarship and those
on pedagogy. The scholarly exchanges have focused on issues of policy,
mostly those that have implications for our own time: Is the liberal
paradigm of the New Deal one we should defend? Did Hoover pursue the
correct monetary and fiscal policies? Etc. The teachers, on the other
hand, have been exchanging ideas about social and cultural history, popular
culture, oral history, the lived experience of the Great Depression among
ordinary Americans -- and have said relatively little about the New Deal
itself, although I'm sure they all teach their students about the New Deal
as well in some way.
One of the attractions, but also one of the problems, of writing and
teaching in the field of twentieth-century history is that what we do almost
always intersects with contemporary issues and events in some way. There is
a strong, and quite legitimate, temptation to shape our work around the
issues we care about -- to write and teach in a way that serves to
legitimate the ideas we embrace today. But it is also important, I believe,
to think of the 1930s as a distinctive period, very different from our own,
with its own assumptions, values, problems, and opportunities. It's not
medieval France, certainly, but neither is it 2001.
I think scholars who have worked on the non-policy history of the New Deal
have, on the whole, done a better job of making the case for the 1930s as a
distinctive era than many of us who have worked more on the New Deal itself.
And so perhaps it's worth talking a little bit about some of the ways in
which New Deal scholarship has, and could, move out of the shadow of the
political debates about liberalism today and become a more truly historical
enterprise.
Alan Brinkley
------=_NextPart_000_0011_01C0C346.9C996700
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Reading the many entries on teaching the =
1930s, I'm=20
struck by the apparent disconnect between the exchanges so far about New =
Deal=20
scholarship and those on pedagogy. The scholarly exchanges have =
focused on=20
issues of policy, mostly those that have implications for our own =
time: Is=20
the liberal paradigm of the New Deal one we should defend? Did =
Hoover=20
pursue the correct monetary and fiscal policies? Etc. The =
teachers,=20
on the other hand, have been exchanging ideas about social and cultural =
history,=20
popular culture, oral history, the lived experience of the Great =
Depression=20
among ordinary Americans -- and have said relatively little about the =
New Deal=20
itself, although I'm sure they all teach their students about the New =
Deal as=20
well in some way.
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Jonathon Lever
Subject: Re: New Deal Teaching and New Deal Scholarship
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_000E_01C0C33F.A76146A0"
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_000E_01C0C33F.A76146A0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
One of the attractions, but also one of the problems, of writing and =
teaching in the field of twentieth-century history is that what we do =
almost always intersects with contemporary issues and events in some =
way. There is a strong, and quite legitimate, temptation to shape our =
work around the issues we care about -- to write and teach in a way that =
serves to legitimate the ideas we embrace today. But it is also =
important, I believe, to think of the 1930s as a distinctive period, =
very different from our own, with its own assumptions, values, problems, =
and opportunities. It's not medieval France, certainly, but neither is =
it 2001. =20
=20
I think scholars who have worked on the non-policy history of the New =
Deal have, on the whole, done a better job of making the case for the =
1930s as a distinctive era than many of us who have worked more on the =
New Deal itself. And so perhaps it's worth talking a little bit about =
some of the ways in which New Deal scholarship has, and could, move out =
of the shadow of the political debates about liberalism today and become =
a more truly historical enterprise.
=20
Alan Brinkley
------=_NextPart_000_000E_01C0C33F.A76146A0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
One=20
of the attractions, but also one of the problems, of writing and =
teaching in=20
the field of twentieth-century history is that what we do almost =
always=20
intersects with contemporary issues and events in some way. =
There is a=20
strong, and quite legitimate, temptation to shape our work around the =
issues=20
we care about -- to write and teach in a way that serves to legitimate =
the=20
ideas we embrace today. But it is also important, I believe, to =
think of=20
the 1930s as a distinctive period, very different from our own, with =
its own=20
assumptions, values, problems, and opportunities. It's not =
medieval=20
France, certainly, but neither is it 2001.
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Jonathon Lever
Subject: Re: New Deal Teaching and New Deal Scholarship
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_001E_01C0C340.57A49120"
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_001E_01C0C340.57A49120
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
I apologize, first for the message that just went out under my name, I =
was attempting to cut part of Alan's message and messed up.
What I was going to say in that message, is that for the most part I =
think Alan is right that the 1930s need to be treated as a distinctive =
era. At the high school level, one of the most difficult aspects of =
teaching history is making it relevant to the students in an effort to =
keep them engaged in the material. I have found one of the most effect =
ways of doing that is to make connections to the present, while many =
high school students don't think of social security as something that =
really affects them, there are a few (in my classes anyway) who do see =
it as significant and so focusing on some of the policies of the New =
Deal and Depression help to make things more relevant.
I am not trying to say that anyone should ignore the cultural aspects, =
it is beneficial when you can make some connections between the past and =
present. Often times, policies do make the biggest connection.
Jon Lever
Green River HS
Green River, WY
I think scholars who have worked on the non-policy history of the New =
Deal have, on the whole, done a better job of making the case for the =
1930s as a distinctive era than many of us who have worked more on the =
New Deal itself. And so perhaps it's worth talking a little bit about =
some of the ways in which New Deal scholarship has, and could, move out =
of the shadow of the political debates about liberalism today and become =
a more truly historical enterprise.
=20
Alan Brinkley
------=_NextPart_000_001E_01C0C340.57A49120
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
I apologize, first for the message that =
just went=20
out under my name, I was attempting to cut part of Alan's message and =
messed=20
up.
What I was going to say in that =
message, is that=20
for the most part I think Alan is right that the 1930s need to be =
treated as a=20
distinctive era. At the high school level, one of the most =
difficult=20
aspects of teaching history is making it relevant to the students in an =
effort=20
to keep them engaged in the material. I have found one of the most =
effect=20
ways of doing that is to make connections to the present, while many =
high school=20
students don't think of social security as something that really affects =
them,=20
there are a few (in my classes anyway) who do see it as significant and =
so=20
focusing on some of the policies of the New Deal and Depression help to =
make=20
things more relevant.
I am not trying to say that anyone =
should ignore=20
the cultural aspects, it is beneficial when you can make some =
connections=20
between the past and present. Often times, policies do make the =
biggest=20
connection.
Jon Lever
Green River HS
Green River, WY
I=20
think scholars who have worked on the non-policy history of the New =
Deal have,=20
on the whole, done a better job of making the case for the 1930s as a=20
distinctive era than many of us who have worked more on the New Deal=20
itself. And so perhaps it's worth talking a little bit about =
some of the=20
ways in which New Deal scholarship has, and could, move out of the =
shadow of=20
the political debates about liberalism today and become a more truly=20
historical enterprise.
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: David Hanson
Subject: Re: New Deal Teaching and New Deal Scholarship
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; types="text/plain,text/html";
boundary="=====================_94918317==_.ALT"
--=====================_94918317==_.ALT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Good comment from Alan Brinkley!
As a professor who teaches undergraduate college students in U.S. history
survey courses, I have often felt there is a disconnect between scholarship
and
pedagogy. (This is even more evident at the high school level, were I also
did
some teaching in the past.) So I am not surprise that it has permeated this
discussion. Personally, I have my own interests--i.e., favorite topics--that
drive my scholarship, as is commonly the case, but I try to bring the
fruits of
this labor into my classes in ways that are meaningful to students. I explore
areas that I find engaging, yet an underlying question for me is, "How can I
use this to help my students understand and appreciate history?"
Students naturally think in terms of the present, and so for them "the
implications for our own time" [Alan Brinkley's phrase] are paramount. For
example, Social Security is a contemporary concern that they can easily relate
back to the New Deal. But as Alan points out, the era of the New Deal was a
very different period. I have found that "social history"--especially vivid
images and recollections of ordinary Americans who experienced the Great
Depression--are more useful than scholarly debates about paradigms when it
comes to helping students in the 21st century understand that era and the
importance of the New Deal.
Perhaps in a forum such as this there are bound to be two parallel levels of
discussion--between "scholars" and "teachers"--that sometimes overlap or
intersect, but sometimes do not.
Dave Hanson
At 11:49 AM 4/12/01 -0400, you wrote:
>
> Reading the many entries on teaching the 1930s, I'm struck by the apparent
> disconnect between the exchanges so far about New Deal scholarship and those
> on pedagogy. The scholarly exchanges have focused on issues of policy,
> mostly those that have implications for our own time: Is the liberal
> paradigm of the New Deal one we should defend? Did Hoover pursue the
correct
> monetary and fiscal policies? Etc. The teachers, on the other hand, have
> been exchanging ideas about social and cultural history, popular culture,
> oral history, the lived experience of the Great Depression among ordinary
> Americans -- and have said relatively little about the New Deal itself,
> although I'm sure they all teach their students about the New Deal as
well in
> some way.
>
> One of the attractions, but also one of the problems, of writing and
teaching
> in the field of twentieth-century history is that what we do almost always
> intersects with contemporary issues and events in some way. There is a
> strong, and quite legitimate, temptation to shape our work around the issues
> we care about -- to write and teach in a way that serves to legitimate the
> ideas we embrace today. But it is also important, I believe, to think of
the
> 1930s as a distinctive period, very different from our own, with its own
> assumptions, values, problems, and opportunities. It's not medieval France,
> certainly, but neither is it 2001.
>
> I think scholars who have worked on the non-policy history of the New Deal
> have, on the whole, done a better job of making the case for the 1930s as a
> distinctive era than many of us who have worked more on the New Deal
itself.
> And so perhaps it's worth talking a little bit about some of the ways in
> which New Deal scholarship has, and could, move out of the shadow of the
> political debates about liberalism today and become a more truly historical
> enterprise.
>
> Alan Brinkley
--=====================_94918317==_.ALT
Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
Good comment from Alan Brinkley!
As a professor who teaches undergraduate college students in U.S. history
survey courses, I have often felt there is a disconnect between
scholarship and pedagogy. (This is even more evident at the high
school level, were I also did some teaching in the past.) So I am
not surprise that it has permeated this discussion. Personally, I
have my own interests--i.e., favorite topics--that drive my scholarship,
as is commonly the case, but I try to bring the fruits of this labor into
my classes in ways that are meaningful to students. I explore areas
that I find engaging, yet an underlying question for me is, "How can
I use this to help my students understand and appreciate
history?"
Students naturally think in terms of the present, and so for them
"the implications for our own time" [Alan Brinkley's phrase]
are paramount. For example, Social Security is a contemporary
concern that they can easily relate back to the New Deal. But as
Alan points out, the era of the New Deal was a very different
period. I have found that "social history"--especially
vivid images and recollections of ordinary Americans who experienced the
Great Depression--are more useful than scholarly debates about paradigms
when it comes to helping students in the 21st century understand that era
and the importance of the New Deal.
Perhaps in a forum such as this there are bound to be two parallel levels
of discussion--between "scholars" and
"teachers"--that sometimes overlap or intersect, but sometimes
do not.
Dave Hanson
At 11:49 AM 4/12/01 -0400, you wrote:
Reading
the many entries on teaching the 1930s, I'm struck by the apparent
disconnect between the exchanges so far about New Deal scholarship and
those on pedagogy. The scholarly exchanges have focused on issues
of policy, mostly those that have implications for our own time: Is
the liberal paradigm of the New Deal one we should defend? Did
Hoover pursue the correct monetary and fiscal policies? Etc.
The teachers, on the other hand, have been exchanging ideas about social
and cultural history, popular culture, oral history, the lived experience
of the Great Depression among ordinary Americans -- and have said
relatively little about the New Deal itself, although I'm sure they all
teach their students about the New Deal as well in some way.
One of the attractions,
but also one of the problems, of writing and teaching in the field of
twentieth-century history is that what we do almost always intersects
with contemporary issues and events in some way. There is a strong,
and quite legitimate, temptation to shape our work around the issues we
care about -- to write and teach in a way that serves to legitimate the
ideas we embrace today. But it is also important, I believe, to
think of the 1930s as a distinctive period, very different from our own,
with its own assumptions, values, problems, and opportunities. It's
not medieval France, certainly, but neither is it 2001.
I think scholars who
have worked on the non-policy history of the New Deal have, on the whole,
done a better job of making the case for the 1930s as a distinctive era
than many of us who have worked more on the New Deal itself. And so
perhaps it's worth talking a little bit about some of the ways in which
New Deal scholarship has, and could, move out of the shadow of the
political debates about liberalism today and become a more truly
historical enterprise.
Alan
Brinkley
--=====================_94918317==_.ALT--
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 18:08:56 EDT
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Maureen Murphy
Subject: Re: New Deal Teaching and New Deal Scholarship
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
I think most of us at the high school level cover what aspects of Social
Security, reforms in banking and the stock markets and the strengthening of
the federal government still affect students today.
Students today are used to the government solving social problems and
economic problems. Having them see this was a new idea during the 30's is a
real eye opener of them.
I think we try also to stress that when things do not work, new things have
to replace them. And although the New Deal brought hope, World War II
brought an end to the Great Depression.
I also mention parallels between credit card debt and the debt in the late
20's and quesitons of international trade.
But our biggest problem is trying to teach 100 years, the 20th century, in 90
daysof 50 minute classes and having students who once they leave high school,
end their academic careers, learn something about their history in a way they
will remember it.
Maureen Murphy
Hoover High School
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 14:24:28 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "Noonan, Ellen"
Subject: PWA
In-Reply-To:
Mime-version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="MS_Mac_OE_3070016669_699589_MIME_Part"
> This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand
this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.
--MS_Mac_OE_3070016669_699589_MIME_Part
Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
From: Robert Leighninger
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 12:28 PM
To: 'DEPRESSION-NEWDEALFORUM@ASHP.LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU'
Subject: PWA
Responses to two of Nancy Zins' questions:
The conception, structure, and administration of the New Deal public
building programs were very different. The one I know most about is the
Public Works Administration.
Re: Hoover precedents: the Hoover Administration was beginning to think
about public works as a response to the depression. The Reconstruction
Finance Corp. was one such response. But it was small and focused on
"self-liquidating projects," things which would pay for themselves
eventually, like toll bridges. Thus, in size and range and
organization, it was nothing like what was to follow.
Re: oversight: PWA was a very interesting combination of federal and
local, public and private cooperation. Projects were initiated locally,
designed by local architects and engineers, and, if approved, built by
local contractors with local labor. Washington did not tell communities
what they needed or how it should look. PWA examined proposals very
carefully, too carefully for some critics, on structural and financial
grounds. Though 30%--later 45%--of the project was a federal grant, the
rest had to be provided by the community. So the financial scrutiny was
to make sure the community could service any debt incurred, either to
PWA or private lenders, to cover their part.
A Resident Engineer-Inspector was sent to all approved project sites to
make sure that no corners were cut, policies violated, kickbacks given,
or frauds perpetrated (by either contractor or labor). There was a PWA
Investigations Division that sent out special agents to pursue any
allegation of misconduct. They were very thorough, even when very small
amounts of money were at stake. Overall, PWA pretty much avoided
charges of scandal and ineffeciency. WPA had a different history.
Others will have to speak to that.
Re: competition/cancellation: CWA and then WPA were created because
PWA projects required too much planning and were too reliant on
machinery and skilled labor to make an immediate dent in unemployment,
particularly unskilled labor. CWA/WPA projects were supposed to be
smaller and more labor-intensive. There was competition and sometimes
cooperation. WPA was created from money taken from PWA. PWA generally
did bigger things, but not always; PWA dockets included park
improvements and one-room school houses with outdoor privies. WPA, on
the other hand, had some very big projects as well as a lot of small
ones. Cities sometimes tried to play one agency against another (WPA
didn't require as much local participation in financing). But Ickes and
Hopkins kept this to a minimum, I think. As to cancelling each other
out: there was more than enough need to go around.
The best works I know on this are:
J. Kerwin Williams, Grants-in-Aid Under the Public Works Administration,
(New York: Columbia University Press), 1939.
A. Macmahon, J. Millett, & G. Ogden, The Administration of Federal Work
Relief, (Chicago: Social Science Research Council), 1941.
C.W. Short & R. Stanley-Brown, Public Buildings... (Washington: GPO),
1939.
As you can see, these are all dated. If anyone knows of more recent
work on PWA, I'd love to know about it.
Bob Leighninger, Arizona State University
--MS_Mac_OE_3070016669_699589_MIME_Part
Content-type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
PWA
From: Robert =
Leighninger
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 =
12:28 PM
To: 'DEPRESSION-NEWDEALFORUM@ASHP.LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU'
Subject: =
PWA
Responses to two of Nancy Zins' =
questions:
The conception, structure, and =
administration of the New Deal public building programs were very =
different. The one I know most about is the Public Works =
Administration.
Re: Hoover precedents: the =
Hoover Administration was beginning to think about public works =
as a response to the depression. The Reconstruction Finance Corp. =
was one such response. But it was small and focused on =
"self-liquidating projects," things which would pay for =
themselves eventually, like toll bridges. Thus, in size and range =
and organization, it was nothing like what was to follow. =
Re: oversight: PWA was a =
very interesting combination of federal and local, public and private =
cooperation. Projects were initiated locally, designed by local =
architects and engineers, and, if approved, built by local contractors =
with local labor. Washington did not tell communities what they =
needed or how it should look. PWA examined proposals very =
carefully, too carefully for some critics, on structural and financial =
grounds. Though 30%--later 45%--of the project was a federal =
grant, the rest had to be provided by the community. So the =
financial scrutiny was to make sure the community could service any =
debt incurred, either to PWA or private lenders, to cover their part. =
A Resident Engineer-Inspector was =
sent to all approved project sites to make sure that no corners were =
cut, policies violated, kickbacks given, or frauds perpetrated (by =
either contractor or labor). There was a PWA Investigations =
Division that sent out special agents to pursue any allegation of =
misconduct. They were very thorough, even when very small amounts =
of money were at stake. Overall, PWA pretty much avoided charges =
of scandal and ineffeciency. WPA had a different history. Others =
will have to speak to that.
Re: =
competition/cancellation: CWA and then WPA were =
created because PWA projects required too much planning and were too =
reliant on machinery and skilled labor to make an immediate dent in =
unemployment, particularly unskilled labor. CWA/WPA projects were =
supposed to be smaller and more labor-intensive. There was =
competition and sometimes cooperation. WPA was created from money =
taken from PWA. PWA generally did bigger things, but not always; =
PWA dockets included park improvements and one-room school houses with =
outdoor privies. WPA, on the other hand, had some very big =
projects as well as a lot of small ones. Cities sometimes tried =
to play one agency against another (WPA didn't require as much local =
participation in financing). But Ickes and Hopkins kept this to a =
minimum, I think. As to cancelling each other out: there =
was more than enough need to go around.
The best works I know on this =
are:
J. Kerwin Williams,<=
I> Grants-in-Aid Under the Public =
Works Administration, (New York: Columbia University Press), =
1939.
A. Macmahon, J. Millett, & G. =
Ogden, The =
Administration of Federal Work Relief, (Chicago: Social Science Research =
Council), 1941.
C.W. Short & R. =
Stanley-Brown, Public Buildings... (Washington: GPO), 1939. =
As you can see, these are all =
dated. If anyone knows of more recent work on PWA, I'd love to =
know about it.
Bob Leighninger, Arizona State =
University
--MS_Mac_OE_3070016669_699589_MIME_Part--
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 23:35:33 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Alan Brinkley
Subject: The New Deal in the Age of the Market
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
One of the things that strikes me about New Deal scholarship (and by that,
I
> mean scholarship on the Roosevelt administration, not the much larger body
> of scholarship on the Depression era generally) is how impervious it has
> seemed to the very profound political changes of the last several decades.
> As I mentioned earlier this month, the original liberal-progressive
paradigm
> for examining the New Deal still survives with remarkable hardiness,
despite
> a lot of nibbling around the edges from both the left and the right. The
> fact that William Leuchtenburg's 1963 synthesis is still one of, if not
the,
> standard work on the New Deal for teaching and other purposes is a
testament
> not only to the excellence of the book, but also to the durability of its
> interpretive framework.
>
> And yet when we look at the political world around us, we find many of the
> assumptions that were the basis of the New Deal either weakened or
> destroyed. To most New Dealers, the principal challenge was to find some
> way to tame the free market and protect individuals from its instability
and
> injustices; and while there were many ideas about how to do that, very few
> New Dealers (and very few others in the 1930s) would have argued that the
> best solution to the Depression was allow the market to work according to
> its own natural laws. That assumption -- that the market required some
> regulation and control in order to work efficiently -- survived pretty
well
> into the 1970s, and then began to fall apart. Today, although such ideas
> are not uncontested, I think it's fair to say that the dominant assumption
> about economic life is that the market is the most efficient, effective,
and
> even just system for ordering our world.
>
> Why then has the New Deal received so little reinterpretation on the basis
> of this new political paradigm? Or has it? In my opinion, David
Kennedy's
> Freedom from Fear at least hints at such a reinterpretation, although it
> stops well short of rejecting the liberal paradigm. Perhaps others will
> follow. In the meantime, though, I wonder how other scholars and
teachers
> confront this apparent paradox -- continued reverence for the New Deal in
an
> age that has rejected its most basic assumptions -- when they try to
explain
> this moment in our history to students and others.
>
> Alan Brinkley
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 09:01:49 -0500
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Paddy Swiney
Subject: Re: The New Deal in the Age of the Market
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Perhaps we are so accustomed to the market controls that were completed by
the New Deal that we no longer notice them. "Caveat emptor" has been
replaced by deposit insurance, anti-trust laws, some regulation of the
stock market, taxed redistribution of wealth, oversight of the money
supply, regulation of the labor market and consumer advocacy. If we
regard the New Deal as a culmination of Progressive/Populist attempts to
control and literally re-form the market, it would seem that the economic
controls have been accepted, even though the political rationale may no
longer be applicable.
Paddy Swiney, assistant Professor, Tulsa Community College
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 15:59:06 +0100
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: "r.j.sandilands"
Subject: Re: The New Deal in the Age of the Market
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Alan Brinkley writes:
> Today, although such ideas are not uncontested, I think it's fair to say
that the dominant assumption about economic life is that the market is the
most efficient, effective, and even just system for ordering our world.
>
> Why then has the New Deal received so little reinterpretation on the
basis of this new political paradigm? ... I wonder how other scholars and
teachers confront this apparent paradox -- continued reverence for the New
Deal in an age that has rejected its most basic assumptions -- when they
try to explain this moment in our history to students and others.
I think part of the answer is that many scholars see the New Deal as a
mixture of helpful and unhelpful measures to combat depression.
Today the "new political paradigm" does indeed largely endorse the free
market as more efficient than Big Government. J K Galbraith argues (in "The
Culture of Contentment") that this is because the comfortable middle
classes are more interested in efficiency than in greater equality and
protection for the poor (paid for by taxes on the rich). If the contented
do think about the poor they rationalize their neglect on the argument that
a rising tide lifts all the boats.
Galbraith is our most durable New Deal theorist and practitioner, for
yesterday and today. But I think that most economic historians now draw a
sharper distinction than does Galbraith between the abnormally severe and
prolonged Great Depression of the 1930s and the much milder forms of
cyclical recessions and persistent injustices and inequalities that have
been experienced in the United States since WWII.
Even among today's "free-market liberal" or "libertarian" economists there
are few who dispute that some form of very vigorous government intervention
was justified in the early 1930s to reverse economic collapse. For example,
Milton Friedman, the leader of the (right-wing) liberal post-war Chicago
School, looks back on 1931-33 and agrees that by then a major public works
programme, financed by borrowing from the Fed, was probably necessary to
arrest and reverse the fall in the nation's money supply, the sine qua non
for the maintenance of prices and full employment.
At the same time, Friedman and the Chicago School agree that the main cause
of the Great Depression and the monetary collapse, 1929-33, was Federal
Reserve incompetence. They argue that if the Fed had not been so
preoccupied with the stock market in 1928-29 and had instead kept their
eyes on the real economy (which was turning down in the summer of 1929)
they would not have raised interest rates in August 1929 and would not have
sat idly by in the face of mass liquidations that caused the money supply
to contract by 30%.
But the Fed was incompetent and the ensuing depression abnormally severe.
Abnormal conditions called for abnormal remedies, though the Chicago advice
(not unique to them) is not to let abnormal conditions develop in the first
place. And they believe that firm, steady control of the money supply ought
to iron out the worst of the business cycle and obviate the need for fiscal
deficits, big public spending programmes or high and progressive taxation.
Chicagoans argue that monetary control is more or less the only kind of
control that is required to keep the economy efficient and healthy. Their
supporters also argue, with some justice, that some New Deal measures, such
as price and wage controls and the strengthening of trade unions, may have
hindered recovery. They reckon that both depression and recovery had more
to do with macro- than with micro-economic policy. Seen in this light there
is little inconsistency between the (right-wing) liberal view of the New
Deal and their current approach to the management of the modern economy.
But a more extreme libertarianism is also gaining ground today. It views
the New Deal with essentially the same spectacles as the Austrian
"liquidationists" that Brad DeLong mentioned in his recent post. (Brad
mentioned Schumpeter, Hayek and Robbins; he could also have mentioned B M
Anderson, J Laurence Laughlin, H P Willis and Gottfried Haberler.) They
believe that bust follows boom as night follows day. Since there was a
Great Bust it must have been preceded by a Great Boom, fed by irresponsible
credit expansion. For them the Fed erred only in being insufficiently
restrictive in 1928-29 and the subsequent contraction was a necessary
purgative. Fiscal and monetary activism would only delay recovery. No gain
without pain, as the policy nihilists say nowadays.
David Laidler has an excellent discussion of the competing claims of the
various kinds of activists and nihilists in the 1930s, their intellectual
antecedents and their modern followers, in "Fabricating the Keynesian
Revolution", Cambridge University Press, 1999.
My own views are set out in: R J Sandilands, "The New Deal and
'domesticated Keynesianism' in America", in Michael Keaney (ed.), Economist
with a Public Purpose: Essays in Honour of John Kenneth Galbraith, London
and New York, Routledge, 2001.
Roger Sandilands
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, UK
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 17:54:15 +200
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: RANKHUMISE SELLO P
Organization: University of North West
Subject: New Deal and (Post -) Apartheid South Africa
In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.20010418155906.0072f574@pop-hub.strath.ac.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
Dear History Matters
As a History student (from South Africa) I was often interested in
the History of America - especially History on both pre - and post -
depression period. This History formed part of the South African
matric History syllabus. Studying this History it is interesting to
note how the economic development of US (during the 1920s) ultimately
led to the fall of the Wall Street Stock Exchange, which affected
the whole world.
During the depression years South Africa was still ruled by the white
minority. This minority critically observed how Roosevelt's economic
policy - New Deal helped to restore the US economy which had been
destroyed by the Depression. To alleviate white poverty, the South
African government (dominated by Afrikanners) introduced policies
which were meant to rebuilt the economy - which was, among others,
brought down by the depression.
Afrikanner farmers were given loans to develop agriculture and other
measures to improve the white minority economic position was put in
place. In this way the then minority white government in South
Africa was presenting to its white population "the three Rs' of the
New Deal. While this was happening the black majority suffered
economic hardships at the hands of the white minority. This in my
view became an Apartheid Deppression or you can call it Apartheid
Oppression.
While independence was achieved (in South Africa) in 1994. The black
majority - led government put it upon itself to level the playing
field between the formerly advantaged whites and disadvantaged
blacks. Through economic policies such as Reconstruction and
Development Programme (RDP), the new government promised all South
Africans 'the three Rs - the New Deal.
I would like any participant (from the New Deal Forum and or
elsewhere) who is doing or has done comparative study of New Deal and
RDP to respond to this mail.
Patrick Rankhumise
-------------------------
Sello Patrick Rankhumise Lecturer: History Dept.
University of North West Tel: +27 140 892440
P/Bag X2046. Mmabatho. 2735 North West Province. RSA
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 13:12:48 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: David Hanson
Subject: Re: New Deal and (Post -) Apartheid South Africa
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
I am not an authority on South African history (far from it) but I will
forward this note to a colleague at George Mason University who is. I do
find it interesting to reflect on the fact that the implications of this
discussion about the New Deal extend beyond our own national borders. I
also find it interesting that Professor Brinkley and others have such an
interest in the so-called "liberal paradigm" as it relates to contemporary
political-economic theory. I suppose it is refreshing to see history
applied in such a manner, since one of the criticisms of our field is that
we study the past as a dusty academic exercise without practical value.
That has not been the case in this discussion of the Great Depression and
New Deal.
Dave Hanson
At 05:54 PM 4/18/01 +0200, you wrote:
>Dear History Matters
>
>As a History student (from South Africa) I was often interested in
>the History of America - especially History on both pre - and post -
>depression period. This History formed part of the South African
>matric History syllabus. Studying this History it is interesting to
>note how the economic development of US (during the 1920s) ultimately
>led to the fall of the Wall Street Stock Exchange, which affected
>the whole world.
>
>During the depression years South Africa was still ruled by the white
>minority. This minority critically observed how Roosevelt's economic
>policy - New Deal helped to restore the US economy which had been
>destroyed by the Depression. To alleviate white poverty, the South
>African government (dominated by Afrikanners) introduced policies
>which were meant to rebuilt the economy - which was, among others,
>brought down by the depression.
>
> Afrikanner farmers were given loans to develop agriculture and other
>measures to improve the white minority economic position was put in
>place. In this way the then minority white government in South
>Africa was presenting to its white population "the three Rs' of the
>New Deal. While this was happening the black majority suffered
>economic hardships at the hands of the white minority. This in my
>view became an Apartheid Deppression or you can call it Apartheid
>Oppression.
>
>While independence was achieved (in South Africa) in 1994. The black
>majority - led government put it upon itself to level the playing
>field between the formerly advantaged whites and disadvantaged
>blacks. Through economic policies such as Reconstruction and
>Development Programme (RDP), the new government promised all South
>Africans 'the three Rs - the New Deal.
>
>I would like any participant (from the New Deal Forum and or
>elsewhere) who is doing or has done comparative study of New Deal and
>RDP to respond to this mail.
>
>Patrick Rankhumise
>
>-------------------------
>Sello Patrick Rankhumise Lecturer: History Dept.
>University of North West Tel: +27 140 892440
>P/Bag X2046. Mmabatho. 2735 North West Province. RSA
>
>This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
>
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 18:09:04 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Gail Radford
Subject: The New Deal in the Age of the Market
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
From Gail Radford
SUNY--Buffalo
Alan's comments about teaching the New Deal in the age of the market brings
up what I find to be the key problem with presenting this period to
students. Of course I like to do a lot with all the great cultural topics
connected with the era, but for me the core narrative is the transformation
of American politics that the New Deal represented. I would expand this to
include not just the effort to regulate the market that Alan talked about,
but also the New Deal's emphasis on the virtues of public spending. This
is the specific issue that I find somewhat surreal to try to deal with at
this moment in history, a time when a Democratic president has declared the
era of big government to be over. (And, in addition, to denigrating it,
Clinton didn't DO much of in the way of social investment, either, even
though the economy as a whole experienced such growth.) Some wag
characterized the Gore-Bush race as similar to a contest between Hoover and
Coolidge. This didn't seem too far off the mark. As you remember, Gore
told the Wall Street Journal that in the event of a recession, he would cut
government spending. (Who knows, perhaps our current ideological climate
accounts for all the focus on Hoover when this on-line discussion of the
New Deal began!)
After growing up with red-meat conservatives in Southern California in the
1950s, I find myself teaching 20th-century history in Western New York, a
metropolitan area with one of the highest densities of unionization and
where the right end of the political spectrum tends to be Rockefeller
Republicanism. It's been a dizzying (although pleasant) change for me
personally, but what it means for my teaching is that I can evade--for
now--a direct confrontation with the anachronism of my moral narrative of
the thirties. Actually, I don't ignore the contradiction entirely, but
when I bring it up, the students don't respond. In this locale, for now,
they are still living inside the New Deal paradigm.
How do other people in this conversation--perhaps people who write and
teach in more conservative parts of the country--deal the contradiction
between the Leuchtenburg synthesis and the common sense our own time? I
would welcome discussion on this point, and I am grateful that Alan
introduced the subject.
___________________________________________________
Gail Radford / Department of History / SUNY--Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260-4130 / radford@buffalo.edu / 716.837.7461
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 16:16:11 -0700
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: Robert Leighninger
Subject: New Deal vs. "common sense"
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="Boundary_(ID_AUDcXUUsZmsrd67LMVv+HQ)"
This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand
this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.
--Boundary_(ID_AUDcXUUsZmsrd67LMVv+HQ)
Content-type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Gail Radford notes the difficulty of teaching about the "virtues of public
spending" in a era when "common sense" denies the existence of public
investment and declares "the era of big government" over. One of the things
that makes this common sense possible is a massive ignorance of the physical
products of the New Deal. And historians must share some of the blame.
We are surrounded in our daily lives by examples of New Deal public
investment and nobody seems to know where they came from. Mayer and Wade's
Chicago; Growth of a Metopolis says the new federal programs "left no
physical mark on the city" (364). The Outer Drive Bridge, the Lake Michigan
shoreline, DuSable HS, Cook County Hospital's Nurses' Home, the U of I
Dental School, and most of the city's sewage system are just a few of the
physical marks the New Deal left on Chicago. In the backwater state of
Louisiana, 228 PWA projects put up almost 400 structures, most of which are
still in use. And that's just PWA. If we could point out to our students
the contributions of PWA, WPA, CCC, CWA, FERA, NYA and the other building
agencies of the New Deal that left physical marks on our landscape, common
sense might be different.
PWA was by most definitions a classic "big government" program. Ronald
Reagan spent most of his political career trying to discredit such programs.
But when his name gets attached to Washington National Airport, one of PWA's
gems, nobody gets the joke. How did this amnesia happen?
Bob Leighninger
Arizona State University
--Boundary_(ID_AUDcXUUsZmsrd67LMVv+HQ)
Content-type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
New Deal vs. "common sense"
Gail Radford notes the difficulty of =
teaching about the "virtues of public spending" in a era when =
"common sense" denies the existence of public investment and =
declares "the era of big government" over. One of the =
things that makes this common sense possible is a massive ignorance of =
the physical products of the New Deal. And historians must share =
some of the blame.
We are surrounded in our daily lives =
by examples of New Deal public investment and nobody seems to know =
where they came from. Mayer and Wade's Chicago; Growth of a =
Metopolis says the new federal programs "left no physical mark =
on the city" (364). The Outer Drive Bridge, the Lake =
Michigan shoreline, DuSable HS, Cook County Hospital's Nurses' Home, =
the U of I Dental School, and most of the city's sewage system are just =
a few of the physical marks the New Deal left on Chicago. In the =
backwater state of Louisiana, 228 PWA projects put up almost 400 =
structures, most of which are still in use. And that's just =
PWA. If we could point out to our students the contributions of =
PWA, WPA, CCC, CWA, FERA, NYA and the other building agencies of the =
New Deal that left physical marks on our landscape, common sense might =
be different.
PWA was by most definitions a classic =
"big government" program. Ronald Reagan spent most of =
his political career trying to discredit such programs. But when =
his name gets attached to Washington National Airport, one of PWA's =
gems, nobody gets the joke. How did this amnesia =
happen?
Bob Leighninger
Arizona State University
=
--Boundary_(ID_AUDcXUUsZmsrd67LMVv+HQ)--
This forum is sponsored by History Matters--please visit our Web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu for more resources for teaching U.S. History.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 19:51:00 -0400
Reply-To: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
Sender: Great Depression and New Deal History Forum
From: David Hanson
Subject: Re: New Deal vs. "common sense"
In-Reply-To:
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; types="text/plain,text/html";
boundary="=====================_30979611==_.ALT"
--=====================_30979611==_.ALT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Good commentary! I fear that Bob Leighninger is right. How many people today
(under the age of 40) credit the New Deal with their 60 yr. old federal
buildings, dams, parks, etc.? All thanks to that "big government" in
Washington that has become so politically correct to bash. Now I read where
"top Republicans" want to put Reagan on the $10 bill. Even if I wasn't a
Democrat, as a historian I would have trouble with the idea of placing
contemporary political "icons" on the currency in place of guys like George W.
1st (the one from Virginia), Lincoln, Jackson, and Hamilton. If anyone
deserves to have his face on a Federal Reserve Note, it's FDR, not RR.
Considering Jackson's hatred of the Bank of the United States, his spirit
would
probably rest better if we put FDR on the $20 bill and left the $10 alone. At
the risk of continuing this admittedly light diversion from the serious
tone of
this forum, and reactions?
Dave Hanson
At 04:16 PM 4/18/01 -0700, you wrote:
>
> Gail Radford notes the difficulty of teaching about the "virtues of public
> spending" in a era when "common sense" denies the existence of public
> investment and declares "the era of big government" over. One of the things
> that makes this common sense possible is a massive ignorance of the physical
> products of the New Deal. And historians must share some of the blame.
>
> We are surrounded in our daily lives by examples of New Deal public
> investment and nobody seems to know where they came from. Mayer and Wade's
> Chicago; Growth of a Metopolis says the new federal programs "left no
physical
> mark on the city" (364). The Outer Drive Bridge, the Lake Michigan
> shoreline, DuSable HS, Cook County Hospital's Nurses' Home, the U of I
Dental
> School, and most of the city's sewage system are just a few of the physical
> marks the New Deal left on Chicago. In the backwater state of Louisiana,
228
> PWA projects put up almost 400 structures, most of which are still in use.
> And that's just PWA. If we could point out to our students the
contributions
> of PWA, WPA, CCC, CWA, FERA, NYA and the other building agencies of the New
> Deal that left physical marks on our landscape, common sense might be
> different.
>
> PWA was by most definitions a classic "big government" program. Ronald
> Reagan spent most of his political career trying to discredit such
programs.
> But when his name gets attached to Washington National Airport, one of PWA's
> gems, nobody gets the joke. How did this amnesia happen?
>
> Bob Leighninger
> Arizona State University
--=====================_30979611==_.ALT
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Good commentary! I fear that Bob Leighninger is right. How
many people today (under the age of 40) credit the New Deal with their 60
yr. old federal buildings, dams, parks, etc.? All thanks to that
"big government" in Washington that has become so politically
correct to bash. Now I read where "top Republicans" want
to put Reagan on the $10 bill. Even if I wasn't a Democrat, as a
historian I would have trouble with the idea of placing contemporary
political "icons" on the currency in place of guys like George
W. 1st (the one from Virginia), Lincoln, Jackson, and Hamilton. If
anyone deserves to have his face on a Federal Reserve Note, it's FDR, not
RR. Considering Jackson's hatred of the Bank of the United States,
his spirit would probably rest better if we put FDR on the $20 bill and
left the $10 alone. At the risk of continuing this admittedly light
diversion from the serious tone of this forum, and reactions?
Dave Hanson
At 04:16 PM 4/18/01 -0700, you wrote: