This chapter opens with federal investigator Lorena Hickok traveling across America reporting on the New Deal's impact on the lives of ordinary people. The deprivation, anguish, and courage she found upset the stereotype of lazy loafers in search of government handouts. She also discovered that the New Deal had restored hope and confidence in many people, and because of it Americans looked to Washington as never before for help.

The American People in the Great Depression

The Great Depression also functioned as a great leveler. It reduced differences of class, ethnicity, geography, and race through deprivation. Most people did not plummet to rock bottom; they simply lived leaner lives. Some tightened family budgets; others moved to cheaper quarters. A few starved to death, and more than a few foraged for food. For the first time, more people left than entered the country. With hard times came shame, self-doubt, and a loss of confidence. Birth and marriage rates dropped, and troubled families broke apart. In strong and weak families alike, the role of homemaker took on added importance. More and more women worked outside the home to supplement meager family incomes, and the home itself became an inexpensive center of recreation and companionship. A depression culture emerged, but whether on film, radio, or in print, it tended to reinforce the basic social and economic tenets of American culture: middle-class morality and family life, capitalism, and democracy.

An ecological disaster transformed 1,500 square miles from the Oklahoma panhandle to western Kansas into a gigantic "Dust Bowl." Made partly by man, partly by nature, the Dust Bowl emptied the region of large numbers of its people, as 3.5 million farmers left the Great Plains, the only states of the country to suffer a net loss of population. Moreover, "agribusiness," the corporatization of farming, pushed as many farmers from their land as nature did. An unprecedented migration of rural refugees, many of them white and native-born, wandered the country in search of work.

Meanwhile, outsiders—especially Mexican and African Americans—suffered more than their share of hardship. Beginning in 1931, after more than a decade of local encouragement, the federal government launched a series of deportations or "repatriations" of Mexican migrants (and with them their Mexican American children). The Latino population of the country declined by 500,000, even as Hispanic "barrios" in Los Angeles and other cities continued to grow. The nation's largest minority, African Americans, reported unemployment rates as high as 50 percent. The Great Depression, moreover, aggravated racial prejudice as the number of recorded lynchings tripled between 1932 and 1933. Yet many African Americans refused to be victimized by the Depression. Some urban blacks, like George Baker ("Father Divine"), stressed economic cooperation and opened shelters, while a few rural blacks joined with whites in the newly founded Southern Tenant Farmers Unions.

The Tragedy of Herbert Hoover

The depth of the crisis soon exhausted private and municipal resources. By 1931 only New York had a statewide relief agency. The federal government became the court of last resort. It alone possessed sufficient resources to meet the manifest need. Unfortunately, President Herbert Hoover proved ineffective at solving the nation's economic problems. He relied almost exclusively on the techniques of the New Era—self-help, voluntarism, publicity, and public calls for private cooperation. Though he did more than any of his predecessors to combat a downturn, he could not bring himself to do enough, for fear that too much government activity would unbalance the budget, impede the return of business confidence and recovery, and create an unwieldy and intrusive bureaucracy.

Resentment grew and peaked during the disastrous march of the Bonus Army on Washington in 1932. In the election that fall, Hoover suffered a thundering rebuke as Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won nearly 58 percent of the popular vote and laid the foundation of a powerful coalition that would dominate politics for decades to come.

The Early New Deal (1933-1935)

Some of the reasons for Roosevelt's victory included his warmth, dynamism, and willingness to experiment, as well as the insistent fights for the underdog waged by his wife, Eleanor. From the beginning of his administration, a spirit of activism emanated from Washington. Roosevelt's first "hundred days" in office brought an unprecedented flood of legislation: banking and securities acts to restore the credit structure and safeguard investment markets; relief measures to aid the dispossessed; the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide flood control and to siphon federal building funds into one of the poorest regions of the country.

Reform and relief were less important themes in the early New Deal than recovery. On this issue, Roosevelt proceeded cautiously but vigorously, attempting to revive the economy with a combination of new federal planning strategies and associational techniques pioneered during the 1920s. The National Recovery Administration promoted industrial cooperation and self-regulation through codes of fair practices, while the Agricultural Adjustment Administration similarly relied on private cooperation to raise farm prices by reducing acreage under cultivation. Although more successful than the NRA, the AAA (like the NRA before it) was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1936.

A Second New Deal (1935-1936)

The limited economic progress of the New Deal nonetheless bred political success for Roosevelt's allies in the 1934 off-year elections, when Democrats actually increased their majorities in Congress. Yet New Deal critics, too, experienced success, as progress failed to keep pace with rising public expectations. Among the most popular voices of protest were Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, Detroit radio priest Charles Coughlin, and Dr. Francis Townsend, an advocate of aid to the elderly. They helped, along with Congress and the public-at-large, to push Roosevelt and the New Deal farther to the left in 1935.

A second "hundred days" of legislation signaled a break from the earlier partnership with business and stressed longer-term relief and more sweeping reform. The Works Progress Administration substituted federal work relief for earlier give-away programs and made aid to the needy a centerpiece of administration policy. The Social Security Act institutionalized a semi-welfare state with a relatively conservative social insurance program. The National Labor Relations Act created a federal board to oversee unionization and labor relations with management, thereby giving a powerful boost to organized labor. Legislation regulating banking, holding companies, and new taxes strengthened federal control over the private sector and further alienated many business leaders.

In 1936 Roosevelt won reelection by the largest majority to date in American history. He built his victory through a powerful coalition of the traditionally Democratic South, big-city ethnic communities, and labor. The success of this approach reflected the wide impact of the New Deal on the American people, particularly those at the middle and bottom of the economic ladder.

The New Deal and the American People

In the most stunning electoral reversal of the century, African Americans turned their allegiances from the Republican party to the Democrats. Though local administration often meant that racial discrimination persisted in New Deal programs, black citizens still received more attention than they had since Reconstruction.

So, too, did Mexican Americans and women. None of these groups prospered, but all benefited to a greater or lesser degree. Organized labor probably benefited most of all, but splits between the American Federation of Labor and the Committee for Industrial Organization weakened solidarity. A wave of sit-down and other strikes alienated Democrats and Republicans alike.

The End of the New Deal (1937-1940)

The president himself brought on some of the troubles of his second term. In 1935 and 1936, a conservative Supreme Court had invalidated several New Deal measures on the very grounds used by the administration to expand executive authority. Roosevelt fought back by trying to "pack" the courts with new judges. Later, because of deaths and retirements, Roosevelt appointed five justices to the Supreme Court, but his court-packing plan, badly formulated and ineptly handled, succeeded only in angering the public and bolstering a conservative coalition of Republicans and rural Democrats. A presidential effort to balance the budget in 1937 led to a deep recession in 1938, and a vindictive attempt to unseat anti-New Deal Democrats ended in failure.

By 1938, with passage of a public housing act and a wages-and-hours law, the New Deal had come largely to an end. Though Roosevelt and the New Deal never succeeded in completing the recovery (and indeed achieved only mixed results in comparison to some of the European revitalization efforts of the period), their legacy was a lasting one: the creation of economic stabilizers to compensate for future swings in the economy, the modernization of the presidency, the establishment of a limited welfare state, and the revitalization of the Democratic party.