by Jill Lepore
Roosevelt’s ability to take such measures was greatly strengthened by the popular endorsement he was able to secure by way of the radio. People said that in the summer you could walk down a city street, past the open windows of houses and cars, and not miss a word of a fireside chat, since everyone was tuned in. “We have become neighbors in a new and true sense,” FDR said, describing what coast-to-coast broadcasting had wrought. He’d listen to recordings of his addresses after he’d given them, to make improvements for the next time. He worked and reworked drafts so that, by the time he sat down at the microphone, he’d committed his speech to memory. Before every address, he took a nap to rest his voice. He spoke at an unusual speed—much slower than most radio announcers—and with an everyday vocabulary. Roosevelt’s mastery of the airwaves resulted from his talent for and dedication to the form. But he also worked with his FCC chairman to block newspaper publishers from owning radio stations, thereby defeating William Randolph Hearst’s attempt to expand his empire to radio and denying one of his key political opponents a place on the dial.42
Roosevelt was also dogged in his work with Congress. He met with legislators every day of the first hundred days of his administration and proposed—and Congress passed—a flurry of legislation intended to stabilize and reform the banking system, regulate the economy through government planning, provide economic relief through public assistance programs, reduce unemployment through a public works program, and allow farmers to keep their farms by securing better resources to rural Americans. “As a Nation,” Perkins said, “we are recognizing that programs long thought of as merely labor welfare, such as shorter hours, higher wages, and a voice in the terms and conditions of work, are really essential economic factors for recovery.”43
Roosevelt’s agenda rested on the idea that government planning was necessary for the recovery and, to some degree, on the Keynesian belief that the remedy for depression was government spending, an agenda he adopted even before the publication, in 1936, of Keynes’s Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. FDR’s banking reforms included the Emergency Banking Act; the Glass-Steagall Act, which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; and creation of the Securities Exchange Commission. The Public Works Administration oversaw tens of thousands of infrastructure projects, from repairing roads to building dams, as well as cultural and arts initiatives, including the Federal Writers’ Project and the Federal Theatre Project. The Agricultural Adjustment Act addressed the problems faced by the more than one in three Americans who worked on farms.
FDR had dealt with many of these problems as a governor of New York. During the 1920s, more than three hundred thousand farms in New York were abandoned. Like many reformers associated with what came to be called the New Conservation, Roosevelt believed the greatest disparity of wealth in the United States was that between urban and rural Americans. Farming communities had worse schools, inadequate health care, and higher taxes. Poor land makes poor people, he believed. “I want to build up the land as, in part at least, an insurance against future depressions,” Roo sevelt said in 1931, the year he established the New York Power Authority. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Farm Security Administration, and other agricultural initiatives extended a better and fairer distribution of resources like land, power, and water to a national scale. Much of the greatest distress among rural Americans was felt in the Cotton Belt, a part of the country that FDR called “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem—the Nation’s problem, not merely the South’s.”44
Reform, relief, and recovery were the three legs of FDR’s agenda. Early results were promising, but the Depression continued. “When any prognosticator foretells the outcome of the acts of the New Deal, he is more or less of a guesser in this vale of tears,” Charles Beard wrote in 1934. “What is an ‘outcome’ or a ‘result’? Is it an outcome or result in 1936, 1950, or the year 2000?” The New Deal had barely begun but voters approved; Democrats fared well in the midterm elections, leading Roosevelt to push further. “Boys, this is our hour,” his adviser Harry Hopkins said. “We’ve got to get everything we want—a works program, social security, wages and hours, everything—now or never.” Or, not quite everything. In 1934 Isaac Rubinow, who’d fought for national health insurance during the 1910s, published The Quest for Security and urged FDR to include health care in the New Deal. But by now the American Medical Association, which had favored Rubinow’s proposal before the war, had switched sides. Government meddling in medicine, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association said, came down to a question of “Americanism versus sovietism.”45
Even without universal health care, the scope of the New Deal was remarkable. In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, granting to workers the right to organize, and established the Works Project Administration, to hire millions of people who built roads and schools and hospitals, as well as artists and writers. Meanwhile, Perkins drafted the Social Security Act, passed by Congress later that year. It established pensions, federal government assistance for fatherless families, and unemployment relief.
Still, the reforms had limits. The liberal policymakers who created the welfare state in the 1930s were averse to relief as such. “The Federal Government,” FDR said, “has no intention or desire to force upon the country or the unemployed themselves a system of relief which is repugnant to American ideals of individual self-reliance.” And they were also squeamish about direct taxes, an aversion most manifest in the decision to fund the Social Security Act with an indirect tax on payroll. This allowed New Dealers to distinguish between old-age and unemployment programs (cast as insurance, paid for by annuities created from payroll taxes acting as insurance premiums) and poverty programs, like Aid to Dependent Children (cast as welfare). One legacy of this distinction was that Americans hostile to welfare seldom saw Social Security as part of it.46
Sharecroppers were evicted from their homes in 1936 in Arkansas after joining a tenant farmers’ union. HUNGER, ACHING WANT, was the great scourge of the 1930s. The land itself had grown barren. “When we picked the cotton, we could see the tracks where we plowed two or three months before,” Willis Magby recalled of the drought in Beaton, Arkansas, west of Little Rock. “It hadn’t rained enough to wash away the tracks.” Magby was thirteen years old in 1933 when his parents piled him and his six younger siblings into an old Model T and drove from Arkansas to south Texas. The family slept on the ground at the side of the road, pawning the last of their scant belongings along the way to buy gasoline. Once in Texas, for weeks at a time they ate nothing but cornmeal soaked in rainwater. One winter, they lived off rabbits. Only in 1936, when Magby’s father was able to get a government loan to buy a team of mules and plant a crop, did things start to look up.47
Nearly five in ten white families and nine in ten black families endured poverty at some point during the Depression. Black families fared worse, not only because more fell into poverty but also because the roads out of poverty were often closed to them: New Deal loan, relief, and insurance programs often specifically excluded black people.
Louise Norton, born in Grenada in 1900, met her husband, Earl Little, a Baptist minister, at a United Negro Improvement Association meeting in Philadelphia in 1917. In 1925, when the Littles were living in Omaha and Louise was pregnant with her son Malcolm and home alone with her three young children, mounted Klansmen came to their house, threatening to lynch the Reverend Little. Finding him not at home, they shattered all the windows. Driven out of Omaha, the Littles eventually settled in Lansing, Michigan, where still more vigilantes burned their home to the ground. In 1931, the Reverend Little was killed by a streetcar; much evidence suggests that his death was not an accident. After Little’s death, the insurance company denied his widow his life insurance. For a while, Louise and the children lived on dandelions. In 1939, after giving birth to her eighth child, Louise Little was committed to an insane asylum at the Kalamazoo State Hospital, where she remained for the next quarter century. He
r son Malcolm was moved into foster care and then a juvenile home, and eventually lived in Boston with his half-sister. He would one day change his name to Malcolm X.48
Yet if hard times widened some divisions, they narrowed others. People who were doing fairly well one day could be reduced to anguished indigence the next. Then, too, it was impossible not to bear witness. Massive unemployment had this side effect: people had more time on their hands to listen to the radio. One third of all movie theaters closed, but, between 1935 and 1941 alone, nearly three hundred new radio stations opened. By the end of the decade, the United States had more than half the world’s radio sets, at a time when radio broadcasts chronicled and dramatized the suffering of the poor to a national audience, both in reporting and in the emerging genre of the radio drama, with a new vocabulary of sound effects, immediate and visceral.49
Much of the work of chronicling the suffering of those years was done by playwrights, photographers, historians, and writers, hired by the government under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. Working for the Federal Writers Project and the Federal Theatre Project, including its Radio Division, they documented the lives of the ordinary, the rural, and especially the poor, in interviews, photographs, films, paintings, and radio broadcasts. Its critics called it the “Whistle, Piss, and Argue” department, but at a time when one in four people in publishing were out of work, the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project provided employment to more than seven thousand writers, including Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, and Richard Wright.50 But it was radio that brought the sounds of suffering into the homes, even, of people who were still getting by, and even the rarer few who were prospering. James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America (1931), featuring the lives of the humblest Americans, was dramatized by the Federal Theatre of the Air. “There is no lack of excellent one-volume narrative histories of the United States, in which the political, military, diplomatic, social, and economic strands have been skillfully interwoven,” Adams had written in his book’s preface. The Epic of America was not that kind of book. Instead, Adams had tried “to discover for himself and others how the ordinary American, under which category most of us come, has become what he is to-day in outlook, character, and opinion.” Adams, who’d wanted to call his book “The American Dream”—a term he coined—celebrated the struggles of the common man in language that would stir leaders of later generations, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama.51
Much the same spirit pervaded the documentary projects of the WPA and of other New Deal programs, including the photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, undertaken on behalf of the Farm Security Administration. The head of the FSA’s photography program required his staff to read Charles Beard’s History of the United States—an eloquent and strident social history that championed the struggles of the poor. The WPA’s folklore director, Benjamin Botkin, wanted to turn “the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature.” From more than ten thousand interviews, the Writers’ Project produced some eight hundred books, including A Treasury of American Folklore, and a volume called These Are Our Lives, which included excerpts from more than two thousand interviews with Americans once held as slaves.52
If the Depression, and alike the New Deal, created a new compassion for the poor, it also produced a generation of politicians committed to the idea that government can relieve suffering and regulate the economy. In 1937, lanky former Texas schoolteacher Lyndon Baines Johnson was elected to Congress, where he worked to obtain federal funds for his district for projects like the construction of dams to improve farmland. When LBJ was a boy, his father had lost his farm. He’d grown up dirt-poor. Six foot three, with long ears and no discernible end to his energy, Johnson had hitchhiked to a state teachers college and, after graduating, taught at an elementary school in Cotulla, Texas, sixty miles north of the border. The students were Mexican American; there was no lunch break, because the children had no lunch to eat. Johnson organized a debating team and taught them how to fight for their ideas. When he ran for Congress, he printed signs that read “Franklin D. and Lyndon B.” Like his hero, LBJ embraced the radio, campaigning on radio stations like KNOW in Austin and KTSA in San Antonio and once—in an act of inspired populist appeal—broadcasting from a barbershop.53
In Congress, Johnson regularly worked sixteen- and eighteen-hour days. He fought for the Bankhead-Jones Act in 1937, to help tenant farmers buy land. He campaigned for more improvements, too, and fought to have rural electrification placed in the hands not of power companies but farmers’ cooperatives. He later said, “We built six dams on our river. We brought the floods under control. We provided our people with cheap power. . . . That all resulted from the power of the government to bring the greatest good to the greatest number.”54
What was that number? New methods and new sources of information made it possible to measure the impact of the New Deal, as the age of quantification yielded to the age of statistics. In 1912, an Italian statistician named Corrado Gini, Chair of Statistics at the University of Cagliari, devised what came to be called the Gini index, which measures economic inequality on a scale from zero to one.55 If all the income in the world were earned by one person and everyone else earned nothing, the world would have a Gini index of one. If everyone in the world earned exactly the same income, the world would have a Gini index of zero. In between zero and one, the higher the number, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor. Using federal income tax returns, filed beginning in 1913, it’s possible to calculate the Gini index for the United States. In 1928, under the tax scheme endorsed by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, the top 1 percent of American families earned 24 percent of all income. By 1938, after the reforms of the New Deal, the top 1 percent of American families earned only 16 percent of all income.56 It was just this kind of redistribution, at a time when Americans were flirting with fascism, that alarmed conservatives. The sort of economic planning that Gini himself advocated was closely associated with nondemocratic states. In 1925, four years after he wrote an essay called “The Measurement of Inequality,” Gini signed the “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals.” His work as a scientist was so closely tied to the fascist state that after the regime fell he was tried for being “an apologist for Fascism.”57
Americans, too, began hunting for apologists for fascism, and, especially, for communism, fishing for American subversives. During the Depression, some seventy-five thousand Americans had joined the Communist Party. In May 1938, Martin Dies Jr., a beefy thirty-seven-year-old conservative Democrat from Texas and a fly in Lyndon Johnson’s eye, convened the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate suspected communists and communist organizations. Dorothy Thompson railed against the committee: “little men—nasty little men—who run around pinning tags on people. This one is a ‘Red’; this one is a ‘Jew.’ Since when has America become a race of snoopers?” But the snooping had been going on for a while. Much of Dies’s work continued the campaign of harassment and intimidation waged by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which had for years been conducting surveillance on hundreds of black artists and writers, infiltrating their organizations and, in particular, harassing writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. As Richard Wright wrote, in “The FB Eye Blues,” “Everywhere I look, Lord / I see FB eyes . . . I’m getting sick and tired of gover’ment spies.”58
In congressional hearings, Dies directed his ire at writers and artists employed by the WPA, attempting to demonstrate that their work—their plays and poems and folklore collections and documentary photographs—contained hidden communist messages. In one notorious encounter, Dies called Hallie Flanagan, the director of the Federal Theatre Project. Flanagan, born in South Dakota, was an accomplished playwright and distinguished professor of drama at Vassar, where she’d founded its Experimental Theatre. When she appeared before Dies’s committee, in December 1938, Alabama congressman Joseph Starnes asked her about a scholarly article she’d written in which she used t
he phrase “Marlowesque madness.” (The Theatre Project had funded productions of Marlowe’s Tragical History of Dr. Faustus in New Orleans, Boston, Detroit, Atlanta and, directed by Orson Welles, in New York.)
“You are quoting from this Marlowe,” Starnes said. “Is he a Communist?”
Spectators roared with laughter, but Flanagan answered solemnly.
“I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.”
“Tell us who Marlowe is,” Starnes pressed.
“Put in the record,” Flanagan said wearily, “that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare.”59
Flanagan was right to be worried. The Federal Theatre Project had staged more than eight hundred plays. Dies’s committee objected to only a handful—including Woman of Destiny, about a female president, and Machine Age, about mass production—but months after Flanagan’s testimony, funding for both the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Writers’ Project stopped, Congress having struck a bargain with Dies little better than the deal Faustus struck with Lucifer.
III.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S PRESIDENCY marked the beginning of a “new deal order,” an American-led, rights-based liberalism that Lyndon Johnson would carry into the 1960s. In the nineteenth century, “liberalism” meant advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism. The meaning of the term changed during the Progressive Era, when self-styled Progressives, borrowing from Populism, began attempting to reform laissez-faire capitalism by using the tools of collective action and appeals to the people adopted by Populists; in the 1930s, these efforts came together as New Deal liberalism.60
All that while, a new kind of conservatism was growing, too. It consisted not only of businessmen who opposed government regulation of the economy but also of Americans, chiefly rural Americans, who objected to government interference in their lives. These two strands of conservatism were largely separate in the 1930s, but they’d already begun moving closer together, especially in their animosity toward the paternalism of liberalism.61