Taking office on March 4, 1933, in the midst of a deepening financial crisis, Roosevelt did not only seek to reassure Americans that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Reiterating his understanding that “This Nation asks for action, and action now,” he also called on them to reclaim the “temple” from the “money changers” and exercise military-like “discipline” to fight the depression. And he then quickly set himself and his newly appointed cabinet members to the urgent task of turning rallying cries and campaign promises into legislative proposals and government policies and programs. But what ensued entailed far more than a package of public policy initiatives.1
FDR and his “New Dealers”—the thousands of men and women who eagerly enlisted to build and staff the expanding federal departments and newly created agencies of what would forever be known as the New Deal—were setting out on a grand democratic experiment of renewal and transformation. The Harvard economist Gardiner Means, who left academe for a post in the Department of Agriculture, would say they were struggling to “find a way to make things work.” And the Treasury Department economist Edward Bernstein observed that that “spirit of innovation and experimentation was what made the New Deal click.” There were precedents, but most of what they did was improvisation. They came up with ideas, plans, and projects. They tried things out. They did not, they would not, they could not, stand still. Everything seemed to be at stake and everything seemed possible.2
Moreover, Americans had heard in their new President’s words more than simply a promise that government action was forthcoming. They heard a call to action. And their democratic impulses surged. They were not only ready to work at lifting themselves up. They welcomed the prospect of a grand experiment and intended to be more than the subjects of it. Taking up his post with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in Birmingham, Alabama, the young New Dealer John Beecher would recall that he encountered not resignation but readiness: “The ferment I discovered . . . was just tremendous. The people were ready, really, to take action.”3
Indeed, the majority of Americans would enthusiastically embrace the progressive possibilities that they believed FDR’s words projected. They would take up the jobs and labors that the New Deal created. They would organize themselves—as workers, as consumers, as citizens—to demand their rights. And they would make America freer, more equal, and more democratic.
President and people alike would overreach, make mistakes, and antagonize powerful interests and each other. But they did not often retreat—and they would repeatedly draw on their early improvisations and experiments to carry out renewed efforts and ensuing initiatives. They did not win everything they fought for. But they won far more than they had first imagined possible. And in the course of improvising, experimenting, working, and struggling, they would not only progressively transform the nation and themselves. They would also ready themselves for their rendezvous with history.
• • •
In less than a year and a half, Roosevelt not only secured passage of an extraordinary body of legislation. He also strengthened existing government agencies and established an unprecedented host of new ones, including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), National Recovery Administration (NRA), Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Public Works Administration (PWA), Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Civil Works Administration (CWA), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC).4
The nearly universal desire for action afforded FDR and the New Dealers significant space in which to act. However, powerful forces compelled them to make critical compromises. Businessmen were unpopular, but they still commanded industry and commerce, and while not necessarily averse to government action to instigate economic recovery, they opposed paying for it or allowing government to interfere in their managerial prerogatives. Democrats now reigned in Congress, but southerners headed key committees and, as much as they might want to send federal dollars down to Dixie, they opposed legislation that might undermine the South’s racial regimes. Moreover, Roosevelt and his colleagues were themselves so determined to pursue relief, recovery, reconstruction, and reform all at the same time that they sometimes burdened key initiatives with competing objectives.
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), establishing the NRA, provides a case in point. Modeled after World War I arrangements, the NRA was supposed to help revive manufacturing and commercial activity, raise workers’ purchasing power, and promote cooperation between capital and labor. To encourage business participation and prevent cutthroat competition, it suspended antitrust laws and created industry-wide councils of business leaders that were to issue codes regulating production, prices, and wages. To improve workers’ incomes and conditions of labor, as well as secure AFL approval (the crisis had already weakened the Federation’s attachment to voluntarism), it called for establishing Labor and Consumer Advisory Boards and stipulated in Section 7(a) that workers had “the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” And to create a universal standard for the industry-specific codes to follow, the NRA director, Hugh Johnson, secured agreement on a temporary “blanket code” that abolished child labor and set both a national minimum wage (30–40 cents an hour) and a maximum number of work hours (35–40 a week). FDR himself projected even more progressive possibilities when he said, on signing the NIRA into law: “no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages has any right to continue in this country.”5
The economy and many workers’ lives did improve, but the NRA would fail to produce either dramatic growth or class harmony. Hastily drafted codes inevitably caused trouble. Even more damaging, corporate executives—at the expense of small business interests and consumers—continually called the shots in writing the codes and regularly fixed prices higher than warranted. And still determined to resist unions, many of them took advantage of the vagueness of Section 7(a) to organize “captive” or company unions in their workplaces.6
The New Dealers had more success improving the state of agriculture. Instituting a system in which farmers voluntarily reduced their planted acreage and limited their production of basic commodities in return for government-guaranteed prices and subsidies (paid for by taxes on food processors), the AAA raised both agricultural prices and incomes. However, while midwestern family farmers saw real gains, many thousands of southern tenants and sharecroppers, black and white, saw no benefits when landowners refused to share government payments with them. Worse, when those landowners reduced their cultivated acreage, their renters and croppers were shoved off the land and into the ranks of the jobless and homeless.7
Nevertheless, Roosevelt and his New Dealers were initiating a revolution in American government and public life. Subjecting capital to public regulation, providing relief on a grand scale, and pursuing social-and industrial-democratic policies and programs, they were not just increasing the size and operations of government, but also, as FDR had envisioned, redrawing the nation’s constitutional order. So thoroughgoing an evolution of America’s purpose and promise had last been attempted after the Civil War, and prior to that only at the country’s founding.8
In the radical belief that citizens had to be secured against the powers of the state, the Founding Fathers had appended the Bill of Rights to the Constitution in 1791. Standing on their forebears’ shoulders, the New Dealers were now seeking to expand the reach of those fundamental civil and political rights and to augment them with social and economic rights. In a message to Congress in 1934, Roosevelt declared: “the security of the home, the security of livelihood, and the security of social insurance are . . . a minimum of the promise we can offer to the American people. They constitute a right which belongs to every individual and family willing to work.” At the same time, he and his colleagues sought to reposition government itself to serve as a defender of Americans against those who might attempt to obstruct or disable them in the exercise of their rights. In a September 1934 Fireside Chat, Roosevelt said: “I believe with Abraham Lincoln, that ‘The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.’ ”9
In that spirit, FDR and the New Dealers heavily invested in public-works projects, not only to quickly provide jobs for the jobless, but also to radically transform and improve the nation’s public infrastructure and public spaces. Here, too, they felt empowered by American ideals and precedents, but more than their nineteenth-century predecessors they were committed to “using government to foster economic development” in ways that would “benefit . . . ‘the people’ rather than ‘the interests.’ ” Enlisting a total of 3 million young men between 1933 and 1942, the CCC would “plant more than 2.3 billion trees . . . on 2.5 million acres of previously barren, denuded or unproductive land . . . slow soil erosion on 40 million acres of farmland . . . and develop 800 new state parks.” Employing 4.5 million people during the harshest months of 1933–34, the CWA “built or improved 500,000 miles of roads, 40,000 schools, over 3,500 playgrounds and athletic fields, and 1,000 airports.” And affording work to a total of 8.5 million people between 1935 and 1943, the WPA of the ensuing “Second New Deal” would upgrade 600,000 miles of rural roads, lay 67,000 miles of city streets, erect 78,000 new bridges and viaducts, construct 40,000 public buildings, and build several hundred airports. Concurrently, the PWA would underwrite construction of thousands of miles of roadways and an equally remarkable number of public buildings and structures such as schools, libraries, hospitals, post offices, state and municipal offices, bridges, and water and sewer systems—35,000 projects altogether—including the Boulder, Grand Coulee, and Bonneville dams out west, the Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge in New York, Skyline Drive in Virginia, and the Los Angeles water supply system. The TVA would realize a dazzling scheme of dams, reservoirs, environmental works, and community enterprises providing hydroelectric power and economic development to the long-neglected people of the Tennessee Valley region. And the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), created in 1935, would in just a few years enable the formation of more than 400 local power cooperatives, bringing affordable electricity to nearly 300,000 farms and rural households that corporate utilities had refused to serve. FDR’s “public works revolution” dramatically enhanced the state of the public weal and—placing the needs of the commonwealth above those of corporations—rendered powerful testimony to the possibility of pursuing public action for the public good.10
Mobilizing Americans not only in the millions, but also in all their diversity, the New Dealers were beginning to transform the nation in yet another fundamental way. Recognizing that racism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism, not to mention sexism, obstructed reform and denied the hopes and prayers of millions, many a New Dealer worked at reconstituting the “We” in “We the People.” Which was no easy task, especially regarding race. Southern officials, despite federal directives to the contrary, were to blatantly discriminate against blacks in distributing federal relief; southern businessmen effectively licensed themselves to pay African Americans less by securing regional wage differentials in the NRA codes; and southern congressmen unashamedly wrote discrimination into the new laws and programs—not only the NIRA, but also the later Social Security and National Labor Relations acts—by excluding from their coverage farm and household workers, who were predominantly black or, as in the Southwest, Latino. Moreover, Washington remained a segregated city.11
Nevertheless, the New Dealers made critical advances. FDR himself brought to D.C. a cohort that included Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor, the first woman ever to hold a cabinet-level appointment; Henry Morgenthau, Jr., as Treasury Secretary, only the second Jew ever to do so; Harold Ickes as Interior Secretary and PWA director, who, though white, had led the NAACP in Chicago; Harry Hopkins, who as FERA, CWA, and then WPA director would work strenuously to assure the well-being of the poor, indeed, to advance the idea “that relief was a matter of right . . . not charity”; and, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt as First Lady, who by her actions would break the mold of presidential wives and, through her many speeches and writings, ardently advocate the causes of women, labor, blacks, and the young. Together they further signaled that more than WASP men could govern the nation by enlisting thousands of Catholic and Jewish lawyers and professionals—most notably, the law-writing team of Tom Corcoran and Ben Cohen—to draft the new legislation and policies and head up the new agencies and programs.12
In that same vein, while FDR did not push civil rights legislation, he spoke out against racial violence and endorsed efforts to integrate government and the New Deal. In the same 1936 radio address in which he said, “We are still in the making,” he also stated: “it is well for us to remember that this America of ours is the product of no single race or creed or class.” And at historically black Howard University, he would say: “As far as humanly possible, the Government has followed the policy that among American citizens there should be no forgotten men and no forgotten races. It is a wise and truly American policy.”13
Some of his foremost New Dealers shocked and outraged southern sensibilities far more by their actions. Mrs. Roosevelt hosted black friends such as the NAACP head Walter White and the educator Mary McLeod Bethune, along with many other African Americans, at the White House. Secretary Ickes desegregated the Interior Department cafeteria, insisted that PWA-project contractors hire skilled black workers, and recruited African Americans to policymaking and administrative positions. And on assuming direction of the new WPA in May 1935, Harry Hopkins moved aggressively to enforce Roosevelt’s executive order banning discrimination from its operations—which included appointing Mary McLeod Bethune to direct the Office of Minority Affairs of the new National Youth Administration, from which post she “led” FDR’s so-called Black Cabinet.14
Furthermore, intent upon preparing Americans to stand strong and united to fight the Great Depression and, if history demanded it, European fascists and Japanese imperialists, Roosevelt himself proceeded to articulate a more inclusive vision of the American nation. Addressing the Federal Council of Churches in late 1933, he decried “lynch law” as a “vile form of collective murder,” urged the faithful to teach “the ideals of social justice,” and made clear his belief that government’s role in religious matters was to “guarantee” Americans, both “Gentile and Jewish,” the “right to worship God in their own way.” In fact, with events abroad and at home in mind, he regularly reaffirmed the country’s fundamental commitment to religious freedom. When antagonists attacked him, claiming that his ancestors were Jews, he refused to dignify anti-Semitism: “In the dim distant past,” he said, “they may have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants—what I am more interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God—I hope they were both.”15
Recognizing the impossibility of doing so, Roosevelt did not seek to eliminate the immigration quota system. But he radically recast the official view of “non-Nordic” Europeans by rhetorically weaving them into a shared American narrative. Speaking in predominantly Catholic and blue-collar Green Bay, Wisconsin, in August 1934, he told a huge outdoor crowd:
[T]hroughout Europe—your ancestors and mine—had suffered from the . . . unjust Governments of their home land, and they were driven by deep desire to find not alone security, but also enlarged opportunity . . . [They were] a mixed population, differing often in language . . . external customs and . . . habits of thought. But in one thing they were alike. They shared a deep purpose to rid themselves forever of the jealousies, the prejudices, the intrigues and the violence . . . that disturbed their lives on the other side of the ocean.
Still, he said, the story did not end there: “the average man had to fight for his rights . . . against those forces which disregard human cooperation and human rights in seeking that kind of individual profit which is gained at the expense of his fellows.” Indeed, linking the new “great national movement” to the struggles of their forebears, FDR left the story open-ended.16
African Americans heard their story in his words. Recalling how she would race around to find someone with a radio “so as not to miss anything the president might say,” the black Georgian Viola Elder stated how she imagined herself seated with him in conversation “in his living room.” And based on fieldwork in rural Mississippi in the mid-1930s, the sociologist Hortense Powdermaker observed: “Roosevelt has become the representative and symbol of [southern black] hopes. When he first spoke of the forgotten man, most . . . in the community thought he meant the Negro. Some still think so, and feel that with crop diversification and Federal relief, the forgotten man has begun to be remembered.” Furthermore, she wrote, “Although they have no voice in the government, and find no security through its legal institutions, government activities arouse their lively interest and something close to confidence,” and for these Negro men and women, “the Federal administration has combined the rather incongruous elements of paternal benevolence and revolutionary change.”17
Despite its shortcomings, the early New Deal afforded southern blacks a lifeline and the new Civil Works Administration of 1933–34 provided higher wages than some had ever received. That very spring, the blues singer Joe Pullum would express the sense of liberation that so worried propertied southern whites:
CWA, look what you done for me:
You brought my good gal back, and lifted Depression off-a-me.
I was hungry and broke, because I wasn’t drawing any pay.
But in stepped President Roosevelt, Lord, with his mighty CWA.18
New Deal initiatives would also promote a richer, more democratic Americanism. While the NRA, with its “Blue Eagle” symbol and “We Do Our Part” slogan, was rallying popular support for its efforts by way of campaigns and parades that portrayed economic regulation and industrial democracy as patriotic pursuits, the CCC was beginning to recondition not only America’s landscape, but also the first of its ultimately 3,000,000 young recruits (200,000 of them African Americans). Laboring outdoors, eating good meals, and receiving proper medical care, FDR’s “Soil Soldiers” would grow fitter, larger, and healthier. The experience would transform them more than physically, however. Offering courses in vocational skills and conservation, dispatching them to locales far from home, and—though camps were segregated by race—bringing them together in all their variety to remake the environment and themselves, it would sow new understandings of teamwork and citizenship. Bud Wilbur, an upstate New Yorker, said of his CCC company in Nevada, “There were Jewish kids, Italian kids, Irish kids, and probably the best mix of nationalities you could find,” and the enrollee James Danner told FDR in 1936 of how “second-generation Poles, Slovaks, Italians, Hungarians, all are . . . finding a new pride in saying, ‘We are Americans!’ ”19
The New Dealers clearly aimed to empower laboring people. The AAA sought to cultivate “grassroots democracy” by providing for local referenda to set production quotas and land-use planning committees that farmers themselves were to elect—both of which afforded southern black landowners opportunities to vote for the first time ever. Responding to AFL demands, and hoping to counter the power of capital through “industrial democracy” rather than by severely increasing the power of the state, Senator Robert Wagner of New York, the “Legislative Pilot of the New Deal,” insisted the NIRA include Section 7(a) guaranteeing workers the right to organize, and when it proved unenforceable, he would take the lead in advancing a more authoritative law. And not only did the NRA exhort shoppers to buy only at those stores displaying its “Blue Eagle” symbol (indicating they had signed on to the program), but as it became ever more apparent that even those businesses were not holding down their prices, administration officials such as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell began to call on middle-class consumer advocacy groups to “organize” more aggressively and popularly in order to more effectively pressure industry and government. FDR himself praised the “impulse among consumers to enter the industrial market place equipped with sufficient organization to insist upon fair prices and honest sales.” Moreover, he would admit in 1935: “New laws, in themselves, do not bring a millennium.”20
• • •
By 1936, Roosevelt had mobilized the nation. Indeed, reinvigorating popular hopes, aspirations, and energies, he had also unleashed a great democratic surge in which workers, farmers, women, minorities, intellectuals, students, and others were challenging the propertied and powerful in favor of extending and deepening freedom, equality, and democracy.
Working people, in particular, embraced FDR. Forever recalling how he “lifted their spirits” and restored their belief in themselves, they carried his image in demonstrations and hung it in their homes, often right alongside one of Jesus. Broadway lyricists and Mississippi Delta blues artists alike composed songs in his honor. Black families named their children Franklin and Eleanor. Speaking for laboring men and women of every race and region, a white South Carolina millhand wrote that Roosevelt is “the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch.” Yet the relationship involved more than appreciation and affection.21
Rexford Tugwell would observe years later that somehow “ordinary” people understood Roosevelt better than anyone and, doing so, they “adopted” him as their “champion.” There was, however, even more to it. Doing so enabled them to act in their own behalf in dramatic, new ways. Hearing talk of “fulfilling American ideals,” action “from the bottom up,” and “economic rights,” they rallied to FDR’s New Deal by joining together to reclaim—or, for the first time, lay claim to—America. Responding to a Fireside Chat invitation to tell him of their “troubles,” workers, who made up 46 percent of all of those who wrote, sent him millions of letters. And agreeing with him or not, their words regularly confirmed that they understood that America’s greatness depended not simply on his actions, but also on their own determination and solidarity—or, as the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph would declare, that “Freedom is never given. It is won.”22
In fact, American workers moved even faster than the President to take up the struggle—and they were prepared to take it further.
Signed into law in June 1933, the NIRA—titled labor’s “Magna Carta” by AFL president William Green—instigated almost 2 million workers, skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled, to flood into the labor movement. Referring to it as “a virtual uprising . . . for union membership,” an AFL executive council memo observed that workers themselves “held mass meetings and sent word they wanted to be organized.” Viewing it as “a picture of the opening of the gates of freedom,” the Plumbers and Steam Fitters’ head, Thomas Burke, jubilantly wrote: “Men who never dared consider joining a union now come forward openly, eagerly and joyously.” And the Russian-Jewish immigrant and ILGWU organizer Rose Pesotta would warmly recall that the “Unorganized workers who had never before raised the question of their rights . . . and who had accepted whatever they were given as inevitable, suddenly awakened to the fact that they were part of a great democratic nation.”23
In just one year’s time the UMW leapt from 50,000 to 300,000 members; the ACWA from 60,000 to 120,000; and the ILGWU from 40,000 to 200,000. Making it all the more challenging, the industrial unions remained committed to interethnic and interracial labor solidarity, even in the face of workers’ own persistent prejudices. Pesotta, for one, would proudly recall the sense of unity she felt when, at the 1933 ILGWU convention, she and her union brothers and sisters moved the entire gathering from one hotel to another rather than tolerate “Jim Crowism.”24
Industrial labor organizers and activists promoted anew labor’s “Americanism” of democratic rights and material security. And those ideals inspired workers in every region and in all their diversity to embrace the New Deal, sign union cards, and carry the Stars and Stripes into action. Rose Pesotta would recount hearing young Mexican dressmakers in Los Angeles speak of how those ideals made them want to become “American citizens”—and notably, 1934 saw a “marked acceleration in initial requests for naturalization papers” from the Mexican-born.25
Craft unions expanded, too, as hundreds of thousands of semiskilled workers in the steel, rubber, auto, textiles, and other mass-production industries sought admission. Blinkered by their own prejudice, most AFL leaders remained skeptical of semiskilled “ethnics,” thereby compounding the challenge of incorporating their vast numbers to their skilled brotherhoods. Pressed to do something, and hoping thereby to restrain the newcomers’ exuberant militancy, they set up temporary “federal unions” under their own direct authority—all of which served to anger their industrial-union colleagues, frustrate the workers themselves, and enable fast-acting corporate managers to corral eager-to-be-organized employees into company unions that, doubling their memberships to 2.5 million, actually grew faster than labor’s own.26
With or without the federation’s approval, workers acted. A total of 2,500,000 of them carried out work stoppages in 1933–34, turning some into large-scale events. Led by radicals, Toledo autoworkers, Minneapolis teamsters, and San Francisco longshoremen staged strikes that spring and summer which—meeting with violence from bosses and local officials, but garnering the active support of other unions and unemployed councils—resulted in city-wide battles in Toledo and Minneapolis and a general strike in San Francisco that shut down the entire Bay Area and every port on the West Coast. Then, in September, 400,000 textile workers from New England to the Deep South, proudly bearing the American flag, struck for their democratic rights and to secure improvements in wages and working conditions. However, they, too, encountered—in locales as different as Rhode Island and the Carolinas—business intransigence and the use of deadly force by guards, local police, and state militias.27
Though Section 7(a) of the NIRA did not cover agricultural workers, they, too, organized. In California, 50 thousand Mexican, Filipino, and Anglo migrant farm laborers and cannery workers united to confront employers and police, who viciously answered their demands with terror and force. And in Arkansas and surrounding states, thousands of courageous tenants and sharecroppers, black and white together, joined the Christian-inspired and socialist-organized Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) seeking redress for their treatment by planters and the AAA.28
Labor led the democratic surge, but more than workers asserted themselves. Upper midwestern family farmers backed the Wisconsin Progressive and Minnesota Farmer-Labor parties, both of which promised to back the New Deal.29
Spurred by labor’s new energies and the Roosevelt administration’s calls for consumer activism, middle- and working-class women mobilized. National Consumers’ League activists not only lobbied for additional regulation of food prices, but also aligned themselves with both black groups fighting the racism of the new industrial codes and unions demanding enforcement of the NIRA’s Section 7(a). And New York housewives, ever more vocally protesting rising prices, organized into neighborhood “councils” and gave birth to a national “housewives movement” when, in response to soaring meat prices, they initiated boycotts of butcher shops in the spring of 1935 that quickly spread across the country and came to include women of every background.30
Meanwhile, in contrast to the 1920s, writers and artists were now feeling, as the composer Aaron Copland would recall, “the desire to be ‘American.’ ” And they set out, as the writer Alfred Kazin put it, “to recover America as an idea.” Even Communist intellectuals, who had previously scorned both liberal democracy and other leftists, took up the project in 1935 after receiving welcomed new party directives from Moscow. They, too, now worked to form a broad antifascist “Popular Front” and a “cultural front” to promote the causes of labor and democracy.31
Some intellectuals took to the road to witness and document developments. Others turned to the past. No one expressed the radical-democratic spirit of the day better than the worker and labor organizer turned poet Carl Sandburg, whose book The People, Yes was as affirmative and embracing as its title. But whether reporting on the state of the nation and the “forgotten man” or recovering America’s progressive tradition, all were giving voice to experiences and ideas long suppressed by conservatives or mockingly dismissed by debunkers that might further energize the nation’s democratic impulse.32
Black political-intellectual life also experienced a new ferment. Still attached to the party of Lincoln, most African Americans voted for Hoover in 1932. But as the New Deal began to take off, black leaders saw new possibilities emerging. The NAACP president Joel Spingarn, himself white, convened an August 1933 gathering of the most promising young black intellectuals to discuss how they might now address the needs of African Americans. Known as the Second Amenia Conference, the meeting revealed a division between those who favored continuing the specific quest for civil and political rights and those like the radical Howard University social scientists Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche who wanted to develop an approach linked to labor and the Left. Both strategies would be pursued, but somewhat separately. Led by its new executive secretary, Walter White, and its chief counsel, Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP would challenge racism and segregation by lobbying for federal antilynching legislation, by suing southern states to honor the “equal” in “separate but equal,” and by demanding an end to the “all-white primaries” and poll taxes that effectively disfranchised black citizens. And seeking to secure social and economic changes as well, more radical figures such as Harris and Bunche joined with A. Philip Randolph and others to organize the National Negro Congress (NNC) in 1935.33
Southern blacks faced great danger in confronting white authority. And yet many did so. Thousands enlisted in unions like the STFU and UMW. Some not only bravely banded together in “political clubs,” but also daringly tried, as early as 1934, to participate in the all-white Democratic primaries of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas. Meanwhile, 400,000 others headed north, where they quickly registered to vote and fervently contributed to making blacks a significant urban political force.34
Traditionally conservative, college students in the tens and, soon, hundreds of thousands also mobilized and began to stage demonstrations in favor of causes from antimilitarism to civil rights and civil liberties. Pioneering the Popular Front, the Socialist Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) and the Communist National Student League (NSL) joined with dozens of other young people’s organizations in 1934 to create the American Youth Congress (AYC), which would come to include a politically diverse and both multifaith and multiracial array of youth organizations representing a total membership of 4.5 million. While openly critical of the President for not providing adequate employment and educational opportunities (ironically, FDR himself had urged “American youth of all parties” to “Unite and Challenge!”), its leaders would find a real champion in the First Lady.35
Most Americans did not march or protest. But the majority—that is, of those who could vote—showed their support for Roosevelt at the midterm elections of 1934 by going against historical expectations and giving him and his party even larger majorities in both houses of Congress.