CHAPTER 8 The son of a Presbyterian minister, Woodrow Wilson took the presidential oath of office in 1913 determined to live up to his new commitment. Indeed, his high moral principles were tested, for it took much skill to keep the United States at peace in a world moving toward war. World War I (also known as “The War to End All Wars,” and “The Great War”) raged in Europe from 1914 to 1918, and resulted in the end of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian Empires.
After the devastating war, the 1929 stock market crash sent Americans plummeting into the Great Depression, though the war was by no means the only reason why the nation faced an economic downturn. During Prohibition, bootlegging made money for organized crime figures and even more respectable businessmen, but it did little for the national economy. For nearly a century, single-crop farming had ruined the soil and contributed to cycles of drought and flooding in America’s farm belt. Finally, the unequal distribution of wealth and surpluses in business corporations meant that farmers and laborers were not able to purchase the goods being produced.
IN JUNE 1914, Austro-Hungarian archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated by Serbian nationalists as they rode through the streets of Sarajevo in Bosnia. It provoked hostilities in Europe and fostered the combat readiness of many armies put on alert.
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RUSSIA, AS THE PROTECTOR OF GREEK-ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS, feared that Austria intended to annex Serbia and wanted to settle the issue in the Hague Tribunal (a court of arbitration). Austria refused. Germany backed Austria, for the two countries were allies.
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ON JULY 28, 1914, Austria declared war on Serbia, and this caused Russia, an ally of Serbia, to mobilize. Germany sent an ultimatum to Russia to halt its mobilization or face German action. Russia refused, and Germany then declared war on Russia on August 1. As if this wasn’t enough wrangling between world powers, France, a Russian ally, refused to urge the Russians to stop. France wanted to regain the Alsace-Lorraine region, which it had lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Germany declared war on France on August 3, and also invaded Luxembourg and Belgium.
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FEW REALIZE THAT World War I was fought between countries whose rulers were relatives. King George V of England was the first cousin of Kaiser Wilheim of Germany and Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Queen Victoria, grandmother to these royal children, was their determined matchmaker, believing that if she arranged international marriages it would help bring about world peace.
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THE FRENCH JOINED the fighting, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Russia in August 1914. President Wilson was committed to neutrality while the other countries began to fight the Great War, named World War I years later. Eventually thirty-two nations became embroiled in the conflict.
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IN WORLD WAR I, the French-British-Russian alliance became known as the Allied Forces. Germany and Austria-Hungary formed the Central Powers.
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BRITAIN’S SEA POWER had effectively halted German shipping, but this created problems for the United States, which had supplied food and arms to both sides. The British tightened their blockade, and as Germany’s supply routes were closed off, the Germans faced starvation unless they worked around it.
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BY APRIL 1917, more than $2 billion worth of goods had been sold by the United States to England and the Allied countries. The German navy used submarines, called U-boats, to torpedo vessels supplying England. Unfortunately, this included U.S. ships.
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WHILE THE GERMAN embassy had issued a warning to travelers to cross the Atlantic at their own risk, many gave little heed to that admonition. Only one passenger canceled his ticket of all the vessels that were traveling.
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IN APRIL 1915, the British Cunard liner Lusitania prepared to leave New York harbor. On May 7, the Lusitania was passing Ireland on its way to England when a German submarine attacked, sinking the ship with 1,198 passengers onboard, including 126 Americans. Germany insisted that the Lusitania carried munitions; the United States denied the allegations (though it would later be learned that there were cases of shells, cartridges, and small-arms ammunition onboard).
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EVEN THOUGH THE ship’s sinking enraged Americans, who felt the Germans had attacked a defenseless civilian vessel, the Wilson administration was determined to keep the country out of war. The United States forced Germany to modify its method of submarine warfare, but in no time at all, the Germans sunk a French steamer, causing the loss of additional American lives.
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WILSON WON RE-ELECTION in 1916 while the war in Europe raged on.
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ALTHOUGH MANY FORMER presidents are buried at the National Cemetery, which is near the national capital of Washington, DC, there is only one president buried in Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson, who is buried at the Bethlehem Chapel of the Washington Cathedral. He passed away on February 3, 1924.
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THE NUMBERS OF casualties mounted: in the Battle of the Somme, 1.25 million men on both sides were killed, wounded, or captured; the Battle of Verdun resulted in 1 million French and German casualties.
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WILSON WARNED THE GERMAN COMMAND of the United States’ strong opposition to unrestricted submarine warfare. Therefore, when Germany announced that, effective February 1, 1917, unrestricted submarine warfare would be launched on all shipping to Great Britain, the president had little choice but to break off diplomatic relations. At Wilson’s request, a number of Latin American countries also broke off relations with Germany.
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IN A SPEECH BEFORE CONGRESS, Wilson suggested that if American ships were attacked, he would be forced to act. Not heeding the U.S. signals, the Germans sent secret telegrams to Mexico promising an alliance in return for help in defeating the United States should it enter the war. The British intercepted a telegram from Arthur Zimmerman, the German foreign minister to Mexico, which encouraged Mexican attacks upon the United States, offering the return of Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico in exchange.
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THE RED SCARE resulted in America’s obsession with Communism following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. In 1919, the U.S. House of Representatives refused to seat Socialist representative from Wisconsin, Victor L. Berger, because of his socialism, German ancestry, and antiwar views.
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GERMAN U-BOATS TORPEDOED two American ships (the Illinois and the City of Memphis) on March 16, 1917, and Wilson asked Congress to declare war. The United States officially declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.
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GENERAL JOHN PERSHING, having led the force that took on Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa in New Mexico, was given command of American expeditionary forces in Europe. But unlike its allies, the United States had no large standing army to send overseas, nor was the nation equipped with planes, ships, and other military equipment.
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UNLIKE THE CIVIL WAR, no one could buy his way out of military service in this conflict. Thus, the first American troops arrived in France in June 1917—approximately 200,000 Americans in training.
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AMERICANS BEGAN LEARNING about poison gas, hand grenades, and demolition when they went to war. Trench warfare provided some basic protection against enemy fire, but not nearly enough. Enemy soldiers raided the trenches, killing unsuspecting soldiers, and the mud and dampness wreaked havoc on the soldiers’ health. Penicillin and other antibiotics didn’t exist, so even minor cuts were potentially lethal.
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THE TIDE WAS starting to turn against the Germans. They had failed to destroy the British navy through submarine warfare and began sustaining heavy losses in their U-boat fleet, around the same time the Allies’ shipbuilding efforts increased. In December 1917, Russia signed a peace agreement with the Austro-German negotiators, essentially ending eastern-front fighting.
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THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION had occurred after Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March. Withdrawal from the Great War was a cardinal point in Bolshevik policy.
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IN JANUARY 1918, President Wilson proposed his peace plan, but the war continued.
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IN MAY, ALLIED VICTORY came in the tiny French village of Cantigny as Americans, in their first offensive of the war, took the town in less than an hour, aiding their British and French counterparts.
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THE GERMANS LAUNCHED a major offensive along the Chemin des Dames Ridge, and the Americans defeated the Germans at Belleau Wood, a small hunting ground, in June. In fact, U.S. artillery hit Belleau with everything it had, ravaging the area with shells and fire.
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NEITHER THE BRITISH nor the German press (including official dispatches) were forthcoming in their reports of the war. The title of Erich Maria Remarque’s great novel, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was a German army dispatch on a day when thousands of soldiers were dying in the trench warfare of World War I.
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ON SEPTEMBER 26, 1918, American and French troops launched the Meuse-Argonne offensive in an effort to cut off the Germans between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest, and British forces breached the Hindenburg line the next day. The Germans had fortified this line for four years, reinforcing bunkers with concrete and turning towns into virtual forts.
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DESPITE THE PREPARATIONS by the Germans, the fresh supply of Allied troops, combined with overhead fighting power, overwhelmed them. It took much forward movement and military strategy on land, in the air, and through naval blockade, but the Hindenburg line was broken on October 5, sealing Allied supremacy. The Allies were gaining on the enemy. By November 1918, the American Expeditionary Forces numbered nearly 2 million.
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ON NOVEMBER 11, 1918, Germany and the Allies reached an armistice agreement, thus ending years of heavy fighting and world rancor.
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MANY OF THOSE who’d survived the war died of influenza as a worldwide epidemic struck. But victory was at hand. From January through June of 1919, the Allies discussed the treaty, which came to be known as the Treaty of Versailles. Members of the Big Four—Georges Clemenceau of France, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, David Lloyd George of Britain, and Woodrow Wilson of the United States—met in the Hall of Mirrors at the French palace.
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THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES changed the map of Europe. One provision was the formation of a League of Nations, based on President Wilson’s ideas to achieve lasting peace and world justice. However, for the League of Nations to truly effect peace, it required all members’ assistance. If some withheld their cooperation, the league had no way of enforcing its will.
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THE ALLIES GAVE Germany the ultimatum to either sign the Treaty of Versailles agreement or return to battle. As a result, protests broke out in Germany and Hungary, but Germany was strong-armed into signing the treaty. Although the Treaty of Versailles solved some of Europe’s problems, it created others; the Allies had come to Versailles looking to extract the cost of the war from the Central Powers.
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THE UNITED STATES Senate didn’t ratify the treaty, and the United States didn’t join the League of Nations—this alone guaranteed the League’s failure.
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THE FOURTEEN POINTS was the name given to the proposals of President Woodrow Wilson to establish a lasting peace following the Allied victory in World War I. Wilson outlined these points in his address to a joint session of Congress in January 1918, giving further evidence of his moral leadership.
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OHIO HAS SUPPLIED more presidents to our country than any other state, eight presidents in all! Aside from William Henry Harrison (who was born in Virginia, and moved to Ohio when it was still a territory), all of these presidents were born and raised in Ohio: Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Warren G. Harding.
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AS THE NEW DECADE BEGAN, Warren G. Harding took over the presidency after campaigning to return America to normalcy. On November 2, 1920, radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast the presidential election results. This spawned not only a new industry, but also a new way to disseminate news about the nation, its leaders, and its current events.
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WARREN G. HARDING was the first president to address the nation using radio broadcasts.
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HARDING’S TRUSTED ADVISORS sullied the administration with numerous scandals. But before Harding could be impeached for any wrongdoing, he died in office in 1923, amid speculation of foul play.
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THE TEAPOT DOME was the most famous of Harding’s scandals. Interior Secretary Albert Fall was convicted of selling oil from the U.S. Navy’s huge oil reserve at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and pocketing the money received for it (he also got a herd of cattle as part of the deal). He served ten months in jail.
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CALVIN COOLIDGE TOOK the oath of office and restored trust in the executive branch after Harding’s death.
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ONE DAY WHILE COOLIDGE WAS PRESIDENT, his wife was too ill to go to church on Sunday. Coolidge went without her. When they sat down to dinner that night, Mrs. Coolidge was feeling better and wanted to talk about the sermon she had missed earlier that day. She asked her husband what the subject of the minister’s sermon had been that morning. Known as a tight-lipped man, all Coolidge said was, “Sin.” That answer didn’t satisfy his wife, and she pressed him to tell her what the minister had said about sin. “He was against it,” was Coolidge’s reply.
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THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL, named after an oil field in Wyoming, involved United States Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall leasing the rights to public oil fields to private oil companies (without competitive bidding) in exchange for thousands of dollars. Fall was found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison, making him the first cabinet member to go to jail for his actions while in office.
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THE ROARING TWENTIES received this distinction because of the outrageousness of the times. Prohibition restricted many people’s lifestyles, tempting them to disobey the law. Illegal “speakeasy” bars flourished, along with gangsters and organized crime.
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THE 1920s SERVED as the golden era for New York theater, which in prior decades had consisted of farces, melodramas, and musicals, but nothing of much literary merit. The time spawned playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill and Noel Coward.
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A NEW STYLE of music hit the nation with its African American folk rhythms combined with popular and European music. W. C. Handy, a black musician, was unable to attract a music publisher for his song “St. Louis Blues,” so he published it himself in 1914. Forever after, his sound was known as jazz.
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THE JAZZ ERA, which many say first took hold in New Orleans, flourished with talented musicians such as Louis Armstrong. As African Americans migrated north for better industrial jobs, it caught hold in Chicago and in Harlem, a section of New York City that was undergoing its own renaissance.
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AFTER KDKA BROADCAST the election results, radio took hold. Prior to World War I, amateur operators in dozens of cities regularly transmitted music and speech, but the war ended all that. In 1925, WSM Radio in Nashville, Tennessee, began airing barn dance music, which would later become known as the Grand Ole Opry. In 1927, Congress expanded the Radio Act of 1912 to reflect this new industry, no longer run by amateurs but by commercial enterprises.
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IN 1934, THE industry created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to consider license applications and renewals for radio stations. The FCC also set guidelines for obscenity and false claims in advertising.
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FOR YEARS THE Anti-Saloon League of America (ASL) had urged saloonkeepers to give up their businesses. By 1900, millions of men and women regarded drinking alcoholic beverages as a dangerous threat to families and society. On December 22, 1917, Congress submitted to the states the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” By January 1919, ratification was complete.
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THE 1925 TRIAL of a biology teacher named John Scopes, who had been arrested for teaching theories of evolution that contradicted the biblical version of creation, was another famous broadcasting moment.
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WHETHER SCOPES RECEIVED a fair trial (a prayer opened each court session, and expert evolutionists were banned from taking the stand) is unclear. Scopes was found guilty, but was fined only $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court later overturned the local court’s decision, citing a technicality. Although it never reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the Scopes trial served to showcase many freedoms in the Bill of Rights—the freedoms of speech, religion, and the separation of church and state.
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THE 1924 IMMIGRATION ACT became another controversial political issue stemming from the Red Scare, for it set quotas on the number of immigrants allowed into the United States. Congress limited immigration to 2 percent of each nationality present in the United States in the year 1880. This year was chosen mainly because at that time there were very few people of Far Eastern and East European descent present in the United States, thus severely limiting further influx.
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THE IMMIGRATION ACT of 1965 put an end to national quotas for immigration, making individual talents and skills or close relationships with U.S. citizens a better basis for admittance.
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WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN the 1800s were very limited—husbands had the legal right to exercise total authority over their wives. Married women couldn’t retain their own wages, control their own property, or even keep custody of their children if they sought a divorce.
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IN THE PROSPEROUS POSTWAR ERA, women stashed conservative clothing in their closets and wore dresses that clung to their bodies and skirts above the knee. Such fashionable women became known as “flappers.” They cut their hair shorter in a “bobbed” style and enjoyed a new sense of freedom not granted to prior generations of young ladies. These women were the first to smoke and the first to dance “wildly” with the Charleston, popular at that time.
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WOMEN ALSO BEGAN to enter careers beyond the limits of nursing or teaching during this time, for typewriting skills yielded further job prospects for millions of women—far more than worked around the turn of the century.
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EMMA WILLARD, self-taught in algebra, geometry, geography, and history, tutored young ladies and petitioned the New York legislature to open a girls’ school. She didn’t stop there, though; her strides led to female teachers, more competitive salaries, and financing for women’s education.
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WOMEN WHO HAD tremendous impact throughout American history include Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member as secretary of labor during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in Congress; and Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to serve in Congress.
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THOUGH OBERLIN COLLEGE in Ohio had been the first in America to admit women in 1837, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, carried out Willard’s educational philosophy. Mount Holyoke was founded by Mary Lyon the same year as Oberlin College.
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ELIZABETH CADY STANTON began crusading as an abolitionist, but her work furthered women’s rights as well. Stanton joined Lucretia Coffin Mott, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony in speaking out in favor of a woman’s right to vote, a right once granted by some colonies in Colonial America but lost years later.
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CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT proved to be a talented organizer and served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
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THESE WOMEN REFORMERS became known as suffragettes, and the American suffragist movement scored its major achievement following the victory in World War I.
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IN 1919, CONGRESS approved the Nineteenth Amendment providing that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The amendment was ratified August 18, 1920.
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ANOTHER IMPORTANT EFFORT benefiting women was Margaret Sanger’s crusade for contraceptives and the newly coined phrase “birth control.” As a nurse in some of the poorer sections of New York City, Sanger saw women overburdened with more children than they could care for. She believed that oversized families spawned poverty, and that in any case, women should have rights over their own bodies.
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SANGER OPENED the country’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, but those who viewed her activities and the information she disseminated as obscene thwarted her efforts. But Sanger wasn’t deterred easily, and in 1952, she persuaded a friend to back research that ultimately led to “the pill,” or oral contraceptives.
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IT WAS NOT until 1965 that the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Connecticut’s law banning the dissemination of birth control information and prescriptions.
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THE POPULARITY OF Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper proved in the 1800s that Americans craved quality literature. Irving’s The Sketch Book contained stories such as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Its subsequent publication in London made Irving the first internationally recognized American writer.
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EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE had begun in New England, but with the success of Irving and Cooper, New York became the literary center of America.
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A FEW WRITERS known as the Concord Group, mostly followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson, put New England back on the literary map. Emerson and other transcendentalists maintained steadfast opposition to the overemphasis on material progress. Henry David Thoreau embraced much of this in his work, especially in his most famous book, Walden, describing the two years that he spent living as a virtual recluse in a simple cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts.
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FOUR OTHER TITANS of American literature—novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, poet Walt Whitman, and poet/short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe—defined the craft of writing.
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EDGAR ALLAN POE, a desperate man with bouts of alcoholism, depression, and unemployment, wrote some of his best work (including the mysterious and the macabre) just to survive, such as the detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It was the publication of The Raven and Other Poems, however, that set him apart as an internationally acclaimed poet.
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WALT WHITMAN WROTE in rhythmic free verse about controversial subjects, but in many cases espoused democratic ideals. He self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 as a collection of twelve long poems.
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ON MAY 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became famous for the first solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, which took thirty-three hours and thirty minutes.
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LINDBERGH WAS AWARDED the Congressional Medal of Honor and in 1954, he earned a Pulitzer Prize for his book bearing the same name as his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis.
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MARK TWAIN of Missouri came to public notice with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi.
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MARK TWAIN’S REAL name was Samuel Clemens.
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EMILY DICKINSON WAS reticent in life (indeed, she lived out much of her life as a recluse in her Amherst, Massachusetts, home), but after her death she came to be regarded as one of America’s finest poets.
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IN THE POSTWAR PROSPERITY, some writers yearned to return to the simpler life with basic values. These were known as “the Lost Generation.” Ernest Hemingway was one of them, and his novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms both appeared in the late 1920s.
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IN 1954, HEMINGWAY received the Nobel Prize for literature, but sadly, he succumbed to severe depression and alcoholism and committed suicide in 1961.
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T.S. ELIOT, another of the Lost Generation, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.
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SINCLAIR LEWIS CHRONICLED the career of a corrupt evangelist in Elmer Gantry and became the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize, which he was awarded in 1930.
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PEARL S. BUCK was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1938. The Good Earth, a novel about a northern Chinese peasant family, is considered to be her masterwork.
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THE NYSE BEGAN in 1792 when a group of stock and bond brokers gathered in downtown New York City to trade stocks, bonds, and other instruments of finance. Two years later, the trading moved indoors on the corner of Wall and Water Streets. Then in 1817, the exchange moved closer to its present Wall Street location. It drew up a more formal constitution and soon became the country’s center of finance. In 1863, it became known as the NYSE.
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THROUGHOUT THE 1920s, Americans speculated in stocks in record numbers. When they didn’t have the disposable cash, they invested their life savings as well as borrowed money. Those who were highly leveraged lost everything when market jitters began on October 24, 1929. The massive selling spree of millions of shares collapsed businesses and sent investors and brokers scrambling.
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ON OCTOBER 29, 1929, the market hit bottom. “Black Tuesday,” the single worst day for the NYSE, was largely thought to have caused the Great Depression, but truly the economy was growing at a rate that was far too fast to sustain. Another cause was increased industrialization and wealth remaining in the hands of a few.
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THROUGHOUT PROHIBITION, drought in the Midwest, and increasing economic inequality, three presidents—popularly known as the “do-nothing presidents”—avoided any government intervention, preferring to let business and its leaders take care of their own affairs. These three presidents were Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, who had been elected in 1928.
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PRESIDENT HOOVER WAS the first Quaker president of the United States. Quakers are forbidden by their religion from supporting or participating in war or any other acts of violence. This is called pacifism. Hoover himself was not a pacifist. He thought that war was acceptable if waged in defense of one’s country.
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THE ONCE-ORPHANED HOOVER was a self-made businessman and a millionaire, and plenty of voters saw him as the quintessential American success story. Hoover had even distributed food as Wilson’s national food administrator in World War I. But as the effects of the Depression deepened, many unfairly blamed Hoover and lost faith in his policies of economic isolationism.
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OTHER NATIONS, such as Great Britain, were reaching out to the poor with payments to the unemployed and the elderly. Most Americans began to believe that their own government owed them some form of assistance. But President Hoover, though sympathetic, held fast to his principle of individual responsibility.
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CLEARLY, HOOVER FAILED to grasp the extent and severity of the problem. When in March 1930 he claimed that the worst was just about over, the unemployment rate rose, more businesses failed, banks closed, and many people defaulted on their mortgages and lost their homes.
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CONGRESS TRIED TO respond to the economic crisis with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that raised tariff rates to record levels. Although hesitant to put his name on the legislation, President Hoover signed it anyway. The intention was to increase sales of U.S. products by raising the cost of imported goods, but the measure was a miserable failure. An international trade war broke out, drastically reducing sales of U.S.−made goods overseas. As international trade was weakened, foreign countries plunged into what was now a worldwide depression.
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BY 1932, APPROXIMATELY 12 MILLION PEOPLE were out of work compared to 4 million two years before.
BECAUSE OF THE president’s lack of government assistance, his name was given to the growing wretched shantytowns—called “Hoovervilles”—while those who had only newspapers to protect them from the cold were said to use “Hoover blankets.” The president once hailed for his humanitarian gestures was now ridiculed for his failure to help the American people.
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IN MAY 1932, thousands of World War I veterans, once promised a bonus from the army, walked, rode the rails, or otherwise made their way to the nation’s capital to demand the payment, which they needed immediately, not in the mid-1940s when the payments were scheduled to occur. Congress turned them down, and that July, Hoover lost patience with the contingent of former soldiers and ordered the standing U.S. Army, led by General Douglas MacArthur, to drive them away with tear gas.
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WHEN FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT got married in 1905, it was a family affair in more ways than one. Wealthy Americans at the time had a habit of marrying distant cousins (so distant that they were really related in name only). Roosevelt’s own father and mother were sixth cousins. He married his fifth cousin, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, and another fifth cousin, President Theodore Roosevelt, gave the bride away (he was her uncle).
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FACING THE 1932 ELECTION, the Republicans didn’t want to take the blame for the Depression, and so they renominated Hoover as their candidate. The Democrats chose Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had first earned a seat in Congress from New York in 1910 as a liberal Democrat.
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FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT had been crippled by polio in 1921. Though he made progress with his recovery, Roosevelt would forever be confined to a wheelchair (however, since it was before the advent of television, most Americans were not aware of this). The public rarely saw him sitting in a wheelchair or using the steel braces he needed to walk. By common, unspoken consent, the press almost never photographed Roosevelt while he was in motion.
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FDR’S POLIO STRUGGLE transformed this wealthy New Yorker into a champion of the poor and downtrodden. Roosevelt’s campaign slogan stated “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and he won the election.
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IN HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS, Roosevelt reassured the nation when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He also pledged that he would ask Congress for broad executive power “to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact to be invaded by a foreign foe.”
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ON INAUGURATION DAY, many states had declared bank holidays in order to keep the remaining banks solvent. They feared the runs on the banking system that had already occurred with depositors lining up to withdraw their money. Two days later, on March 6, President Roosevelt called a halt to banking operations, and three days later Congress, which had been called to special session, passed the Emergency Banking Act. Federal auditors examined bankbooks, unsound banks would be closed, and approximately 12,000 banks were back in business.
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IN NOVEMBER 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment repealed Prohibition. Most Americans heralded its passage (though the state of Utah was the last to ratify it). In the decade prior, Prohibition had only led to bootlegging, smuggling, and an increase in organized crime. In addition, the economic crisis created a demand for federal revenues from the taxation of alcohol.
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ROOSEVELT FOLLOWED UP with massive reform as Congress established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 1933, which guaranteed individual deposits up to $5,000 (that amount has increased over time). The new law, just as the president had intended, gave investors the confidence that if the bank failed, they wouldn’t lose all their funds.
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TWO ACTS, one in 1933 and another the following year, brought forth detailed regulations for the securities market, enforced by the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Joseph P. Kennedy became the commission’s first chairman.
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THE FEDERAL EMERGENCY RELIEF ADMINISTRATION (FERA) was created in 1933 and led by Roosevelt’s trusted advisor Harry Hopkins. The FERA made initial cash payments to the unemployed, but also put people to work in jobs that didn’t compete with private enterprise.
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THE AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT was a complex farm bill that paid farmers to take land out of cultivation. It had been intended to raise agricultural prices, and in 1936 it was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
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ONE OF THE MOST PROFOUND New Deal programs stemmed from passage of the Social Security Act of August 1935. This legislation consisted of three core components—a retirement fund for the elderly, unemployment insurance, and welfare grants for local distribution (which included aid for dependent children). Social Security was developed in the United States later than in several European countries, which had instituted such programs before World War I.
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TWO YEARS AFTER the Social Security program was passed into law, 21 million workers were covered by unemployment insurance and 36 million were entitled to old-age pensions.
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THE TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY (TVA) was particularly innovative, building dams in seven southeastern states to generate electricity and manage flood control programs. Power came to thousands in rural regions where electricity had not previously been delivered.
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PERHAPS THE CORNERSTONE of the New Deal was the National Industrial Recovery Act passed in 1933 to establish the National Recovery Administration (NRA). It was supposed to encourage good business by establishing codes of fair competition. Workers were to be guaranteed such things as minimum wages, maximum hours, and the right to collective bargaining. Unfortunately, code making got way out of hand, resulting in hundreds of codes for various industries. Its director, the former army officer Hugh S. Johnson, resigned after failing to win over the American people, and in 1935, the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional.
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THE NEW DEAL seemed to be off to a rousing start, for in the first hundred days of the new administration there was a flurry of legislation to get the country moving forward again. Public works projects put thousands on the job, creating infrastructure such as the Lincoln Tunnel connecting New York with New Jersey, as well as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Whatever political opposition the president faced was taken care of in 1934 when Democrats swept the midterm elections, increasing their majorities in both the Senate and the House.
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THE MANY BANK failures in the Great Depression caused the United States Congress to create an institution that would guarantee bank deposits. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was created by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The FDIC currently guarantees checking and savings deposits in member banks up to $100,000 per depositor.
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THE WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA) provided government funding not only for building construction, but also for artists and writers. As a result, murals were painted, plays performed, photographs taken, and folk music sung. Through the Federal Writers Project, state-by-state guidebooks were created, while the Federal Theater Project staged free performances.
ROOSEVELT’S BRAIN TRUST was instrumental in the passage of his unprecedented array of social programs. The individuals forming this advisory group consisted of government outsiders, including professors, lawyers, and economic experts. The enduring legacy of the New Deal was government’s increased involvement in the lives of its citizens.
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JOHN L. LEWIS rose to power in the organized labor movement. In 1935, he founded the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) that broke with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to become the most radical labor organization in the country.
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HUEY LONG, GOVERNOR OF LOUISIANA, became one of the most controversial politicians. Nicknamed “Kingfish,” he improved roads and expanded services in his state by taxing corporations and the rich. In 1931, he resigned as governor to enter the U.S. Senate, where he developed the Share-Our-Wealth program, promising to make “every man a king.”
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LONG HAD PLANNED to run for president in 1936, but was gunned down a year earlier at the height of his political influence.
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IN 1935, CONGRESS passed the National Labor Relations Act, known as the Wagner Act (for Senator Robert Wagner of New York, its sponsor). The act established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This law guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain through unions. Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member, served as secretary of labor during this time.
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BONNIE AND CLYDE, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and John Dillinger fascinated the public. Though they were all gangsters who lived and died by the gun, people couldn’t learn enough about them. Dillinger, for instance, was wanted by J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau of Investigation (today’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI).
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ONE OF DILLINGER’S most famous acts was his 1933 escape from jail using a mock gun carved from wood. A year later, he coerced a plastic surgeon to alter his face and fingerprints, but the “feds” caught up with Dillinger, shooting him outside a movie theater.
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AMELIA EARHART WAS the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. She challenged herself and set several other records. But in 1937, she took off on an around-the-world trip with a navigator, never to return. Her plane simply vanished, and despite a massive search, no trace of her was found.
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MUSICIANS OF THE TIMES, including Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, had hit songs during the 1930s. Oddly enough, the same establishments who spun their records most likely would not have served these African Americans on account of segregation. Shunning prejudiced attitudes, Big Band leader Benny Goodman toured with a racially integrated band.
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RADIO CONTINUED TO capture Americans who desperately needed an escape. Popular programs of the day included The Jack Benny Show, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Show, and The Shadow. Orson Welles popularized The Shadow.
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IN 1938, ORSON WELLES produced a radio broadcast based on H.G. Wells’s science fiction classic The War of the Worlds, in which Martians invaded a New Jersey town (in the novel, the Martians invaded several English towns). He pulled off the production with such realism the night before Halloween that some spooked listeners panicked, believing the broadcast was indeed an actual news report of an invasion from outer space.
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THE RADIO BROADCAST of The War of the Worlds caused listeners to jam up highways hoping to escape the aliens and beg police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas. There were even rumors that the show caused suicides, but none were ever confirmed.
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JESSE OWENS CAPTURED headlines with his four-medal performance at the Summer Olympics in 1936. Owens, a U.S. sprinter, won the two sprint events as well as the long jump. Berlin, Germany, hosted that year’s games.
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CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND Mary Pickford had appeared in early silent movies, but now the technology continued to evolve with the invention of Technicolor (a three-color process) on the big screen. Alfred Hitchcock thrillers were all the rage, and so was the comedy of Laurel and Hardy and movies starring Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Mae West, and the young Shirley Temple. Movie theaters provided not only entertainment, but information as well, since many learned their current events from the newsreels that chronicled headlines and images from around the world.
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WILLIAM LE BARON JENNEY, American architect and engineer, pioneered the use of metal-frame construction for large buildings. He used cast-iron columns encased in masonry to support steel beams bearing floor weights. Freed from bearing the load, outside walls could be filled with windows. Jenney’s revolutionary construction method spurred the emergence of skyscrapers.
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FINISHED IN 1902, the Flatiron Building at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street was Manhattan’s first skyscraper, standing approximately 312 feet tall. In 1930, architect William Van Alen added the art deco Chrysler Building to the skyline.
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IN 1931, the Empire State Building was completed on Fifth Avenue, between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Street, making it the tallest building in the world at that time (1,250 feet), 202 feet taller than the Chrysler Building.
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EVEN THOUGH IT no longer holds the distinction of the tallest building, with its elegant art deco design, the Empire State Building is regarded as the quintessential American skyscraper. It featured prominently in the 1933 movie King Kong, where the creature climbed the Empire State Building (actually, he climbed a model used for the sequence).