The Great Depression

Read this article about the Great Depression in the United States. In addition to introducing the various causes, the text also covers The New Deal, a bundle of legislation that pulled the country out of depression and was arguably responsible for fully modernizing the United States.

Notes

  1. George Donelson Moss, The Rise of Modern America: A History of the American People, 1890–1945 (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1995), 185–186.
  2. Ibid., 186.
  3. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1921–1940 (New York: Random House, 1984), 36.
  4. John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 320.
  5. Moss, Rise of Modern America, 186–187.
  6. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 65, 68.
  7. Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
  8. Herbert Hoover, "The President's News Conference of November 15, 1929," Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Herbert Hoover, 1929 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1974), 280.
  9. Christina D. Romer, "The Great Crash and the Onset of the Great Depression," Quarterly Journal of Economics 105, no. 3(1990), 606.
  10. Peter Fearon, Origins and Nature of the Great Slump, 1929–1932 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 34.
  11. Ibid.
  12. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 70–103.
  13. William E. Leuchtenburg, The American President from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 135.
  14. "Wagner Puts Party in Progressive Role," New York Times, May 15, 1931, 2.
  15. Ibid., 76.
  16. Mrs. M. H. A. to Eleanor Roosevelt, June 14, 1934, in Robert S. McElvaine, ed., Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 54–55.
  17. Lester V. Chandler, America's Greatest Depression, 1929–1941 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 41.
  18. Chandler, America's Greatest Depression, 44.
  19. Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: New Press, 2000), 20–21.
  20. See especially Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 5).
  21. Mirra Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 133.
  22. Claudia Dale Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 34.
  23. William H. Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 71.
  24. Claudia Dale Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 34.
  25. William H. Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 71.
  26. William A. Sundstrom, "Last Hired, First Fired? Unemployment and Urban Black Workers During the Great Depression," Journal of American History, 65, no. 1 (1978), 70–71.
  27. Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 15–23.
  28. Robert S. McElvaine, ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Depression (New York: Macmillan, 2004), 320.
  29. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 48.
  30. James R. McGovern, And a Time For Hope: Americans in the Great Depression, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 10.
  31. James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 22.
  32. Cybelle Fox, Three Worlds of Relief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 126.
  33. Ibid., 127.
  34. Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (New York: Sage, 2006), 269.
  35. Ibid., 92.
  36. Eric Rauchway, Why the New Deal Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 144–146.
  37. Biographies of Roosevelt include Kenneth C. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny: 1882–1928 (New York: Rand, 1972); and Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007).
  38. Outstanding general treatments of the New Deal include Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956–1960); William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963); Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (New York: Hill and Wang), 1989; and Kennedy, Freedom from Fear. On Roosevelt, see especially James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956); Frank B. Friedel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952–1973); Patrick J. Maney, The Roosevelt Presence: A Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Twayne, 1992); Alan Brinkley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Eric Rauchway, Why the New Deal Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).
  39. Eric Rauchway, "The New Deal Was on the Ballot in 1932," Modern American History 2, no. 2 (2019), 202–203.
  40. Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Inaugural Address," March 4, 1933. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14473.
  41. Eric Rauchway, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 140.
  42. Michael E. Parrish, Securities Regulation and the New Deal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970).
  43. See especially Anthony J. Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008).
  44. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal).
  45. Neil Maher, Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
  46. Thomas K. McCraw, TVA and the Power Fight, 1933–1939 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971).
  47. Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1986), 217.
  48. Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982).
  49. Bonnie Fox Schwartz, The Civil Works Administration, 1933–1934: The Business of Emergency Employment in the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York (New York: Norton, 2013).
  50. Howard Odum, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), quoted in David L. Carlton and Peter Coclanis, eds., Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great Depression: The Report on Economic Conditions of the South with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford St. Martin's, 1996), 118–119.
  51. Wright, Old South, New South, 217.
  52. Ibid., 227–228.
  53. Ibid., 216–220.
  54. William Leuchtenberg, The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2005), 74.
  55. "Press Conference #160," November 23, 1934, 214, in Roosevelt, Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Volumes 3–4, 1934 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).
  56. McCraw, TVA and the Power Fight).
  57. Carlton and Coclanis, Confronting Southern Poverty, 42.
  58. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, State and Party in America's New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
  59. Alexander J. Field, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 40.
  60. Mark H. Leff, The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal and Taxation, 1933–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
  61. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 267.
  62. Gareth Davies and Martha Derthick, "Race and Social Welfare Policy: The Social Security Act of 1935," Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 2 (Summer 1997), 217–235.
  63. Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1969).
  64. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 201.
  65. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005).
  66. George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1967), 491.
  67. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994).
  68. William E. Leuchtenburg, "The Origins of Franklin D. Roosevelt's 'Court-Packing' Plan," The Supreme Court Review (1966), 347–400.
  69. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Knopf, 1995).
  70. Cohen, Making a New Deal; Kristi Andersen, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Caroline Bird, The Invisible Scar (New York: McKay, 1966).
  71. Quoted in Terkel, Hard Times, 34.