CHAPTER 24

The Great Depression and the New Deal,1929–1939

ugged Campobello Island lying off Eastport, Maine, was sunlit that RAugust afternoon in 1921. A small sailboat bobbed in the waters off the island. At the helm, with several of his children, was thirty-nine-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt. Assistant secretary of the navy during World War I, Roosevelt had been the Democratic party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1920. But all this was far from his mind now. He loved sailing, and he loved Campobello Island. The idyllic afternoon suddenly took an ominous turn when Roosevelt spotted a fire. Beaching the boat, he and the children frantically beat back the spreading flames. The exertion left Roosevelt unusually fatigued. The next morning his left leg dragged when he tried to walk. Soon all sensation disappeared in both legs. He had suffered an attack of poliomyelitis (infantile CHAPTER OUTLINE paralysis), a viral infection that most often struck children but sometimes Crash and Depression, 1929–1932 struck adults as well. Except for a cumbersome shuffle with crutches and heavy metal braces, he would never walk again. The New Deal Takes Shape, 1933–1935 This illness changed the lives of both Franklin Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor. To Franklin, it seemed the end of his career. But he endured endless The New Deal Changes Course, therapy and gradually reentered politics. In 1928, laboriously mounting the 1935–1936 podium at the Democratic National Convention, he nominated his friend Al The New Deal’s End Stage, 1937–1939 Smith for president. That fall, he himself was elected governor of New York. Social Change and Social Action in the 1930s The American Cultural Scene in the 1930s

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Somewhat superficial and even arrogant before The chapter focuses on five major questions: 1921, this privileged only child became, through his ■ What were the main causes of the Great ordeal, understanding of the disadvantaged and Depression? far more determined. “If you had spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe,” he once said, “after that ■ What depression-fighting strategy underlay the so- everything else would seem easy!” called First New Deal, and why did the Roosevelt Eleanor Roosevelt at first devoted herself to her hus- administration change course in 1935, giving rise to band’s care and to the child-rearing duties that now fell the so-called Second New Deal? to her. But she also encouraged his return to politics, ■ Which New Deal programs have had the greatest resisting his domineering mother’s efforts to turn him long-term effect, and how did ideas about the role of into an invalid at the family home at Hyde Park, New government change as a result of the New Deal? York. Eleanor became her husband’s eyes and ears. ■ How did the depression and the New Deal affect Already involved with social issues, she now became specific groups in the United States? (Consider, for active in the New York Democratic party and edited its example, small farmers and sharecroppers, Native newsletter for women. Painfully shy, she forced herself Americans, industrial workers, women, African- to make public speeches. Americans, and Mexican-Americans.) The Roosevelts would soon need the qualities of character they had acquired. Elected president in 1932 ■ How did American culture—including both the amidst the worst depression in American history, mass-entertainment industries and the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt dominated U.S. politics until his novelists, artists, photographers, and composers— death in 1945. Roosevelt’s presidency, the so-called New respond to the events of the 1930s? Deal, spawned an array of laws, agencies, and programs that historians ever since have tried to whip into coher- CRASH AND DEPRESSION, ent form. And, indeed, certain patterns do emerge. In what some label the First New Deal (1933–1935), the 1929–1932 dual themes wer