Roosevelt’s Manic Start: The Chaos of the New Deal

The election of 1932 was an expression of desperate hope. Poverty and unemployment were at high levels and threatened to go even higher. The campaigns of Hoover and Roosevelt were based more on sentiment than specific policy proposals.

Roosevelt projected hope and optimism. One of the few specific actions he presented to voters was that he would support the repeal of the eighteenth amendment. Procedurally, however, the amendment was repealed by the individual states. Roosevelt’s presidential appeal on the topic was at best symbolic, but also utterly ineffectual and irrelevant.

The Democrats had lost the 1928 presidential election. They thought that one reason for the loss was that their candidate, Al Smith, was a Roman Catholic. So in 1932, they nominated Roosevelt, a Protestant. There was, in fact, some anti-Catholic sentiment in the nation at that time; it is difficult to determine, however, whether that sentiment played a major role in the out come of the 1928 election.

Voter sentiment was against Hoover, rightly or wrongly blaming him for the Great Depression.

In the end, Roosevelt won by a landslide.

The nation was eager to see what Roosevelt would do when he took office. Because the campaign had been vague on details, the public wasn’t sure which actions he would take. He’d promised to take measures dramatically and swiftly, as historian Amity Shlaes writes:

By the time of his inauguration back on March 4, everyone knew that Roosevelt would experiment with the economy. But no one knew to what extent. Now, in his first year in office, Roosevelt was showing them. He would present it all in what came to be known as the Hundred Days, that first frenzied period of legislative activity.

Roosevelt’s actions were quick and significant, but not necessarily consistent or planned. His approach was one of experimentation. He simply wanted to what would work.

Two major obstacles confronted FDR. First, the stakes were high to simply experiment: people’s livelihoods were at risk. Second, so many variables were changed and changing that discerning cause and effect was difficult or impossible.

Several of FDR’s goals were in tension with each other: He hoped to raise prices, to increase income for both companies and workers. Yet an increase in price could lead to weaker demand, reducing sales and subsequently income.

The president and the nation were, however, impatient and not willing to conduct careful analysis. They simply wanted to see action, and they hoped that action would bring improvement, even if the action was random, as Amity Shlaes explains:

The main tasks Roosevelt assigned himself were simple. The first was that there be a broad sweep of activity; Americans must know Washington was doing something. If there were contradictions between experiments and within them, well, that did not matter.

So it was, then, that measures were taken to reduce agricultural output, even as food shortages shaped the market. No serious thought was given to the decreased income to farmers.

Likewise, the New Deal would inevitably lead to increased taxation and increased national debt, sooner or later, and those phenomena would similarly slow the economy.

The New Deal, which ultimately failed to offer significant help — economic variables hadn’t improved by 1937 — was the result of sentiment rather than analysis: a chaotic flurry of activity.

Turning the Corner: How and When Slavery Began to End in the Americas

Students who know even a small amount about United States History, or American History, are aware that slavery existed. That’s not new knowledge.

What is less well known is that slavery existed in the Americas — North America, Central America, and South America — not for centuries, but for millennia: not for hundreds of years, but for thousands of years. Slavery was ubiquitous in the Americas.

This means that slavery cannot be treated merely as “a tangential part of the country’s history,” in the words of journalist Joe Heim, or as “an unfortunate blemish.” Slavery was an essential and pervasive feature of pre-Columbian cultures.

It is well documented that civilizations like the Inca, the Aztec, and the Maya were based on slavery. It is less well understood that slavery permeated the areas which are now Canada and the United States.

Given that slavery was everywhere established as a foundation of pre-Columbian societies in the Americas, the questions can be posed: How did slavery end? When did anti-slavery and abolitionist sentiments appear in the Americas?

The first permanent and enduring settlement in what would become the original thirteen states of the United States was, of course, Jamestown in Virginia, founded in 1607. Within a few years, the anti-slavery view had become so prevelant that slavery was outlawed in Rhode Island in 1652, creating for the first time in history a defined territory in the Americas in which slavery was illegal.

After hundreds and thousands of years, for the first time ever, there was a place in the Americas in which slavery was now longer perceived by society as the natural default circumstance. The inhumane institution of chattel slavery, kept in place for millennia, finally began to crumble after the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the ensuing settlements in North America.

Although the first radical break with slavery began in the early 1600s, it would last many years until the last traces of it were erased from the hemisphere. The eradication of slavery proceeded in steps. First, the majority of the population in the majority of the United States got rid of slavery. But a few states clung fiercely to slavery: the result was the bloodiest military conflict in U.S. history.

Because of the magnitude of the U.S. Civil War, and the fact that the war was caused largely by slavery, Joe Heim notes that people sometimes think of slavery “primarily as a factor in the Civil War.” But slavery is much more than the major cause of this war.

Slavery is a defining characteristic of pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations in the Americas. It was omnipresent in the Western Hemisphere until settlements of Europeans established themselves on the continents.

Sadly, some of the European were enchanted by the ways of the indigenous Native Americans and adopted the practice of slavery. Ultimately, slavery had to be purged not only out of the indigenous societies, but also out of some of the Anglo-European settlers.

The institution of slavery was so persistent that it took several centuries of European presence to finally eradicate chattel slavery.

African-American Leaders during the Great Depression: The Government Is Incapable, so Citizens Take Action

During the Great Depression, the ingenuity of ordinary citizens was fueled by their challenging circumstances. The overworked phrases of “thinking outside the box” and “necessity being the mother of invention” are correctly applied to this phenomenon.

Given the government's inability to make meaningful inroads against economic hardships — in 1937, things were as bad, or worse, than they were in 1932, despite five years of FDR’s “New Deal” — everyday people had to find ways to survive.

Beyond merely surviving, they found ways to uplift and encourage their communities: ways to develop and strengthen a sense of neighborliness. As examples, historian Amity Shlaes offers two African-American leaders who understood that when the government is unable to help, common citizens could step up and achieve great things:

Even the poorest communities, including the blacks, found their own response to joblessness and hunger. In Washington, Solomon Elder Lightfoot Michaux, a radio preacher, reached millions with his “Happy Am I” aphorisms. Michaux fed the hungry and maintained apartment houses for those evicted. Another figure in the black community to respond was Father Divine on Long Island. He began to expand the Sunday banquets served at his Sayville residence. What stood out about Father Divine’s meals was that they were the opposite of apples on the corner or soup kitchen food. Father Divine’s meals were luxurious. The coffee percolated; the roasts - chickens, ducks - were plentiful; the vegetables were splendid. “We charge nothing,” Father Divine ordained. “Anyone, man, woman, or child, regardless of race, color or creed can come here naked and we will clothe them, hungry and will will feed them.”

After the Great Depression and after WW2, Lightfoot Solomon Michaux went on to host his own television show starting in 1947. (In 1948 the show went from a regional broadcast to a national one.) It is significant that an African-American was hosting a TV program at this early date in the development of regular commercial broadcasting. Elder Michaux was born in Virginia in 1885.

Father Divine is often alleged to be the source of the phrase “you’ve got to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative,” which was later made into a popular song. Father Divine remains a mysterious figure: his exact birth date, birth place, and original legal name remain unclear.

The lesson from Elder Michaux and Father Divine is this: The people can’t wait for the government to fix problems, because it usually doesn’t or can’t. The people can work together, and work around the government, to make life better for their communities.