Category Archives: New Deal

Thinking of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act while isolating in place

08 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, Harry Hopkins, New Deal

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left to right: Henry Morgenthau, Joseph Kennedy, Harry Hopkins, and Harold Ickes at the White House, 1935

Today marks the 85th anniversary of the passage of one of the most significant acts of legislation to come during the Roosevelt Administration, which is saying a lot: it was on April 8, 1935 that the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act became law. The act gave Franklin Roosevelt even wider latitude to distribute Depression emergency funds as he saw fit. Surprisingly there does not seem to be an image of the signing, which took place after Roosevelt returned from a spring fishing trip. FDR being the master politician he was that probably was not accidental, though I don’t know why. Perhaps he was trying to paper over the failures and miscues of some of the alphabet soup agencies that had come into being in the two years since his presidency began. Two central ideas of the bill were 1) that the money would be more decentralized, giving state and local leaders more input into how to spend New Deal funds, and 2) that the emphasis would shift from relief itself to public works. The biggest change that came out of the bill was the creation of the Works Progress Administration.

The WPA’s influence surrounds most Americans every day, even if they are unaware. A good many of our bridges, post offices, roads, and so much more came out of it over the next several years. Culturally it did a lot too. As I type these words I can see the WPA American Guides for New York and Washington D.C. on my bookshelf. In addition to writers they put painters such as the young Jacob Lawrence to work via the Federal Art Project. Politically the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act led to a power struggle between Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins over who would become the czar distributing these billions of dollars. Hopkins, who hardly anyone knows anymore despite all he did during the Depression and Second World War, won the struggles. The New Deal was not perfect and had all sorts of unintended consequences but I do not have the confidence in anyone within a leadership position in the current federal administration that I would have had in Hopkins, or Harold Ickes for that matter. So much of that story began eighty-five years ago today.

(image/Library of Congress)

The photographers’ Great Depression

12 Saturday Oct 2019

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Memory, New Deal

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Okies in Farm Security Administration (FSA) emergency migratory labor camp, Calipatria, Imperial Valley, February 1939. This image was taken by Dorothea Lange, a colleague of Arthur Rothstein whose images are included in the current exhibit at Roosevelt House.

I’m sorry about the lack of posts recently. I have spent much of the past several weeks finishing the draft of a project that proved more difficult and time-involved that I had imagined. I submitted the draft the other day. We’ll see if comes to pass toward the end of the year. People were asking me at work yesterday what I intended to do over the three-day weekend; when they did I answered with a negative: “not writing and editing.”

Last night I went to Roosevelt House on East 65th Street for the opening of the exhibit “A Lens on FDR’s New Deal: Photographs by Arthur Rothstein, 1935-1945.” Rothstein was one of the great visual chroniclers of Depression Era America. It is not going too far to say that he, his friend and colleague Dorothea Lange, and others shaped our awareness and memory and of what the country was enduring in the 1930s and early 1940s. Part of the reason the Roosevelt Administration created the initiative to photograph the severity of the economic crisis to begin with was to press the need for its New Deal programs.

Rothstein was the son of refugees from Eastern Europe. Like so many immigrants and first-generation Americans, he was eager to make his contribution. Born in 1915, Rothstein attended Columbia University at fifteen and in the mid-1930s, just a young man in his early 20s, found himself driving across the country on dirt roads, sleeping in his car, eating off a hot plate, and shooting 80,000 images in migrant camps, farming communities, and elsewhere.

Rothstein’s daughter, Dr. Annie Segan, put the exhibition together in with her husband and the Roosevelt House historian. With over 125 photographs it is the biggest exhibit of Rothstein images to go on display in more than a quarter century. Other photographers are included as well. Many of the images were taken from tiny negatives. Rothstein’s daughter in her talk called them “picture stories.” Incredibly the trove of 175,000 images taken by Rothstein and the nearly twenty other photographers working for the Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) were nearly discarded by indifferent bureaucrats in the years after the Second World War. Thankfully they were saved and are available to the public at the Library of Congress and online.

The exhibit runs into January 2020.

(image/Library of Congress)

 

 

Robert Moses’s Bethpage

19 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in New Deal, Robert Moses

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Robert Moses at Bethpage, April 1935

I am sorry about the lack of posts recently. Blogging will continue to be light through next week as the academic year enters its endgame. There are so many things to make happen before submitting grades, which we will probably do a week from today if all goes as planned. I spent a good chunk of today reading and grading papers. I have learned a great deal this year, about not just Robert Moses but local, state, and national history more widely. We intend to keep the energy going. It’s the people you work with who make it all worthwhile.

Way back on the first day of class we were telling students about Moses’s many accomplishments. The course focus is on New York City itself but you must lay the foundation talking about the master builder’s wider legacy. One of those things, I told the class, was Bethpage State Park near Farmingdale, where they played this week’s PGA Championship on the Black Course. Brooks Koepka held on to become the first back-to-back PGA winner since Tiger Woods in 2006-07. The Black Course is a pretty good test of golf; Woods won the US Open there in 2002. It and the four other links that comprise Bethpage were built under the leadership of Robert Moses in the 1930s within his jurisdiction as head of the Long Island State Park Commission. Needless to say, there was some serious sausage-making in turning it all into a reality. The detail-orientated Moses was involved in every aspect of turning the nearly 1,400 acre site into a golf location open to all. He also used New Deal money and men, putting about 1,800 laborers to work.

Moses envisioned Bethpage State Park as a Jones Beach for the middle-class golfing set. Remember, as its name indicates it is a public facility, not a private club. That they play the majors there is testimony to the vision and legacy of Robert Moses. In class tomorrow I’ll talk to the students briefly about it before getting on with the business of the day.

(image/Brooklyn Daily Eagle)

Mount Vernon, Easter Sunday

21 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by in George Washington's Mount Vernon, Interpretation, New Deal

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The Potomac from the Mount Vernon shoreline, Easter Sunday 2019

I hope everyone had an enjoyable Easter or Passover. I’m watching the beautiful sunset as I type this.

We indeed went to Mount Vernon today. We were questioning our decision halfway there because mass transit proved difficult this holiday weekend. Still, when we arrived we had a good time. (Not wanting a repeat of the frustrating arrival, we took an Uber back to our destination.) The grounds were crowded, which was great. It’s always good seeing people experiencing historic sites. It was warmer than when we were there in January and more of the grounds were thus accessible. The gardens were blooming and the animals–sheep and even cattle–were out. We took in quite a bit. I also had many conversations with the living historians who work there. My strategy on these things is: jump in. At the shoreline not far from where I took the above image I had a conversation with a staffer about how Washington used these low-lying grounds. She replied that it was basically swampland and thus not especially productive. She then added that the flood walls in the Potomac were constructed in the 1930s. This naturally led to a conversation about how and why that happened, with yours truly speculating that it probably happened as part of the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. I intend to dig a little more on this when I get home.

In the gift ship I bought a copy of Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life. I don’t want to go into specifics right now, but Chernow and Thomas Flexner will play into some Interpretive projects I hope to work on this summer. It’s only about six weeks away now.

La Guardia & FDR, October 1936

16 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehman, New Deal, Robert Moses

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Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt break ground on the “tube” connecting Manhattan and Queens one month prior to the 1936 national election. Members of Local 184 made Roosevelt an honorary member during the ceremony. After this long day, Roosevelt traveled north of the city to his home in Hyde Park. New Deal funds totaling $58,000,000 in 1930s dollars went into building the tunnel, which opened one month ahead of schedule in October 1940. Roosevelt was the first to drive across.

I wish the image quality were higher but there is surprisingly little documentation of this historical moment. Here we see Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and President Roosevelt at the groundbreaking for what we now call the Queens–Midtown Tunnel. The photograph is from the 3 October 1936 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the day after the groundbreaking. I was not aware until I began co-teaching this course in January of the size and scope of the infrastructure projects built in New York City under the New Deal. Of course I was aware of such efforts as refurbishing Civil War battlefields, tidying parks, planting trees, building small-scale restrooms and picnic areas along byways. But large scale infrastructure is something on a whole other magnitude.

Municipal leaders outside Gotham believed the fix was in between Roosevelt and La Guardia. That is understandable given that Roosevelt had previously been the governor of New York and that he and Eleanor still owned a house on East 65th Street. The reality though was that New York City and State entered the New Deal process earlier than most locales because men like Herbert Lehman, Robert Moses, and Fiorello La Guardia were ready from the outset with plans. As the 1930s went on other municipalities caught up in real dollars.

This image we see here, grainy as it is, was taken about one month prior to the 1936 national campaign in which Roosevelt ran for re-election against Al Landon. La Guardia was a Progressive Republican supporting Roosevelt. Both men understood the power of publicity and the photo op. Roosevelt’s radio address was broadcast nationally. More than 100,000 people, many of them schoolchildren, turned out on 2 October 1936 to see Roosevelt speak, Mayor La Guardia, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and Senator Robert F. Wagner also sharing the stage. (Earlier the same day this photo was taken La Guardia and Roosevelt together attended Game 2 of the Yankees-Giants World Series at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan, a game the Yankees won 18-4.) While many did not realize it at the time–though given his political instincts Roosevelt almost certainly did–the 1936 presidential election sealed the coalition of conservative white Southern Democrats, blue collar trade unionists, rural populists, African-Americans, and ethnic voters that largely held together until the tumult of the 1960s.