Ref:  MAT2_K01

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Part K01 ; Excerpts from ..  The Great Depression: America 1929 to 1941

 from  Sources Consulted for O ral Hist Project:

 

Abbreviation

Sources

 

 

 

Historical Context Subject Mater 1920-1950

 

K01

GDA

McElvaine Robert S..  The Great Depression: America 1929 to 1941. New York: Time Books, Random House Inc., 1993.

 

 

Originally appeared as annex b in akp99013.rft

 

HOVER supports Gov’t Intervention in Principal

 “The president insisted, though that his first priority was to prevent suffering. “I am willing to pledge myself. The declared in February 1931, That f the time should ever come that the voluntary agencies of the country together with the local state governments are unable to find resources with which to prevent hunger and suffering in my country, will ask the aid of every resource of the Federal Government….” But Hover said he had faith in the American People that such a day would never come” Exactly Hover by this time was acting on faith, not facts.p.51

 

Sympathetic to more drastic solutions

A poorly educated New Yorker said in late 1930, “I am neither an anarchist, socialist, or communist –but by God, at times I feel as if I should affiliate myself with the radicals. P. 81

 

Experimentation:

“Try something if it fails admit frankly and try another…. His experimentation was often aimed a particular if vague results” p117

 

Public support for change

FDR had an understanding, perhaps an instinctive one, that what would have been political suicide a few years before was just what many Americans wanted to hear in 1932. They had seen enough attempts at roof repair and were anxious for some foundation work. Pp125-136

 

Interdependence

Roosevelt said;  “we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other, we cannot merely take but we must give as well” 140

 

Community, Justice and Cooperation

Marxism seemed to many American intelligentsia of the thirties to support their own moral condemnation of the marketplace economy and to uphold the values of community, justice and cooperation that some many writers of the period favored.   The goal was, as progressive historian Charles Beard put it in 1935, the “subordination of personal ambition and greed to common plans and purposes.” 205

 

Redistribution of Wealth

In the Fall of 1937 more than 42 percent of the poor in another Fortune poll said that “the federal government should follow a policy of taking money from those who have much and giving money to those who have little.” When those who favored such a program “ if it doesn’t go too far “ are included, more that 64 percent of the poor endorsed redistribution.

 

Film support for cooperative individualism

“What was evident in the films of Capra and Ford, as well as in many other Depression-era movies, was a call for a kind of cooperative individualism that recognized individuals could achieve a degree of independence and self respect only by cooperating. P 221

 

Not Ideology – just rejection of greed

Americans in the 1930’s may not have known much about ideology, but they knew what they liked – and what they did not like. Their rejection of greed egoism and the unfettered marketplace led them toward values through which they could “remoralise” the American economy and society. P.223

 

Child labor a gradual approach to progress

[Fair Labor Standards Act] outlawed, at long last the use of child labor in interstate commerce…The Fair Labor Standards Act was less than the President wanted, but it did establish the principal of government regulation of these matters. The defects and exclusions might be remedied in the future. P 304