Welcome to Module 17! We've passed the halfway point in our course and are officially out of the Progressive Era. In this module, we'll examine how we commonly remember the 1930s. So much of the New Deal has been internalized into the way we understand citizenship and the experiences of many people in the Great Depression have been integrated into individual family histories and our cultural memory as a nation.
In addition to forming the root of the social welfare system we have today, New Deal programs have had a lasting impact on our understandings of American art, history, and culture.
And, there's a lot of really beautiful, striking art that comes out of the New Deal! (You'll see a few examples in our required reading and in this blog post.)
Three questions will guide this module blog post:
How do we remember the New Deal and the Great Depression?
How did the New Deal construct the American welfare state? What are the dimensions of the American welfare system and how do citizens view that system?
How did the New Deal’s programs impact African Americans?
Let's get started!
Part I: The New Deal and Great Depression in Cultural Memory
Works Progress Administration
One of the most well-known New Deal programs was the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA was established in 1935. It was a relief program that employed 3 million people a year and paid good wages. It included jobs in manual labor, such as renovating public facilities, parks, schools, streets, and sewers.
It is more remembered for its writers’ and artists’ projects, as well as the Federal Theater Project, where it employed white-collar workers like teachers, historians, writers, librarians, actors, and artists.
The Federal Writers’ Project compiled interviewed and oral histories (folklore) of a vast array of Americans, including the slave narratives—interviews with formerly enslaved people. Pieces like this have been integrated into our understanding of the past, and have served as sources for many historical narratives since. (And, hint hint, might be good sources for an I-Search Paper...)
Posters produced by WPA artists have likewise been integrated into our cultural understanding of American heritage, some of the most recognizable being the WPA posters for national parks.
Dorothea Lange's Photographs for the Farm Security Administration
Dorothea Lange was a photographer employed by the Farm Security Administration, who photographed migratory farm laborers in an effort to document economic and social distress among the nation’s agricultural workers and to advertise the agency’s relief programs and measures it was taking to address the dislocation.
The Farm Security Administration was a rural relief program, which assisted about 20,000 tenant farmers to purchase their own land, and constructed housing camps for migratory farm workers (especially those who had been fleeing the Dust Bowl and had resettled in California).
Lange’s most famous photograph, known as “Migrant Mother,” (1936) became an icon of the Great Depression. For many, this photograph conjures up connections to another well-known cultural representation of the Dust Bowl—John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Word Cloud #1:
You read a little about the background of this photograph for our module on the Great Depression. In the word cloud below, enter one thing you notice about it. What do you see when you look at it? If the word cloud isn't loading below, access it here.
As you read for Module 16, the woman in the photograph was Florence Thompson, who wasn’t actually a Dust Bowl refugee, but had been living in California for 10 years with her husband and children. She was Cherokee, from Oklahoma.
Her daughter remembered her being active in farm labor organizations, revealing that her story was more complicated than it appears from the photograph.
Cultural Memory and the Great Depression
We have to think about the “Migrant Mother” image in the context of its time—it and other images like the ones by Walker Evans shown here did prompt the government to increase aid, and was part of a larger project designed to get to the bottom of the economic hardships people faced. However, it is worth considering how the photograph lived on well after the Depression, and how it has become part of our institutional and cultural memory of this time in American history.
For more on the Farm Security Administration, check out Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Workers Collection, at the Library of Congress. You can peruse the audio recordings of people at migrant work camps in California in 1940 and 1941.
Part II: Dimensions of the New Deal Safety Net and the American Welfare State
In Part II, we’ll look to some of the most significant legacies of the New Deal—the creation of the modern American welfare state. We’ll examine several components of the cornerstone of the New Deal, the 1935 Social Security Act.
The provisions in the Social Security Act represented FDR’s convictions that the national government had a responsibility to ensure the material well-being of ordinary Americans. This responsibility has been integrated into our understanding of citizenship to such an extent that we now think of these provisions as a normal part of the relationship between American citizens and the state.
What is "welfare"?
Today, the term “welfare” is usually associated with the state benefits given to people in need. We’ll be considering a broader definition of welfare in this module.
We’ll examine how the New Deal formed the basis of the modern American welfare state—the system developed by the government to protect the well-being of American citizens. That system was implemented through a series of programs which disbursed pensions, benefits, and other grants depending on the population. We should think about welfare as not only the benefits disbursed to the most needy, but in general, as benefits disbursed from the government. For example, the benefits of the welfare state apply not only to mothers of dependent children, but also veterans and retired workers.
The New Deal and the Safety Net
The Social Security Act of 1935 was enacted under a different goal than the earlier initiatives of the New Deal we examined in Module 16.
While the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) were designed to mitigate the impact of the immediate economic crisis, the Social Security Act was designed to initiate long-range economic reform and implement a safety net that would restructure the future relationship between US citizens and their government.
President Roosevelt wanted a comprehensive and universal system of social insurance. He wrote in a 1934 message to Frances Perkins, his Secretary of Labor:
“I see no reason why every child, from the day he is born, shouldn’t be a member of the social security system. When he begins to grow up, he should know he will have old-age benefits direct from the insurance system to which he will belong all his life. If he is out of work, he gets a benefit. If he is sick or crippled, he gets a benefit…And there is no reason why just the industrial workers should get the benefit of this. Everybody ought to be in on it.”
(See more of FDR's messages about Social Security here.)
Social Security Act of 1935
The act instituted five key components. In this module, we will go into further detail about the programs in bold:
Unemployment Insurance
Old Age Insurance
Aid to the Disabled
Old Age Assistance
Aid to Families with Dependent Children
"Welfare" vs. "Entitlements"
Before examining the details of these components, we need to consider the way we think about the “safety net” instituted as a result of the New Deal, both in historical context and how these programs are discussed today. Historian Linda Gordon has described three distinct ways that people talk about welfare. As you’ll see during this module, the ways that people think about welfare vary depending on what types of programs they are discussing, and, more significantly, who is receiving the benefits. [1]
If the question is, What is the rationale behind public assistance? There are three answers.
Need: The state or community is obligated to provide help to people in need, and for whatever reason, have no other option. When we think of “needy” populations, we often think of children, the elderly, or the poor.
Earning, in return for service: Workers who get higher wages do not necessarily do so because of greater need, but because they have earned more compensation for their service. Some forms of public assistance are structured as fulfilling a compensation for a particular service.
Rights: Some benefits are claimed from the state as a condition of citizenship, under an existing law, or when there isn’t a law, by a popular consensus.
Claims to welfare have been justified on all three of these bases. However, Gordon argues that the provisions of public assistance we think of as rights are usually more respected and more generous than those we associate with need. [2]
Those provisions we consider "rights" are known in most contexts as "entitlements." In fact, at times, we don’t consider these aspects of public assistance “welfare” at all. What do you think?
Poll #1:
In 2020, do you consider old age pensions (what is commonly referred to now as "Social Security") to be a right guaranteed to all American citizens? Answer the poll below, or access it here.
Poll #2:
In 2020, do you consider unemployment benefits to be a right guaranteed to all American citizens? Answer the poll below, or access it here.
If you voted differently for Social Security and unemployment, share why in the annotations/comments!
Aid and Benefits for the Elderly
The Depression was especially hard on elderly people. Unemployment for those over the age of sixty was at 40%. Many lost their savings they planned to use for retirement when the banks failed. Of the 7.5 million Americans over the age of 65, half could not support themselves. They turned to private charities, their children, or, in the twenty-eight states which offered them, old age pensions, which were very low.
In this context, Dr. Francis Townsend came up with a plan that won much popular support. Under the “Townsend Plan,” everyone in the country would receive $200 a month, with two conditions: that they spend the full amount each month, and retire if they were still employed. This would put money into the economy, open up jobs for younger people, and all people would be able to retire with dignity. The plan would be funded by a national sales tax. Townsend’s plan was met with a lot of support from people, inspiring 7,000 “Townsend clubs” with about 1.5 million members across the country.
In response, the government implemented its own plan to aid the elderly. The Old Age Assistance plan under the Social Security Act was not as radical as the Townsend Plan. It consisted of two tiers:
#1: Old Age Insurance (OAI, known commonly today as Social Security)
This refers to the benefits collected by elderly Americans after retirement. It was funded out of a 1% increase in payroll taxes. FDR wanted workers to have a long-term stake in the program. If they knew it was coming out of their paychecks, they would be invested in participating. He insisted that the program be financed by payroll taxes so that its character would be distinct from “relief,” and it would gain long-term political support.
OAI distributed benefits that correlated to the previous earnings of recipients while they had participated in the workforce. Thus, workers would have to have a long-term, relatively full-time record in covered employment to qualify. (What employment was covered? We’ll get to it!)
#2: Old Age Assistance (OAA)
Unlike OAI, Old Age Assistance (OAA) was a system of noncontributory benefits for elderly citizens. Instead of paying into the system through payroll taxes, these benefits would be administered as federal grant-in-aid to states. OAA required the national government to provide one-half of the benefits for needy elderly, matching up to a limit of $15.00/month per person. The states decided who was eligible for this program.
OAA was a program based on the idea of need, rather than the idea of “earning” or “rights.”
The Social Security Act did face opposition in Congress, from both states’ rights advocates—who wanted to scale back the reach of the national government in both OAI and OAA—and those who favored a more radical plan, like the one proposed by Townsend.
We will see that the debate over the administration of benefits through the federal government or the states caused issues in other programs, and had consequences for specific racial groups.
Two "Tracks" for Receiving Benefits
From the beginning, the two-tiered system of old age support generated two separate “tracks” for receiving benefits:
Those who were entitled to benefits guaranteed by the national government for (mostly male) wage earners.
Those who were subjects of the states’ administration of public assistance for the needy. [3]
In 1939, the Social Security Act was amended to include benefits for widows under OAI. If a woman had been living with her husband at the time of his death, was not remarried, and was at least 65, she would be entitled to receive her husband’s OAI benefits. If the woman was eligible for benefits based on her own earnings, the amount of her spousal benefit would be reduced by the amount of her own “earned” benefits.
Aid to Dependent Children
The other key aspect of the Social Security Act we’ll examine is Aid to Dependent Children (ADC). This program has become the one most commonly associated with the term “welfare.” It was a noncontributory program, like OAA, and was administered by the individual states. The programs has its roots in the mother’s pensions of the Progressive Era. The rationale was that mothers would be able to stay home with young children in the event their husband died or deserted the family.
ADC was the least funded program of the Social Security Act. In comparison to OAA, where the federal government would match state funds one-to-one, ADC funds were only matched by one-third. Therefore, the program did not necessarily provide enough money to allow mothers to stay out of the workforce completely.
In addition, the language of ADC policy left the states with considerable autonomy in terms of administering benefits and deciding who was eligible to receive them. Therefore, the program was subject to political battles at the state level. In addition, ADC lacked the strong popular support that old age programs had garnered.
After the 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act which allowed widows to access their husband’s benefits, those mothers who would have been previously on the ADC rolls became covered under OAI.
Left behind were children of mothers who were unmarried, divorced, or separated and those whose parents were either among the long-term unemployed or were workers in low-wage occupations not covered by OAI.
Since they existed outside the “normal” family structure, these mothers and children were not seen as being “entitled” to their benefits, bur rather, part of the “needy” poor, and, in many cases, as part of an “undeserving” poor.
Poll #3:
In your opinion, why was Aid to Dependent Children regarded as less important for the American people than Old Age Assistance? Remember, both programs were noncontributory and administered by the states with matching funds from the federal government. Was it that most people assumed that children would be taken care of financially by fathers, so ADC wasn't as necessary? Was it that ADC was just given to women, while OAA was given to both men and women? Or something else? (Please explain in the comments/annotations!) Access the poll below, or answer here.
Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC)
The Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) was not part of the Social Security Act, but it did contribute to the two-tier system of social citizenship that was developed as a result of the new welfare provisions in the New Deal.
HOLC was created in 1933, in order to help Americans retain their homes. HOLC offered long-term, low-interest mortgages to eligible homeowners in urban areas who were unable to meet the terms of mortgage holders and faced the loss of their property.
In its first year, HOLC provided loans on more than a million mortgages, and saved 10% of owner-occupied non-farm residences. In big cities like Chicago, for example, HOLC was especially active, and saved more than half of the threatened homes through granting 45,500 loans between June 1933 and June 1936. [4]
Although HOLC helped homeowners avoid foreclosure in the short run, in the long run, it did some damage to ethnic communities and black communities. In order to determine the value of the loans they would grant, HOLC collaborated with real estate industry leaders and appraisers, producing detailed maps of neighborhoods, which outlined which parts of the city or town were the most desirable to issue a loan.
Neighborhoods were rated on a scale of A-D, with D being the neighborhoods considered “least fit for loans.” Those neighborhoods were outlined in red on the maps (hence, the term “redlining”). The neighborhoods deemed “least fit” were ones with high concentrations of nonwhite residents, certain Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups, or mixed-race neighborhoods.
This led to an understanding that the racial makeup of your neighbors could potentially decrease the property value of your home, because your neighborhood could be seen as undesirable. Although HOLC was willing to grant mortgages to those living in neighborhoods ranked as C or D, later on these maps were used as guides for banks to decide whether to grant potential homeowners loans for mortgages. We will get into more detail about the effects of this in Module 21, when we talk further about suburbanization. In that module, I'll ask you to visit a digital humanities project called Mapping Inequality and search for your neighborhood in San Diego.
Part III: Race and the New Deal
HOLC was a New Deal program with lasting implications for racial inequality, as we will see later on in the course. To conclude the module, we’ll discuss how the Social Security Act and other aspects of the New Deal applied unevenly across racial groups.
(Check out this article for more on Black Americans' political support for FDR and the ambiguity of the New Deal for Black families.)
African Americans and Social Security
As mentioned previously, certain workers were not covered under OAI. When the Social Security Act was passed, two groups were excluded from the both OAI and unemployment insurance: agricultural workers and domestic workers. These occupations were dominated by African Americans, but also disproportionate numbers of Latinx and Asian American workers. This meant that across the US, fully 65% of African Americans fell outside the reach of the new program, mostly in the South. The exclusion also left out approximately 40% of whites.
Agricultural workers fell into three basic categories: 1) those who worked in the large scale agribusiness system in the South and Southwest, where farms employed almost 300,000 workers annually picking fruits and vegetables; 2) those who worked on moderate-sized farms employing more than eight workers, usually concentrated in the same states; and 3) those who performed cotton sharecropping, which basically existed only in the South. The majority of these workers were nonwhite.
Was the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers motivated by racial prejudice?
Some scholars claim that leaving farmworkers and domestic servants out of the equation was because government officials thought it would be too difficult to administer the program for farmworkers and maids.
However, others argue that the concentration of Southerners on the committee drafting the Social Security Act did have racialized effects. Although the Southerners supported the Social Security Act because the region needed lots of help, they also did not want to disrupt the South’s “way of life,” which was dependent on a racialized low-wage economy dominated by segregation.
In regards to domestic workers, most lawmakers had a personal interest in letting them slip through the cracks—most of them employed a domestic servant in their own homes. [5]
Poll #4:
In your opinion, why were agricultural workers and domestic workers excluded from Old Age Insurance? Potential administrative difficulties? (These groups were just too hard to organize and it would be hard to collect payments from employers with so few employees.) or Racial prejudice? (Since most of the workers employed in these industries were Black, we can't ignore race as a significant factor.)
Answer the poll below, or access it here.
ADC and Race
Thus, Black maids and farmworkers had no access to the benefits of OAI. After 1939, this exclusion would also apply to the widows of farm laborers, who would not receive their husbands’ benefits either. In addition, to qualify for OAI one had to demonstrate a history of regular, stable employment. This left out many other Black workers as well.
Additionally, many African Americans faced discrimination in how OAA and ADC were administered, since they were administered by local agencies and social workers.
In some Southern states, strong prejudice and assumptions about Black people's places in the workforce governed whether or not they allowed Black mothers to access benefits. For example, a federal survey of welfare administration attributed the exclusion of black women from ADC to a: “unanimous feeling on the part of the staff and board that there are more work opportunities for Negro women,” an “intense desire not to interfere with the local labor conditions,” and the feeling that “the Negro mother should continue her usually sketchy seasonal labor or indefinite domestic service rather than receive a public assistance grant.” [6]
However, by 1939, African American children came to comprise about one out of every six ADC recipients. Thus, African Americans were able to access ADC at much higher rates than they were able to access mother’s pensions.
This increase in access is not because of a more democratic racial attitude across the board, but shows the extent to which African Americans were excluded from other aspects of the Social Security Act.
Fair Labor Standards Act
We’ll end with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), passed in 1938. This was a landmark piece of legislation that transformed working conditions in the United States. The act:
Established a minimum wage of 25 cents per hour for the first year following passage, 30 cents for the second year, and 40 cents within a period of six years
Provided for maximum working hours of 44 hours per week in the first year following passage, 42 in the second year, and 40 hours per week thereafter
Prohibited child labor in industries engaged in producing goods in interstate commerce
The act was very friendly to the labor movement. It piggybacked off of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which affirmed the rights of wage workers to organize and bargain collectively.
But, the FLSA excluded farmworkers and domestic workers, the most widespread categories for Black workers, from the protections offered by this statute.
Why? By setting a floor on wages, it would have had leveling effects throughout the South, where widespread wage disparities existed between African Americans and whites. There is no question of whether this exclusion was racially motivated.
According to Florida representative James Mark Wilcox:
“There is another matter of great importance in the South, and that is the problem of our Negro labor. There has always been a difference in the wage scale of white and colored labor. So long as Florida people are permitted to handle the matter, the delicate and perplexing problem can be adjusted; but the Federal Government knows no color line and of necessity it cannot make any distinction between the races. We may rest assured, therefore, that when we turn over to a federal bureau or board the power to fix wages, it will prescribe the same wage for the Negro that it prescribes for the white man. Now, such a plan might work in some sections of the United States but those of us who know the true situation know that it just will not work in the South. You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it.” [7]
Conclusion
Cultural memory of the Great Depression has been influenced by images from that era which represent the victims of the Depression in a simplified manner. New Deal programs have been so integrated into our understanding of American citizenship that we now imagine certain elements as “rights.”
The New Deal established the American welfare state as we know it, namely through the implementation of the Social Security Act. However, not all social provisions under that act are viewed equally. We have a two-tiered system, where certain provisions are viewed as “rights” or “entitlements” while others are viewed as “welfare.”
African Americans were largely excluded from the formation of the welfare state and were relegated into programs that stigmatized their communities and families.
Citations:
[1] Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 10-11.
[2] Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, 11.
[3] For more on the "two-track" welfare system, see Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 5-6.
[4] Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 273-274.
[5] For more on the decision to leave out farmworkers and domestic servants, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 43-45.
[6] Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 143.
[7] Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 59-60.
Hi all!
The conversation about unemployment benefits is so interesting. In past classes, I've asked both of those questions (Social Security and unemployment as rights) and usually the unemployment results are much more split down the middle (as opposed to the Social Security one, where most people vote that yes, it is). The context of the pandemic has really changed the dynamics of the question and the way we are thinking about answering it. I think it is really fascinating that unemployment benefits were initiated in the wake of an extreme economic crisis, and we are currently in an economic crisis, which changes the way that we feel about them.
I also really appreciated the comments about ADC--thinking about payments…
In 2020, do you consider unemployment benefits to be a right guaranteed to all American citizens?
I think that everyone should get unemployment benefits. One it helps the economy for to give consumers money for them to spend. But if everyone gets benefits, everyone should too.
When Old Age Assistance was first becoming normalized. It was most likely thought that since citizens worked a long time and contributed to society through taxes, that they should be offered this program. Whereas dependent children where unknowns, and the culture back then expected fathers to leave behind money, or support their children through other family members. It could also have been less liked due to the need for women to work at least partly, rather than not work at all. I think these two factors may have motivated the reasons behind the lack of funding for ADC
In your opinion, were agricultural workers and domestic workers excluded from Old Age Insurance because: Racial prejudice - since most of the workers employed in these industries were Black, we couldn't ignore race as a significant factor. Indeed, racial prejudices would never disappear, and it's always intimidating as an obsession to me whenever I think about it. Agricultural and domestic workers were mostly Black people because they have to suffer disadvantages, they also worked hard, and they should be the ones who needed the most assistance. I don't see any reason that reasonable to exclude them from the OAI, and the reality was just how they make excuses from racial prejudice.
What do you see when you look at this image (Migrant Mother)?
The mother worries about her children and a newborn baby on how she is going to take care of them and provide them the essential needs to live. She looked depressed and has no idea what to do. We can also see the struggle of a single mother.