The New Deal Stalls

I)                   Presidential politics

A)    1936 Presidential election

1)      Roosevelt Landslide – Roosevelt used a great deal of populist rhetoric in the election, calling the Republican Party “economic royalists” and “organized money.”

2)      Roosevelt won 60% of the popular votes cast (greater than his victory over Hoover), and the electoral votes of every state except Maine and Vermont.

(a)    African American vote – by 1936, African Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of FDR over the Republican standard-bearer, in a reversal over long-standing tendencies to vote for the party of Lincoln.  This occurs, despite some discriminatory practices in New Deal programs, for several reasons.

(i)                  “Black Cabinet” – second level bureaucrats and black leaders outside of the administration who provided advice to the administration; these African Americans were particularly influential upon Eleanor Roosevelt.

(ii)                Eleanor Roosevelt – when African American singer Marion Anderson was refused the use of the DAR Hall in DC to hold a concert, Eleanor R. resigned her membership in the organization, and arranged for Ms. Anderson to give her concert on the Mall, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

B)     Roosevelt Recession – FDR’s lack of ideology comes back to haunt him; because he was not a true believer in Keynesian economics, FDR’s lack of ideological commitment to his New Deal Programs led him to cut government spending just as the economy was beginning to recover. Roosevelt was never comfortable with the sizable deficit that his government was running; with his sizable victory in 1936, he decided to greatly reduce spending in 1937, with disastrous results.

1)      Keynesian Economic Theory – the belief that the role of government was to use government spending to regulate the country’s economy; in times of economic distress, this meant “priming the pump” by raising expenditures, even if this meant deficit spending.

2)      Economic recession – the Roosevelt Recession probably contributed most to the disenchantment towards Roosevelt, and the gains by conservatives in the elections in 1938.

3)      Political backlash

(a)    Reaction to “packing” the Supreme Court – a reactionary court had ruled against Roosevelt policies in numerous cases to this point; FDR advocated being enabled to nominate an additional justice for each one over the age of seventy-five (which would have added four additional justices to the bench); both Republican and many Democrats claimed Roosevelt was attempting to become dictator. The public fallout here was probably less severe than the bad press this generated for the President.

4)      Backlash against labor

(a)    Monroe MI – Republic Steel private police force gassed SWOC headquarters and set fire to it.

(b)   Youngstown – Gov. Davey, who labor had supported in the 1936 election, read the handwriting on the wall, and used the National Guard to protect and escort strikebreakers to another Republic Steel plant on strike in this city.  Phil Murray, whom Lewis had appointed to head up the SWOC Little Steel organizing drive, called for FDR to assist in this crisis, which he refused to do; this was the beginning of the rift between Lewis and FDR.

(c)    Chicago Memorial Day Massacre – Republic Steel employees in Chicago on strike were rallying when Chicago police opened fire on the unarmed crowd, killing several; newsreel footage of this incident was withheld because officials feared it would be incendiary.

C)    Temporary National Economic Committee – formed  to study corporate power and obstacles to competition, with an eye to transforming the US economy

1)      Reinvigoration of Antitrust Division in Justice Department

D)    Political realities – the broad vision advocated the National Economic Committee lost out to efforts to regulate and stabilize the economy through tax measures and spending policies, rather than the redistribution of wealth and/or limiting corporate power

1)      Greater corporate opposition – corporate executives lobbied strenuously against these timid efforts of greater regulation of the economy.

E)     New Deal in the South

1)      New Deal programs reinforced Southern hierarchy – rather than transcend social relations in the South (a difficult task), Roosevelt’s New Deal policies reinforced many of these social relations, leaving the southern aristocrats (heirs of the Bourbons) in control.

(a)    Southern political power – fewer than 10% of the adult population voted in elections in Virginia and Mississippi, through the use of poll taxes and other means to keep voter turnout low, and southern aristocrats in control

2)      1938 Congressional Elections – in 1938, FDR attempts to jump start his New Deal programs by campaigning vigorously on the behalf of supporters—which did not include many old-line southern democrats or any Republicans.

(a)    Failure of “realignment” plan – backlash from the worsening economic situation (the Roosevelt Recession), the political fallout from the court-packing proposal, and the apparent social unrest typified by the Flint Sit-Down Strike (and the hundreds of like-minded strikes that it inspired) probably doomed this plan to failure; without serious reform of the southern electoral system (see above), it had no chance of success in that region anyway.

3)      Dixiecrat/Republican alliance – although they were not calling themselves Dixiecrats yet, southern Democrats often cooperated with Republicans after this election to stall New Deal programs.

II)                 Labor Divided – the success of the infant CIO inspired the AFL to begin a vigorous organizing campaign of its own; in fact, the AFL gained more members during this time period than did the CIO.  Rather than cooperation between the two bodies, however, there was a great deal of animosity between leaders of the two bodies.

A)    AFL/CIO rivalry

1)      Raiding – both organizations set up rival unions to attempt to steal members that the other group had already organized; this allowed some employers to play rival groups against each other, to the detriment of rank-and-file members.

2)      AFL attacks on NLRB – the AFL attacked decisions handed down by the National Labor Relations Board (which had been set up to adjudicate labor disputes arising from organizing drives, as well as disputes between unions and management) as favoring the CIO; this dispute finally forced Roosevelt to appoint new board members, who stressed the importance of stability and validity of craft union claims, which of course was the AFL’s position.

3)      House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) – also known as the Dies Committee, after its chair; the un-American activities it was looking to root out were any kind of left-wing political activities, in particular Communism.  Because the CIO leadership in a variety of unions was people by Communists, suspected Communists, and Communist “sympathizers,” which the more conservative leaders of the AFL hated anyway, they saw denouncing these leaders to the Dies Committee as a way of promoting their own causes.

III)              Roosevelt turns to internationalism – the growing international crisis during the latter 1930s gained more and more of Roosevelt’s attention as his New Deal policies began stalling; Roosevelt’s background left him well-prepared to handle this problem, as well.

A)    Threat of Fascism – the world-wide economic crisis of the 1930s led many countries to experiment with new forms of government; one of the most popular was what we call fascism

1)      Definition of fascism – government control of all aspects of life, promising a “third way” between Marxism and capitalism, emphasizing the organic national community; it glorified war and violence; it embraced the irrational (like the occult), and the presumption of revolutionary change.

B)     Italy

1)      Rise of Mussolini

(a)    Fascism – rigid, one-party rule which crushes opposition (especially on the left), retention of private ownership of means of production (which differentiates it from the tenets of Marxism), but which operates under centralized government control; belligerent nationalism (and sometimes racism); and the glorification of war.

(b)   Il Duce (the leader) – former socialist; appealed to Italian nationalism, and played upon the perceived slights to Italy from its participation on the First World War.

(c)    Invasion of Ethiopia – the last independent state on the continent of Africa in the 1930s, but it received no help from other countries to fight of Italian aggression.

C)    Germany

1)      National Socialism (Nazi)

(a)    Hostile to all forms of democracy

(b)   Rise of Adolph Hitler

(i)                  Appeals to pride in German culture

(ii)                Racism – believed in the “natural” superiority of the “Aryan” race (whatever that is); racism was a much more important ideology for German fascists than it was for Italians.

(iii)               Compare Nazi ideas of the superiority of Aryans to the belief (backed by scientific “proof”) that Anglo-Saxons were destined by biology to rule the earth.

(c)    Burning of the Reichstag – fire of suspicious origin (which has been probably rightly been blamed on the Nazis) destroyed the meeting place for the equivalent of the German congress, which then did not meet any longer.

(d)   Kristallnach (November 9-10, 1938) – Nazis burned over 200 synagogues, and looted thousands of Jewish-owned stores

(i)                  Signaled the beginning of a more aggressive anti-Semitism on the part of the German government

(ii)                Point of comparison – until Kristallnach, Jews in Germany suffered less discrimination in that country than they suffered in the United States (no restrictions on residence, or clubs they could not join).

(e)    Repudiation of the Versailles Treaty – moved arms into the de-militarized Ruhr Valley, also began claiming the right to “lebensraum” or living space, pieces of land that Hitler thought other European powers would not go to war to prevent him from claiming.

D)    Japan

1)      Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – to ensure Japan’s continued access to raw materials to run their industries, forced on other East Asian countries by the military power of Japan.

(a)    Invasion of Manchuria – Manchuria lies between China and Russian Siberia, and had traditionally been part of China; had the richest deposit of minerals in Asia.

(b)   1937 Sino-Japanese War – the “Rape of Nanking” which resulted in 300,000 deaths of Chinese civilians; numerous women were carted off to serve as “pleasure girls” (prostitutes for the Japanese army—a practice which they also practiced in other areas in Asia)

2)      Racist stereotyping

(a)    Japanese superiority – Japanese thought that the Chinese were an inferior people, who gave them the rights to dominate; in the Japanese view, westerners like the US and British were decadent westerners who would crumble when confronted by the pure Japanese spirit.

(b)   US racism – US saw Chinese has helpless peasants, largely incapable of self-government; the Japanese, on the other hand, were the “yellow peril,” devious, and set upon ruining the West by exporting their cheap goods, and not buying enough western goods.

E)     Spanish Civil War – the Spanish Civil War served as a surrogate battle between fascist and communist forces, with the fascist forces prevailing.

F)     Isolationism – the foreign policies of the US government had long promoted isolationism from foreign entanglements, and this; although this had begun to dissipate, it had not disappeared.

1)      US Senate rejected membership in the World Court

2)      Neutrality Acts – mandated an arms embargo against both victim and aggressor in armed conflict; stipulated a narrower interpretation of neutrality rights; “cash and carry” trade policy for belligerents that would deprive them of access to US credit, ships, and military goods.