New Deal America - Document Overview
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During the 1932 election campaign, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt promised the American people a "new deal" and "bold persistent experimentation" to help pull the nation out of the Great Depression. His charismatic personality and infectious energy struck a resonant chord. Roosevelt bested Hoover in a landslide, and he brought with him large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. On March 4, 1933, millions of Americans huddled around their radios to hear Roosevelt deliver his inaugural address. He promised them immediate action—and he delivered. No sooner did the former New York governor move into the White House than he began making an unprecedented series of executive decisions and signing new legislation that served to transform the very nature of the federal government.
During the "First Hundred Days" of his presidency, Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, ending the thirteen-year experiment with prohibition of alcoholic beverages, intervened to shore up the banking industry, drafted new regulations for the stock market, and created an array of new federal agencies and programs designed to reopen factories, raise farm prices, put people back to work, and relieve the distress created by chronic unemployment.
The flurry of governmental activity and Roosevelt's uplifting rhetoric helped restore hope to many among the desperate and destitute, but the depression persisted. The honeymoon of expectation that Roosevelt enjoyed immediately after his election gave way to strident criticism from both ends of the political spectrum. Conservatives accused him of assaulting the freedoms undergirding capitalism. In 1934 disgruntled conservative Democrats formed the American Liberty League to organize opposition to Roosevelt's "socialistic" programs. Roosevelt denounced the Liberty League as a group of "economic royalists" indifferent to the misery of the masses. "I welcome their hatred," he declared.
Other critics lambasted Roosevelt for not doing enough to help the poor and unemployed. The desperate economic conditions gave new life to the Socialist and Communist parties, both of which had fielded candidates in the 1932 presidential election . Many prominent writers, artists, and academics gravitated to the radical Left, and several labor unions began to witness the effects of communist agitators.
The volatile social tensions of the 1930s also helped spawn a diverse array of "neo-populist" demagogues. The most prominent of these independent operators was Democratic Senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana. In late 1934 he launched his own "Share Our Wealth" program as an alternative to the New Deal. Using rabble-rousing techniques that he had refined as governor, Long called for a 100 percent tax on all personal income over $1 million and all fortunes over $5 million. He promised to use the revenue from these new taxes to provide every American with a home, a car, retirement benefits, and free educational opportunities. By 1935 Long boasted almost 8 million followers around the country and was preparing to launch a challenge to Roosevelt's reelection. In September, however, he was gunned down in Louisiana by the relative of a disgruntled political opponent.
Another landslide victory in 1936 emboldened Roosevelt to broaden the scope of his New Deal initiatives. He launched new programs for the unemployed, created the first minimum wage, reorganized the executive branch, and began urban redevelopment programs that included public housing for the homeless. Still, millions of Americans continued to live in squalor, especially in the rural South, where tenants and sharecroppers rarely benefited from the new government programs. By 1938, amid a new recession, the momentum of the New Deal began to wane. Roosevelt had expended most of his creativity and political capital. In the November Congressional elections, the Republicans made deep inroads into the Democratic majorities in both houses. Foreign crises began to distract the attention of the Administration and the nation, and Roosevelt began to focus on international diplomacy and military preparedness.
Even more so than her husband, Eleanor Roosevelt understood the human impact of the Depression, and she used her platform as First Lady to minister to the needs of the destitute and to reach out to disadvantaged minorities. She broke precedent to hold her own weekly press conferences, traveled throughout the country to meet with people of all walks of life, gave numerous lectures and radio addresses, and expressed her candid opinions in a daily syndicated newspaper column entitled "My Day." In the process of such ceaseless agitation, Eleanor Roosevelt became a beloved symbol of the New Deal's concern for common folk and their daily distress.
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FDR's First Inaugural Address (1933)
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As Roosevelt took office the nation faced a banking crisis as well as a deepening depression. He had yet to formulate the specific programs that would comprise the New Deal, but he knew that the nation expected quick action and bold leadership. In his inaugural address he sought to provide both.
This is a day of national consecration, and I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels.
This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.
So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give the support to leadership in these critical days.
In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce;the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.
More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment. Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorsteps, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. . . .
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.
It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.
Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a re-distribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.
The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities.
It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms.
It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. It can be helped by the unifying of relief activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical, and unequal. It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character.
There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.
Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people's money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.
There are the lines of attack. I shall presently urge upon a new Congress in special session detailed measures for their fulfillment, and I shall seek the immediate assistance of the several States.
Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. . . .
In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.
If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.
We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.
With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.
Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors. Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.
It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.
I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.
But in the event that the congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.
We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by young and old alike. . . .
In this dedication of a nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us! May He guide me in the days to come!
[From "Text of the Inaugural Address: President for Vigorous Action,"
The New York Times, 5 March 1933.]
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Excerpts from the Federal Writers' Project Interviews with Depression Victims (1930's)
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From the Account of a White Brick-Plant Worker and His Washer-Woman Wife
"Hub's hired solid time and has been for two years. He works every day from six in the morning till six at night in Mr. Hunter's brick plant across the tracks. Some days more'n that—twenty-four hours on a stretch. That's over-time, but it don't mean no extra pay. It's forty dollars a month straight, no matter what."
Rena Murray—small, stooped, hollow-chested—put her whole ninety pounds behind the heavy flatiron. Collar and cuffs came from under the heat, stiff and slick. She lifted the shirt from the board for final inspection.
"Hub fires the boiler most of the time. Then when they're drying bricks, he has to run the fan for twenty-four hours. They couldn't make out in that kiln unless Hub was there.
"He ought to git more for the work he puts out. Forty dollars a month just ain't enough for us to live on. Me and Hub and the three children. We have to pay four dollars out every month for this shack. Mr. Hunter makes the hands live close by the plant. And he gits ahold of that four dollars for rent before we ever see a cent of Hub's wages. This shack ain't worth four dollars a month, neither. Mr. Hunter won't do nothing toward fixing it up. If a window pane's broke, we do the putting in. Leak done ruins the paper and it's up to us to see to new paper."
Rena stooped to the tub of sprinkled clothes. She shook out a rolled-up bundle and slipped another shirt over the narrow end of the home-made ironing board. She settled the board again between the center table and the lard bucket set in a backless kitchen chair.
"I take in washing or do what I can to help out."
"We ain't been to church for years. I was taught working on Sunday was wrong. Folks that holds out against working on Sunday don't have to hire others to work for 'em if they don't show up. Hub had to pay a dollar and a quarter yesterday to git a man to turn the fan so's he could see after his sister. She's about to die. Dirty shame for a man to have to pay to go see his own die. I sure wish he could find hisself a better job."
"What he aims to do is to turn over every stone he can to git back on the WPA. We got along a lot better on the WPA. We had our check regular and had good warm clothes for the girls. And they give Hub clothes, too, because his work kept him in the open. I didn't git none but I could manage all right when the others was gifting all they did. Whenever one of us would git down, the WPA would send a doctor and medicine. They give us food, too. Things that are supposed to be healthy for eating such as prunes and raisins. We can't buy 'em now."
"Burial insurance is a good thing. I wish I had a policy on me and every one of the children. That's just wishing. It pinches us plumb to death to keep Hub's going. We was always behind in dues till he got put on solid time. I couldn't git no insurance noways on account of my bad health. I've had the pneumonia since we've been here. Down three months. There wasn't a Hunter had feeling enough to set foot in this shack. Mrs. Hunter has spoke to me times since, but Mr. Hunter don't trouble about speaking to them that slaves for him. My mammy taught me a dog was good enough to be nice to."
From the Account of a Young Shoe-Factory Worker
"My work is hard all right. It's hard on me because I ain't but only seventeen and ain't got my full growth yet. It's work down in the steam room which they call it that because it's always full of steam which sometimes when you go in it you can't hardly see. You steam leather down there and that steam soaks you clean to the skin. It makes me keep a cold most of the time because when I go out doors I'm sopping wet. Another thing that's hard about it is having so much standing up to do. My hours is from seven o'clock in the morning till four in the evening. And it's stand on my feet the whole time. When noon time comes and I'm off an hour, why I just find me somewheres to set and I sure set there. You couldn't pay me to stand up during lunch time.
"I'm on piecework now and I can't seem to get my production up to where I make just a whole lot. You get paid by the production hour and it takes fifty pair of shoes to make that hour. You get forty-two cents for the hour. Highest I ever made in one week was eleven dollars and the lowest was seven dollars and forty-two cents. I usually hit in between and make eight or nine dollars.
"Now and then somebody will say, 'We ought to have us a union here of some sort.' That kind of talk just makes me mad all over. Mr. Pugh is a Christian man. He brought his factory here to give us some work which we didn't have any before. We do pretty well, I think, to just stay away from that kind of talk. All but the sore-heads and trouble-makers is satisfied and glad to have work.
"I don't blame Mr. Pugh a bit the way he feels about the unions. The plant manager knows Mr. Pugh mighty well and he told my foreman what Mr. Pugh said. Mr. Pugh said, 'If the union ever comes in here and I have to operate my plant under a union, why I'll just close the plant down and move it away from Hancock so quick it'll make your head swim.' That's his word on it and I don't blame him none. I'd hate to see a union try here. No plant and no jobs for anybody. They just operate these unions out of Wall Street, anyhow, trying to ruin people like Mr. Pugh. . . .
"My money has to go a long way. I've got to pay eight dollars a month rent and I have to buy coal and stove wood. I got to buy clothes for the family and something to eat for them. Then twice a month there's that five dollar ambulance bill which it's to take my brother that's got the T.B. to the City Hospital in Memphis where they take and drain his lungs. Sure charge you for an ambulance, don't they? Now, some people say if you just take one trip in an ambulance, the undertaker won't ask a cent for it. Figures he'll get your custom if you pass on. But they sure charge me for my brother.
"Well, I'm always glad when it's quitting time. I like to work there, but you can't help getting tired. I go on home. I walk four blocks and I'm there. Usually I have to wait a while for supper so I just set at the window. I like to watch and see if maybe something will come along the street and I can watch it. Sometimes there's a new funny paper there and I will look it over—specially if it's Tarzan. That's the best thing in a funny paper, the Tarzan part. Nobody ever gets it over old Tarzan, do they? Most times, though, I like to just set there and watch."
"I work steady but I'm most always financially in need of money. It takes a lot to keep a family going. My little sister needs glasses but they cost too much. All of my family has weak eyes but we can't afford to wear glasses.
"So I haven't the money for running around. I wouldn't if I had the money, either. The Bible is against running around and playing cards and seeing the moving pictures. People should study their Bible more and we'd have more Christian men like Mr. Pugh and more jobs. So me and a young lady I know of go to church and Sunday School instead of running around. My family belongs to the Baptist Church, but this certain young lady is a Nazarene and that's where we go.
"You know, when you're blue and down at the mouth and don't see any use anyhow, a good sermon just lifts you up. You haven't got a thing to lose by living a Christian life. Take Mr. Pugh. He lives it and look where he is now. And if you don't make out that way, if you're poor all your life, then you get a high place in the Kingdom. Just do the best you know how and the Lord will take care of you either here or hereafter. It sure is a comfort."
[From
These Are Our Lives (1939), as told to and written by members of the Federal Writers' Project of the WPA (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 224–28, 231–35]
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After Capitalism-What? (1933), Reinhold Niebuhr
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The onset of the Great Depression prompted many people to reflect upon the nature of capitalism as an economic system. One of the most insightful assessments came from Reinhold Niebuhr, a brilliant young minister and theologian who highlighted the pervasive social injustice made visible by the economic collapse. He contended that such inequality was the natural result of a capitalist civilization doomed to collapse.
The following analysis of American social and political conditions is written on the assumption that capitalism is dying and with the conviction that it ought to die. It is dying because it is a contracting economy which is unable to support the necessities of an industrial system that requires mass production for its maintenance,and because it disturbs the relations of an international economic system with the anarchy of nationalistic politics. It ought to die because it is unable to make the wealth created by modern technology available to all who participate in the productive process on terms of justice.
The conviction that capitalism is dying and that it ought to die gives us no clue to the method of its passing. Will it perish in another world war? Or in the collapse of the credit structure through which it manipulates its various functions? Will it, perhaps, give way to a new social order created by the political power of those who have been disinherited by it? Or will it be destroyed by a revolution? These questions are difficult to answer for any portion of Western civilization, and they are particularly puzzling when directed to the American scene. We may believe that the basic forces moving in modern industrial society are roughly similar in all nations. Yet we cannot evade the fact that various nations reveal a wide variety of unique social and economic characteristics and that our own nation is particularly unique in some of the aspects of its political and economic life. Our wealth has been greater than that of any modern nation, the ideals of a pioneer democracy have retarded the formation of definite classes, the frontier spirit belongs to so recent a past that its individualism is not yet dissipated, and the complete preoccupation of the nation with its engineering task to the exclusion of political and social problems makes us singularly incompetent as a people in the field of politics. All these factors, and some others which might be mentioned, warn the prophet to be circumspect in applying generalizations derived from European conditions to our situation. It is therefore advisable to divide our problem of analysis by considering first those aspects of the situation about which generalizations equally applicable to Europe and America can be made; the uniquely American aspects may then be seen in clearer light.
The most generally applicable judgment which can be made is that capitalism will not reform itself from within. There is nothing in history to support the thesis that a dominant class ever yields its position or privileges in society because its rule has been convicted of ineptness or injustices. Those who still regard this as possible are rationalists and moralists who have only a slight understanding of the stubborn inertia and blindness of collective egoism.
Politically this judgment implies that liberalism in politics is a spent force. In so far as liberalism is based upon confidence in the ability and willingness of rational and moral individuals to change the basis of society, it has suffered disillusion in every modem nation. As the social struggle becomes more sharply defined, the confused liberals drift reluctantly into the camp of reaction and the minority of clear-sighted intellectuals and idealists are forced either to espouse the cause of radicalism or to escape to the bleachers and become disinterested observers. Mr. Roosevelt's effort at, or pretension to, liberalizing the Democratic Party may be regarded as a belated American effort to do what Europe has proved to be impossible. Equally futile will be the efforts of liberals who stand to the left of Mr. Roosevelt and who hope to organize a party which will give the feverish American patient pills of diluted socialism coated with liberalism, in the hope that his aversion to bitter pills will thus be circumvented.
All this does not mean that intellectual and moral idealism are futile. They are needed to bring decency and fairness into any system of society; for no basic reorganization of society will ever guarantee the preservation of humaneness if good men do not preserve it. Furthermore, the intelligence of a dominant group will determine in what measure it will yield in time under pressure or to what degree it will defend its entrenched positions so uncompromisingly that an orderly retreat becomes impossible and a disorderly rout envelops the whole of society in chaos. That ought to be high enough stake for those of us to play for who are engaged in the task of education and moral suasion among the privileged. If such conclusions seems unduly cynical they will seem so only because the moral idealists of the past century, both religious and rational, have been unduly sentimental in their estimates of human nature.
Next to the futility of liberalism we may set down the inevitability of fascism as a practical certainty in every Western nation. A disintegrating social system will try to save itself by closing ranks and eliminating the anarchy within itself. It will thus undoubtedly be able to perpetuate itself for several decades. It will not finally succeed because it will have no way of curing the two basic defects of capitalism, inequality of consumption and international anarchy. It will probably succeed longer in Italy and Germany than in America, because fascism in those countries derives its strength from a combination of the military and capitalistic castes. The military caste has a greater interest in avoiding revolution than in preserving the privileges of the capitalists. It may therefore be counted upon to circumscribe these privileges more rigorously than will be the case in America, where such a caste does not exist and where military men lack social prestige.
The certainty that dominant social groups which now control society will not easily yield and that their rule is nevertheless doomed raises interesting problems of strategy for those who desire a new social order. In America these problems are complicated by the fact that there is no real proletarian class in this country. All but the most dis-inherited workers still belong to the middle class, and they will not be united in a strong political party of their own for some years to come. Distressing social experience will finally produce radical convictions among them, but experience without education and an adequate political philosophy will merely result in sporadic violence. We are literally in the midst of a disintegrating economic empire with no receiver in bankruptcy in sight to assume responsibility for the defunct institution. All this probably means that capitalism has many a decade to run in this country, particularly if it should find momentary relief from present difficulties through some inflationary movement. The sooner a strong political labor movement, expressing itself in socialist terms develops, the greater is the probability of achieving essential change without undue violence or social chaos. . . .
Any modern industrial civilization has a natural and justified instinctive avoidance of revolution. It rightly fears that revolution may result in suicide for the whole civilization. When European nations are unable to achieve a bare Socialist majority in their legislative bodies, it is hardly probable that in America we will ever have such a preponderance of Socialist conviction that Socialist amendments to the constitution could be enacted. But revolution is equally unthinkable. There is no possibility of a purely revolutionary movement establishing order on this continent without years of internecine strife. For this reason it is important that parliamentary socialism seek to enact as much of its program as possible within the present constitutional framework during the next decades, without hoping, however, that socialism itself can be established in this manner. The final struggle between socialism and fascism will probably be a long and drawn-out conflict in which it is possible that fascism will finally capitulate without a military or revolutionary venture being initiated against it. It will capitulate simply because the inexorable logic of history plus the determined opposition of the labor group will finally destroy it. The final transfer of power may come through the use of a general strike or some similar technique.
Prediction at long range may seem idle and useless. But it is important to recognize that neither the parliamentary nor the revolutionary course offers modern society an easy way to the mastery of a technological civilization. If this is the case, it becomes very important to develop such forms of resistance and mass coercion as will disturb the intricacies of an industrial civilization as little as possible, and as will preserve the temper of mutual respect within the area of social conflict. Political realists have become cynical about moral and religious idealism in politics chiefly because so frequently it is expressed in terms of confusion which hide the basic facts of the social struggle. Once the realities of this struggle are freely admitted, there is every possibility of introducing very important ethical elements into the struggle in the way, for instance, that Gandhi introduces them in India.
The inability of religious and intellectual idealists to gauge properly the course of historical events results from their constant over-estimate of idealistic and unselfish factors in political life. They think that an entire nation can be educated toward a new social ideal when all the testimony of history proves that new societies are born out of social struggle, in which the positions of the various social groups are determined by their economic interests.
Those who wish to participate in such a struggle creatively, to help history toward a goal of justice and to eliminate as much confusion, chaos and conflict in the attainment of the goal as possible, will accomplish this result only if they do not permit their own comparative emancipation from the determining and conditioning economic factors to obscure the fact that these factors are generally determining. No amount of education or religious idealism will ever persuade a social class to espouse a cause or seek a goal which is counter to its economic interest. Social intelligence can have a part in guiding social impulse only if it does not commit the error of assuming that intelligence has destroyed and sublimated impulse to such a degree that impulse is no longer potent. This is the real issue between liberalism and political realism. The liberal is an idealist who imagines that his particular type of education or his special kind of religious idealism will accomplish what history has never before revealed: the complete sublimation of the natural impulse of a social group.
Dominant groups will always have the impulse to hold on to their power as long as possible. In the interest of a progressive justice they must be dislodged, and this will be done least painfully and with least confusion if the social group which has the future in its hands becomes conscious of its destiny as soon as possible, is disciplined and self-confident in the knowledge of it destiny and gradually acquires all the heights of prestige and power in society which it is possible to acquire without a struggle. When the inevitable struggle comes (for all contests of power must finally issue in a crisis) there is always the possibility that the old will capitulate and the new assume social direction without internecine conflict. That is why an adequate political realism will ultimately make for more peace in society than a liberalism which does not read the facts of human nature and human history right, and which is betrayed by these errors into erroneous historical calculations which prolong the death agonies of the old order and postpone the coming of the new.
It may be important to say in conclusion that educational and religious idealists shrink from the conclusions to which a realistic analysis of history forces the careful student, partly because they live in the false hope that the impulses of nature in man can be sublimated by mind and conscience to a larger degree than is actually possible, and partly because their own personal idealism shrinks from the "brutalities" of the social struggle which a realistic theory envisages. But this idealism is full of confusion. It does not recognize that everyone but the ascetic is a participant in the brutalities of the social struggle now. The only question of importance is on what side of the struggle they are. Think of all the kind souls who stand in horror of a social conflict who are at this moment benefiting from, and living comfortable lives at the expense of, a social system which condemns 13 million men to misery and semi-starvation. Failure to recognize this covert brutality of the social struggle is probably the greatest weakness of middle- class liberals, and it lends a note of hypocrisy and self-deception to every moral pretension which seeks to eliminate violence in the social struggle.
The relation of the sensitive conscience to the brutal realities of man's collective behavior will always create its own problem—a problem in the solution of which orthodox religion has frequently been more shrewd than liberalism because it did not over-estimate the virtue of human society, but rather recognized the "sinful" character of man's collective life. This problem has its own difficulties, and they ought not to be confused with the problem of achieving an adequate social and political strategy for the attainment of a just society or for the attainment of a higher approximation of justice than a decadent capitalism grants.
[From Reinhold Niebuhr, "After Capitalism—What?"
The World Tomorrow (1 March 1933): 203-205.]
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Share Our Wealth (1935), Huey Long
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Huey Long cemented his control as governor of Louisiana by using state power and state funds to improve social services, to build roads, bridges, and schools, and to reform tax codes. In 1932 he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Initially he supported Roosevelt's New Deal measures, but by 1935 he had broken with the president and launched his own "Share Our Wealth" movement as an alternative to the New Deal. He developed quite a grassroots following across the country before being assassinated in 1935.
. . . Here is what we stand for in a nutshell:
1. We propose that every family in America shall at least own a homestead equal in value to not less than one-third the average family wealth. The average family wealth of America, at normal values, is approximately $16,000. So our first proposition means that every family shall have a home and the comforts of a home up to a value of not less than $5,000.
2. We propose that no family shall own more than 300 times the average family wealth, which means that no family shall possess more than a wealth of $5,000,000. And we think that is too much. The two propositions together mean that no family shall own less than one-third of the average family wealth, nor shall any family own more than 300 times the average family wealth. That is to say that none should be so poor as to have less than one-third of the average, and none should be so rich as to have more than 300 times the average.
3. We next propose that every family shall have an income equal to at least one-third of the average family income in America. If all were allowed to work, according to our statistics, there would be an average family income of from $5,000 to $10,000 per year. So, therefore, in addition to the home which every family would own and the comforts of life which every family would enjoy, every family would make not less than $2,000 to $3,000 per year upon which to live and educate their children.
4. We propose that no family shall have an income of more than 300 times the average family income. Less the income taxes, this would mean an annual income of $1,000,000 would be the maximum allowed any one family in 1 year. The third and fourth propositions simply mean that no family should earn less than one-third the average, and no family should earn more than 300 times the average; none to make too much, none to make too little. Everyone to have the things required for life; every man a king.
5. We propose a pension to the old people. Under our proposal taxes would not be levied upon the sons and daughters, nor the working people to support their aged fathers and mothers. But on the contrary, such support as would be given for old-age pensions would be borne solely by the surplus money which the Government would rake off the big fortunes and big inheritances.
6. We propose to care for the veterans of our wars, including the immediate cash payment of the soldiers' bonus, and last, but not least, we propose that every child in America have a right to education and training, not only through grammar and high school, but also through colleges and universities. And this education and training would be of such extent as will equip each child to battle on fair terms in the work which it is compelled to perform throughout life. We would not have it that a child could go to college or university provided his parents had the money on which to send him, but it would be the right of every child under our plan to the costs, including living expenses of college and university training, which could be done by our country at a cost considerably less than is required for the military training which has been given our youth in the past. . . .
Let no one tell you that it is difficult to redistribute the wealth of this land; it matters not how rich or great one may be, when he dies his wealth must be redistributed anyway. The law of God shows how it has been throughout time. Nothing is more sensible or better understood than the redistribution of property. The laws of God command it. It is required of all nations that live. . . .
So let us be about our work. It is simple. Why lie ye here idle? There is enough for all. Let there be peace in the land. Let our children be happy. . . .
How wonderful, how great, how fruitful to all this great land of ours can be. We only have to eliminate useless greed, provide that none shall be too big and none too small. Beautiful America can rise to the opportunity before it. It means to us all:
Every man a king.
[From
Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 1st sess., 7 May 1935, pp. 7049-50.]
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