Chapter 15
In This Chapter
● Enduring the Great Depression
● Failing minorities
● FDR’s Alphabet Soup
● Naysayers, crusaders, nuts, and desperadoes
During one of his last speeches as president, in December 1928, Calvin Coolidge noted that America could “regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.” And much of the country did both. But as the 1930s dawned, it became painfully apparent that Americans had been prematurely satisfied and overly optimistic.
This chapter takes a look at what triggered the Great Depression and what it meant. We also meet Franklin Roosevelt, another of those great men who seem to come along every now and then in American history just when the country needs them.
The Great Depression: Causes and Consequences
America had gone through hard times before: a bank panic and depression in the early 1820s, and other economic hard times in the late 1830s, the mid-1870s, and the early and mid-1890s. But never did it suffer an economic illness so deep and so long as the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Economists have argued ever since as to just what caused it. But it’s safe to say that a bunch of intertwined factors contributed. Among them were
● The stock market crash. The stock market soared throughout most of the 1920s, and the more it grew, the more people were eager to pour money into it. Many people bought on margin, which meant they paid only part of a stock’s worth when they bought it and the rest when they sold it. That worked fine as long as stock prices kept going up. But when the market crashed in late October 1929, they were forced to pay up on stocks that were worth far less than what they had paid for them. Many had borrowed to buy stock, and when the stock market went belly-up, they couldn’t repay their loans and the lenders were left holding the empty bag.
● Bank failures. Many small banks, particularly in rural areas, had overextended credit to farmers who, for the most part, had not shared in the prosperity of the 1920s and often could not repay the loans. Big banks, meanwhile, had foolishly made huge loans to foreign countries. Why? So the foreign countries could repay their earlier debts from World War I. When times got tough and U.S. banks stopped lending, European nations simply defaulted on their outstanding loans. As a result, many banks went bankrupt. Others were forced out of business when depositors panicked and withdrew their money. The closings and panics almost completely shut down the country’s banking system.
● Too many poor people. That may sound sort of goofy, but it’s a real reason. While the overall economy had soared in the 1920s, most of the wealth was enjoyed by relatively few Americans. In 1929, 40 percent of the families in the country were still living at or below the poverty level. That made them too poor to buy goods and services and too poor to pay their debts. With no markets for their goods, manufacturers had to lay off tens of thousands of workers, which, of course, just created more poor people.
● Farm failures. Many American farmers were already having a hard time before the Depression, mostly because they were producing too much and farm product prices were too low. The situation was so bad in some areas that farmers burned corn for fuel rather than sell it.
● Environmental disasters. The production of vast crops during World War I and the decade that followed resulted in over-plowing of much of America’s farmland. The prairie grasses that held topsoil in place were stripped. Coupled with one of the worst droughts in recorded history, the unprotected soil turned the Great Plains into what would become known as the “Dust Bowl.” Dry winds picked up tons of topsoil and blew it across the prairies, creating huge, suffocating clouds of dirt that buried towns and turned farms into deserts.
● Government inaction. Rather than try to jumpstart the economy by pushing the Federal Reserve System to lend money to banks at low interest rates and pumping money into the economy through federal public works projects, the Hoover Administration did nothing at first, then took small and tentative actions that weren’t enough to head things off.
Plus to minus
Anyone who doubts the Great Depression deserves the adjective "great" probably hasn't studied numbers like these:
● More than 5,000 banks closed between 1930 and 1933, 9 million savings accounts were wiped out, and depositors lost $2.5 billion.
● Unemployment rose from less than 1 million in 1929 to more than 12 million by 1933 — equal to about 25 percent of the total U.S. workforce.
● Capital investment dropped from $10 billion in 1929 to $1 billion in 1932.
● The stock market's industrial index dropped from 452 in September 1929 to 58 in July 1932.
● The Gross National Product went from $104 billion in 1929 to $59 billion in 1932.
● Farm income dropped 60 percent in the three years after 1929. In 1932, per capita income from farming was only $80 a year for farmers.
Whatever the causes, the consequences of the Great Depression were staggering. In the cities, thousands of jobless men roamed the streets looking for work. It wasn’t unusual for 2,000 or 3,000 applicants to show up for one or two job openings. If they weren’t looking for work, they were looking for food. Bread lines were established to prevent people from starving (see Figure 15-1).
And more than a million families lost their houses and took up residence in shantytowns made up of tents, packing crates, and the hulks of old cars. They were called “Hoovervilles,” a mocking reference to President Hoover, whom many blamed (somewhat unfairly) for the mess the country was in.
Figure 15-1: Many wait hours in line for bread.
The Lindbergh kidnapping
Almost everybody loved Charles Lindbergh. The lanky aviator had remained a true American hero after his historic solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. So it made national headlines when someone climbed in a second-story window of Lindbergh's Hopewell, New Jersey, home and snatched his 20-month-old son, Charles Jr.
The nation held its breath for six weeks, during which time Lindbergh responded to a ransom demand by paying $50,000. But on May 12, the body of the missing baby was found in the woods about five miles from the Lindbergh home. An illegal immigrant and escaped convict from Germany named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested for the crime after most of the ransom money was found in his garage. Hauptmann was convicted and executed in the electric chair in 1936, still declaring his innocence.
As a result of the crime, Congress passed what became known as the "Lindbergh Law," which made kidnapping a federal crime, and thus allowed the FBI to enter the hunt for kidnappers.
Americans weren’t sure what to do. In the summer of 1932, about 20,000 desperate World War I veterans marched on Washington D.C. to claim $1,000 bonuses they had been promised they would get, starting in 1946. When Congress refused to move up the payment schedules, several thousand members of the “Bonus Army” built a camp of tents and shacks on the banks of the Potomac River and refused to leave. Under orders of President Hoover, federal troops commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur used bayonets and gas bombs to rout the squatters. The camp was burned. No one was killed, but the episode left a bad taste in the mouths of many Americans.
Thousands of farmers left their homes in states like Oklahoma and Arkansas and headed for the promise of better days in the West, especially California. What they found there, however, was most often a backbreaking existence as migrant laborers, living in squalid camps and picking fruit for starvation wages.
Shoving Aside Racial Minorities
The majority of America’s minorities had never had it good, so it’s not surprising that the Depression made their lot even more miserable.
More than half of African Americans still lived in the South, most as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, meaning they farmed someone else’s land. Almost all of those who worked and weren’t farmers held menial jobs that whites hadn’t wanted — until the Depression came along. When it did, the African Americans were shoved out of their jobs. As many as 400,000 left the South for cities in the North, which didn’t help much. By 1932, it’s estimated that half of the black U.S. population was on some form of relief.
Justice, southern-style
In March 1931, nine young black males were taken from a freight train near Scottsboro, Alabama, and arrested for vagrancy. Then two white women who were traveling in the same freight car accused the boys of gang-raping them.
Despite mountains of evidence that the women were lying, an all-white jury quickly convicted the youths, and eight of them were sentenced to death. A communist-backed group called the International Labor Defense took up their cause, and the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a new trial. Five of them were retried and found guilty again, and again the verdict was thrown out by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional because blacks had been excluded from the jury.
None of the defendants were ever executed. One escaped, and the other four were paroled after serving years in prison for the crime of being black in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There also wasn’t much of a “We’re all in this together” mentality. Segregation continued in nearly every walk of life, more than 60 blacks were murdered by lynching and other mob violence, and federal anti-lynching laws were defeated in Congress. Even many of the bold federal programs that came into being in the 1930s blatantly discriminated against African Americans. Wage-setting programs allowed employers to pay black workers less than whites, farm aid programs often ignored African American farmers, and job creation programs provided disproportionately fewer jobs to African Americans.
Some of the programs, however, helped everyone. Segregation in federal jobs did begin to slowly crumble, and some labor unions opened their membership to minorities. Such crumbs were enough to make many black voters leave the party of Lincoln behind, which they felt had done nothing for them, and vote Democratic for decades to come.
Other minority groups suffered similarly. Mexico had been exempted from the immigration restrictions of the 1920s, and, as a result, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans came to the United States, mostly to the Southwest. Prior to the Depression, they were at least tolerated as a ready source of cheap labor. In the 1930s, however, they were pushed out of jobs by desperate whites. Many thousands were deported, even some who were legal U.S. citizens, and as many as 500,000 returned to Mexico. Those of Asian descent, mostly on the West Coast, were likewise pushed out of jobs or relegated to jobs only within their own communities.
Native Americans had been largely forgotten by the U.S. government since the 1880s, which was not a good thing. The general idea had been to gradually have Native Americans disappear into the American mainstream. In 1924, Congress made U.S. citizens of all Native Americans who weren’t already citizens, whether they wanted to be or not.
But preliminary studies done in the 1920s found that assimilation had failed. In 1934, Congress changed direction and passed laws that allowed Native Americans to retain their cultural identity. Although well-meant, it did little for their economic well-being, and they remained perhaps the worst-off of America’s minority groups.
Keeping Women at Home — or Work
With jobs scarce, a strong feeling prevailed that women should stay home and let men have the jobs. There was even a federal rule that two people in the same family could not both be on the government payroll. But two things occurred that actually increased the number of women in the workforce during the decade. The first was that many families simply could not survive without an extra income. The second was that many men abandoned their families to look for work or because they were ashamed that they couldn’t find work. Marriage rates dropped for the first time since the early 1800s.
Inventing an antidepressant
Charles B. Darrow had known better times.
Broke and unemployed in 1933, the Germantown, Pennsylvania, heating engineer was sitting around the house one day thinking about a past family vacation to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he encountered a board game called "The Landlord's Game." Intrigued, Darrow developed a version of the game using Atlantic City addresses like Marvin Gardens and Park Place. He called his get-rich-quick, real-estate board game "Monopoly."
Darrow took his idea to the Parker Brothers game company in 1934. They promptly kicked him out the door, calling the game too long, too dull, and burdened with at least 52 "fundamental play errors." Undaunted, Darrow produced the game on his own and sold 5,000 sets to a Philadelphia department store.
The sale changed the Parker Brothers' mind. They bought the game from Darrow in early 1936, bought the rights to "The Landlord's Game" from its inventor, Elizabeth Magie, and soon were churning out 20,000 sets of "Monopoly" a week. People forgot their hard times for a few hours while rolling dice, buying railroads, and going directly to jail without passing "Go."
Monopoly is now produced in 26 languages and sold in more than 40 countries. Darrow retired at the age of 46 on his royalties. He lived to the age of 76, the first American millionaire to make his fortune by designing a game — and in the midst of the Great Depression yet!
Developing Organized Labor
If the sun peeked through the Depression’s clouds on anyone, it may have been organized labor. The captains of industry and business lost much of their political clout during the 1930s, and new laws made organizing easier.
The decade also saw a telling split in labor. The traditionalists who ran the American Federation of Labor (AFL) wanted to concentrate on organizing workers according to their specific skills or craft. But that left out thousands of workers who had no specific skills and also sometimes pitted workers for the same company against each other.
In 1936, John L. Lewis, the bombastic leader of the United Mine Workers, led a split from the AFL and formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The CIO was more receptive to not only unskilled workers, but also women and minorities. By 1938, it had 4 million members.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) also flexed its muscles in the decade. The UAW used sit-down strikes, where workers would simply stop and sit down at their posts, making it much more difficult to use strikebreakers. In 1937, General Motors, the third-largest company in the country, recognized the UAW after a 44-day strike.
That same year, steelworkers won recognition of their union by U.S. Steel, the giant of the industry. Other steel companies, however, refused to go along, and confrontations were often violent. On Memorial Day, 1937, police opened fire on marching strikers and their families in South Chicago, killing 10 and wounding 90. The tragedy became known as the “Memorial Day Massacre” and served as a rallying cry for labor.
All told, there were more than 4,500 strikes in 1937, and labor won more than three-quarters of them. By 1940, more than eight million Americans were members of organized labor.
Me first
"I shall order the men to disregard your order. I shall then walk up to the largest window in the plant, open it . . . remove my shirt and bare my bosom. Then when you order your troops to fire, mine will be the first those bullets will strike."
— CIO leader John L. Lewis, in response to Michigan Gov. Frank Murphy's question about what Lewis would do if Murphy issued an order to the National Guard to evict striking auto workers in January, 1937. Murphy tore up the order.
W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel
He may have been the only man ever elected governor on the basis of flour and his singing voice. Even in Texas.
O'Daniel was born in Ohio in 1890. In 1925, he moved to Fort Worth as sales manager of a flour milling company, and two years later he got the idea to start a radio program as a way to sell more flour. Backed by a group called the "Light Crust Dough Boys" (whose members included future country music legend Bob Wills), O'Daniel sang, gave advice to housewives, advocated following the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, and made a household phrase out of "please pass the biscuits, Pappy."
In 1938, on something of a whim, O'Daniel asked listeners if he should run for governor. When the answer was a resounding yes, he entered the race, mostly, he said, to boost flour sales. To the surprise of nearly everyone, he won. More than 50,000 people attended his inauguration, which was held at the University of Texas football stadium. O'Daniel did almost nothing of note as governor, but was reelected in 1940 and then elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served until 1949. He died 20 years later, after another successful career in life insurance.
Note: One of the fellows he beat in the U.S. Senate race was a brash, young congressman named Lyndon B. Johnson.
FDR: Making Alphabet Soup
In 1932, Herbert Hoover was the U.S. president. In 1933, he was toast. Much of the country blamed Hoover for the Depression, although the groundwork for it had been laid long before he was elected in 1928. Hoover’s big mistake was that he kept saying things would get better if everyone was just a little patient — and things just got worse.
Electing a reformer
By the time the 1932 presidential election came along, it was pretty clear that the Democrats could nominate a dead dog and still beat Hoover. Fortunately for the country, they passed up deceased canines and chose the governor of New York. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an appellation reduced in newspaper headlines and the popular parlance to “FDR.”
A distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt and the only son of a wealthy railroad executive, FDR attended the best private schools and graduated from Harvard. Trained as a lawyer, Roosevelt served in the state legislature, became assistant secretary of the Navy, and had a boundless future. Then, in 1921, he was struck by polio and crippled.
Eleanor Roosevelt
She began her marriage to her distant cousin in his shadow — and became his "legs." She also became one of the most beloved — and hated — first ladies in U.S. history.
Eleanor was born into a wealthy New York family in 1884. After an unhappy childhood marked by the death of her parents, she married Franklin in 1905. Over the next decade, Eleanor had six children, found out her husband was playing around, and seemed destined to be either divorced or in the background as a politician's wife.
But Eleanor rose to the occasion. As first lady, she broke tradition and held more than 350
press conferences of her own — but for female journalists only. She was a tireless champion for civil rights and women's issues and often represented her husband, whose polio prevented him from traveling easily, around the country. But her activism also earned her vitriolic hatred from people who didn't like her husband, her politics, or the fact that she was an independent woman.
After FDR's death, Eleanor served as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations and as a roving ambassador-at-large. She died in 1962, at the age of 78.
But Roosevelt had an indomitable spirit. He was elected New York’s governor in 1928, earning a reputation as a reformer. The Democrats nominated him for the presidency in 1932 after some behind-the-scenes maneuvering by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst and business tycoon Joseph Kennedy. He campaigned on a “New Deal” platform and easily defeated Hoover.
Despite his aristocratic background, Roosevelt was wildly popular with the average guy, many of whom did not know he could walk only with leg braces and crutches. (News photographers and newsreel cameramen took care not to take shots of him in “awkward” poses.) But many conservatives and business leaders, who considered him a traitor to his class, hated him.
FDR may have been the perfect president for the time. He was friendly and approachable, and exuded sympathy and self-confidence. He knew how to compromise, and, like Lincoln and Washington, he knew how to get the best out of people. He was lucky — before taking office he narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullets while riding in a car with Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak in Miami (Cermak was killed). He wasn’t afraid to do something, even if it proved to be wrong: “Take a method,” he said, “and try it. If it fails, try another. But above all, do something.”
Who's afraid of a little depression?
"First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror that paralyzes needed effort to convert retreat into advance."
— Franklin Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933.
"We ain't gonna die out. People is goin' on — changin' a little, maybe, but goin' right on."
— Ma Joad in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, 1939.
Creating hope through a New Deal
Roosevelt heeded his own advice and did something. Supported by healthy Democratic majorities in Congress, FDR pushed through a dazzling array of programs (many of them best known by their initials) in his first 100 days in office. The products of the first 100 days (and in some cases a bit longer) included the
● Emergency Banking Act. Three days after he took office, FDR closed all banks. Then, on March 9, he pushed through Congress a bill that reopened the banks under close supervision. The bill, which took all of eight hours to go through, also authorized the treasury to issue more currency.
● Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). This created 1,300 camps around the country to give young men new jobs (at $30 a month, with $22 sent home to their families) in conserving natural resources. By 1941, the CCC employed 2.5 million men, who planted more than 17 million trees and made improvements in scores of state and national parks.
● Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA). The FERA eventually provided a total of $500 million in aid to state and local governments.
● Civic Works Administration (CWA). The CWA provided about 4 million jobs in building roads, airports, schools, sewer systems, and other civic projects.
● Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). Basically, it paid farmers not to produce so much food. That bailed farmers out, at least a little, and increased farm prices to more profitable levels.
● Homeowners Loan Act. This provided funds to help keep homeowners from losing their homes to mortgage foreclosures.
● Tennessee Valley Authority Act (TVA) One of the most innovative of the New Deal programs, the TVA created an independent public agency that oversaw the development of dams and other projects in the Tennessee River Valley. The TVA covered 40,000 square miles in seven states. It built 16 dams, took over 5 more, and provided electric power to 40,000 families that previously had none. The TVA also supplied fertilizer, provided flood control and better river navigation, and reforested vast areas.
● Truth in Securities Act. This act required new stocks and bonds offered for sale to be registered with the new Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and required brokers to fully disclose all background information.
● Glass-Stegall Banking Act. This act mandated that banks get out of the investment business and restricted use of bank money on stock speculation. It also created federal guarantees for personal bank accounts.
● National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) This ambitious program was designed to get industries to cooperate in setting maximum hours, minimum wages, and price controls through an organization called the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The NIRA was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935 for giving too much power to the program’s non-government administrators.
● Works Projects Administration (WPA). This organization created a host of federal projects that ranged from cleaning slums and providing electricity to rural areas to painting murals on the walls of public buildings and putting on plays for audiences that paid only what they could afford.
In 1935 Roosevelt added to his alphabet soup of programs by getting Congress to pass the Social Security Act, which began a sweeping federal system of unemployment insurance and retirement pensions paid for by both employers and employees through payroll taxes. In 1938, he signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created a national minimum wage of 25 cents per hour and a maximum workweek of 44 hours.
By the time the 1936 elections rolled around, things were looking up. Unemployment had dropped from 12 million to about 9 million. Average weekly earnings had increased from $17 to $22. So despite Republican predictions that the Democrats were creating a socialist state, FDR was easily reelected.
Harry Hopkins
He was the big dealer in the New Deal, a super social worker who was Franklin Roosevelt's most trusted aide and whose no-b.s. approach to things earned him the nickname "Sir Root of the Matter" from Winston Churchill.
Hopkins was born the son of a harness maker in Iowa in 1890. After graduating from college, he became a social worker and eventually ran relief programs in New York for FDR when Roosevelt was governor. In the White House, Hopkins ran several New Deal programs and agencies and was made secretary of commerce in 1938.
He wasn't shy about spending government money, either: One Hopkins-run program spent $1 billion in less than six months, making even FDR wince. When a New Deal congressional critic suggested there were better ways to deal with the Depression in the long run, Hopkins snapped: "People don't eat in the long run, Senator, they eat every day."
When World War II broke out, Hopkins served as FDR's alter ego and go-between with other world leaders. After FDR's death, Hopkins helped plan the United Nations. Never in good health, he died in 1946 at the age of 55.
Implementing court-packing tactics
One of the things that stuck in FDR’s craw during his first term was the nine-member U.S. Supreme Court, which was dominated by conservatives and had thwarted some of Roosevelt’s plans. So in February 1937, he proposed that he be allowed to appoint a new federal judge for every judge that refused to retire within six months of reaching the age of 70. This “court-packing” tactic would have raised the number of Supreme Court justices to 15.
Roosevelt’s ploy worked — sort of. Although Congress ultimately rejected it, the high court began making decisions that were more favorable to the New Deal. Within a few years, six justices retired, enabling Roosevelt to appoint liberals to the court. But the fight also weakened FDR politically. During his second term, Roosevelt’s programs slowed considerably. The economy dipped again in 1937, and Republicans made gains in Congress in 1938.
How well the New Deal actually worked is debatable. Many of the programs had big price tags. The National Debt, which was about $22.5 billion when FDR took office, was nearly double that by 1940, and so was the size of the federal bureaucracy. Moreover, millions of people were still out of work.
What is undebatable is the fact that the New Deal had greatly increased the role of the federal government in people’s lives. And most people felt a lot better in 1940 than they did in 1932. Americans were pleased enough, in fact, with FDR’s performance by 1940 to give him what they had given no other president — a third term.
The birth of a hero
You may have read that Superman was born on the planet Krypton, but it was really Cleveland, on a hot summer night in 1934. And his parents were a couple of teenagers looking for careers in Depression-ravaged America.
Jerry Siegel was a 19-year-old would-be writer who dallied in science fiction. His pal, 19-year-old Joe Shuster, was an artist. So when Siegel came up with an idea for a comic character with superpowers during a sleepless night, the two decided to put together a comic strip. They dressed their hero in a red, blue, and yellow costume and took him around to every comic strip syndicate in America — and were rejected faster than a speeding bullet.
In 1938, however, D.C. Comics decided to take a chance, and Superman appeared for the first time in Action Comics #1 (a mint copy of which was appraised in 2006 at $340,000). Siegel and Shuster got $130 for him, although they were eventually given pensions and medical insurance from D.C. after several lawsuits.
Created as an antidote for Depression blues, the Man of Steel has become an icon perhaps second only to Mickey Mouse as a larger-than-life pen-and-ink character. And who knows? Without him, we might not have super bowls, superstars, or super-sized fast food meals.
Critics, Crooks, and Crimefighters
Of course, not everyone was in love with FDR. Many Republicans refused to even say his name, referring to him as “that man in the White House.” The 1930s also spawned a gaggle of colorful critics and crusaders who made themselves heard above the hard times.
Huey Long
He was a traveling salesman, a lawyer, and a world-class demagogue. Long was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928 on a populist platform, and actually did some good things for the state, such as making school textbooks free and improving roads and highways. But he also ran a corrupt administration that was not above roughing up, blackmailing, or slandering those who opposed him. By 1930, the “Kingfish” was as close to an absolute dictator as there was in the country. He controlled the legislature and, after winning a U.S. Senate seat, refused to promptly vacate the governor’s office, thus holding both jobs for awhile.
A "democratic" kingmaker
I'm for the poor man — all poor men. Black and white, they all gotta have a chance. 'Every man a king,' that's my motto."
— Huey Long to a journalist, 1932.
Originally an FDR supporter, Long broke with the White House mostly for egotistical reasons. He proposed a “Share Our Wealth” program that called for confiscating family fortunes of more than $5 million and annual incomes over $1 million and guaranteeing every family $2,500 a year, a homestead, and a car. Long had a national following and announced he would run against FDR at the head of a third party in 1936. Private polls showed he might garner 4 million votes, enough to tip the election to the Republicans. But he never got the chance. In September 1935, Long was shot to death on the steps of the Louisiana capital by a man whose family he had ruined.
Francis E. Townsend
Townsend was an elderly California doctor who was selling real estate in Long Beach in 1935 when he had an idea that he just couldn’t help sharing: Providing $200 a month for life to everyone 60 years old or older. It would be financed by sales taxes, and every pensioner would have to spend their entire pension every month, which he said would stimulate the economy. Actually, more experienced economists pointed out the scheme would take half the national income to provide for eight percent of the population.
Despite the crackpot smell of the idea, “Townsend Clubs” sprang up all over the country, with as many as 5 million members. The idea died out only gradually after the Roosevelt Administration proposed the Social Security system.
Charles E. Coughlin
A Roman Catholic priest, Coughlin was, after Roosevelt himself, the best radio orator in America. Broadcasting from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, Coughlin was a super-patriot who ripped into Wall Street, big business, and oppressive bosses. Originally, he supported FDR, but soon he became an ardent foe, advocating the nationalization of banks and ripping into Roosevelt as a communist tool of Jewish bankers.
Shirley Temple
She was less than four feet tall, and she was the biggest thing in Hollywood: dancing, singing, and mugging her way into the hearts of a country that really needed someone to hug.
Born in 1928 in Santa Monica, Temple made her first movie at the age of 3. She went on to make 24 more during the 1930s, and was the number one box-office attraction every year from 1935 to 1938. Movies like Little Miss Marker and Captain January earned the curly-headed charmer $300,000 a year. And thousands more were added by royalties from the sales of Shirley dolls, dresses, dishes, soap, and books. Little girls all over the country wanted to look like, sound like, and be adored as much as Shirley.
Temple retired from films in the late 1940s and had a brief career on TV. She married oil executive Charles A. Black in 1 950 and gradually became active in politics. She served as a U.S. representative to the United Nations, ambassador to Ghana, and chief of protocol for the State Department in the 1970s.
Coughlin created the National Union for Social Justice, which drew more than 5 million members in less than two months. But his increasingly shrill attacks on Jews and Roosevelt created a backlash, and by mid-1940, the bombastic cleric had quieted down considerably.
Despite the fact that their schemes were pretty looney-tunes, FDR’s more vocal and visible critics did put some pressure on FDR to continue to press for reform, especially during his first term. “I am fighting communism, Huey Longism, Coughlinism, Townsendism,” FDR said with some exasperation. “I want to save our system, the capitalist system [but] I want to equalize the distribution of wealth.”
Meanwhile, a guy named Hoover was fighting “outlawism.”
Bad guys and G-men
While some were coming up with political proposals to redistribute wealth, others had a more pragmatic approach: They stole it. The 1930s saw the rise of the modern outlaw. Instead of six-guns and horses, they used Tommy guns and Fords. Some of them became folk heroes, robbing banks that many people felt had robbed their customers.
There was Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, who reportedly robbed more than 30 banks and killed 10 men before he was gunned down in 1934. There was Arizona “Ma” Barker, whose gang consisted mainly of her four sons and who died in a shootout with the law. And there was John Dillinger.
The panic of a Martian invasion
Mercury Theater players had a dull story on their hands and a deadline looming for their live Halloween-eve performance on CBS radio in 1938. But writer Howard Koch did his best with H.G. Wells's novel War of the Worlds, bringing the Martian invasion into the 1930s and relocating it from England to New Jersey. And Mercury leader Orson Welles used all of his considerable acting talent to make it as realistic as possible.
In fact, he and the rest of the cast did too good a job. Despite several announcements that it was just a radio show, many in the show's audience of 6 million thought there was a real Martian invasion going on. Panic spread. Thousands of
people called police to ask what to do. In New Jersey, families hastily packed and took to the roads, clogging major thruways. One woman tried to drink poison rather than wait until the Martians killed her.
It took two days to calm things down, and criminal charges were even considered against Welles. In the end, however, the show got a big new sponsor, Campbell Soup, and Welles was invited to the White House.
"You know, Orson," President Roosevelt told him, "You and I are the two best actors in America."
An Indiana native, Dillinger robbed a grocery store in 1924 and was caught.
He did nine years in prison, and when he got out started a 14-month crime spree that made him one of the most famous, or infamous, men in America. Dillinger killed ten men, engineered three daring jail breaks, escaped from two gun battles with the law, and stole as much as $265,000.
He also became something of a Robin Hood. He once asked a farmer during a bank robbery whether the $50 in his hand was his. When the farmer replied that it was, Dillinger told him to keep it. “Dillinger does not rob poor people,” a fan wrote in the newspapers. “He robs those who became rich robbing poor people. I am for Johnnie.” In the end, such popularity did Dillinger little good. Federal agents killed him in 1934 as he left a movie theater in Chicago.
Fighting the bad guys were the “G-men,” a nickname given to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents by George “Machine Gun” Kelly. The “G” stood for government, and the head G-man was an owlish-looking, fiercely intense man named J. Edgar Hoover. As head of the FBI, Hoover combined a fanatical sense of duty and a flair for public relations to make his agency a beacon of heroism and integrity.
Serving as director from 1924 to his death in 1972, Hoover was one of the most powerful figures in twentieth-century America. His almost pathological hatred of communism, his dictatorial manner, and his unethical and, quite probably, illegal use of the bureau against political and personal enemies have stained his name. But in the 1930s, millions of American boys wanted to be him.