25 Test

Question 1

Soup Kitchens

Answer 1

In the cities, hungry men and women lined up at soup kitchens. People survived on potatoes, crackers, or dandelion greens; some searched through garbage for bits of food.

Question 2

Farmers and what they did to combat low prices

Answer 2

Farmers tried to compensate for lower prices by producing more, thus adding to the surplus and depressing prices even further.

Question 3

Marginal Workers

Answer 3

In the south, where opportunities were already most limited for African Americans, jobs that many white men had considered below their dignity before the depression—street cleaner, bellhop, garbage collector—seemed suddenly desire able.

Question 4

African and Mexican Americans and how they were affected

Answer 4

In 1930 a short-lived facist-style organization, the Black Shirts, protested “No Jobs for N— Until Every White Man Has a Job!” As industry cut production, African Americans were the first fired. Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals trying to make a living also felt the impact. Their wages on California farms fell. Throughout the Southwest, Anglo-Americans claimed that foreign workers were stealing their jobs. Campaigns against “foreigners” hurt not only Mexican immigrants but also American citizens of Hispanic backgrounds. In 1931 the Labor Department announced plans to deport illegal immigrants to free jobs for American citizens.

Question 5

The school system and women

Answer 5

Even before the crisis, women of all classes and races were barred from many jobs and were paid significantly less. With widespread male unemployment, it was easy to believe that women who worked took jobs from men. Of 1,500 urban school systems surveyed in 1930 and 1931, 77 percent refused to hire married women as teachers, and 63 percent fired female teachers who married while employed.

Question 5

The school system and women

Answer 5

Even before the crisis, women of all classes and races were barred from many jobs and were paid significantly less. With widespread male unemployment, it was easy to believe that women who worked took jobs from men. Of 1,500 urban school systems surveyed in 1930 and 1931, 77 percent refused to hire married women as teachers, and 63 percent fired female teachers who married while employed.

Question 6

Hoover’s Limited Solutions

Answer 6

Hoover had great faith in “associationalism”: business and professional organization, coordinated by the federal government, working together to solve the nation’s problems. The federal government’s role was limited to gathering information and serving as a clearing-house for ideas and plans that state and local governments could then voluntarily implement. Hoover feared that government “relief” would destroy the spirit of self-reliance among the poor. He eventually endorsed limited federal action to combat the crisis, but it was much too little.

Question 7

P.O.U.R.

Answer 7

Hoover continued to encourage voluntary responses to mounting need, creating the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief to generate private contributions to aid the destitute. Although 1932 saw record charitable contributions, they were nowhere near adequate.

Question 8

Hawley-Smoot Tariff

Answer 8

Hoover signed into law the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, which was meant to support American farmers and manufacturers by raising import duties on foreign goods to a staggering 40 percent. Instead it hampered international trade as other nations created their own protective tariffs.

Question 9

R.C.F.

Answer 9

In 1932, the administration took its most forceful action. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation provided federal loans to banks, insurance companies, and railroads, an action Hoover hoped would shore up those industries and halt disinvestment in the American economy.

Question 10

Farmers’ Holiday Association

Answer 10

In August 1932, a new group, the Farmers’ Holiday Association, encouraged farmers to take a “holiday”—to hold back agricultural products as a way to limit supply and drive prices up.

Question 11

Bonus Army

Answer 11

More than 15,000 unemployed WW1 veterans and their families converged on the nation’s capital as Congress debated a bill authorizing immediate payment of cash “bonuses” that veterans had been scheduled to receive in 1945. Calling themselves the Bonus Expedition Force, or Bonus Army, they set up a sprawling “Hooverville” shantytown just across the river from the Capitol. Hoover opposed the bill, and after most of the Bonus Marchers left Washington, some stayed however. Hoover called them “insurrectionists” and set a deadline for their departure. When they failed to leave, he sent federal troops on them.

Question 12

Presidential election of 1932

Answer 12

Roosevelt had made it clear he would use federal power to help with the crisis which made everyone vote for him.

Question 13

The New Deal

Answer 13

Roosevelt had pledged “a new deal for the American people.” He had never been very specific about it during his campaign, but it was a series of legislation aiming to better the economic crisis.

Question 14

20th amendment

Answer 14

The so-called Lame Duck Amendment, ratified in 1933, shifted all future inaugurations to January 20.

Question 15

Banking Crisis

Answer 15

The origins of the banking crisis came from WW1 and the 1920s, when American banks made countless risky loans. After real-estate and stocks went down and agricultural prices collapsed, many of these loans went bad. As a result, many banks lacked sufficient funds to cover their customers’ deposits. Fearful of losing their savings in a bank collapse, depositors pulled money out of banks.

Question 16

Emergency Banking Relief Bill

Answer 16

Roosevelt used powers legally granted to close the nation’s banks for a four-day “holiday” and summoned Congress to an emergency session. He immediately introduced the Emergency Banking Relief Bill, which was unanimously approved, and signed into law the same day. This bill provided federal authority to reopen solvent banks and reorganize the rest, and authorized federal money to shore up private banks.

Question 17

N.I.R.A.

Answer 17

At the heart of the New Deal experiment in planning were the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The N.I.R.A. was based on the belief that “destructive competition” had worsened industry’s economic woes. The N.I.R.A. authorized competing businesses to cooperate in crafting industry-wide codes. Competition among manufacturers would no longer drive down prices and wages. Individual businesses’ participation in this program, administered by the National Recovery Administration, was voluntary—with one catch. Businesses that adhered to the industry-wide codes could display the Blue Eagle, the N.R.A. symbol. In 1935, the Supreme Court put an end to the administration’s floundering. Using an old definition of interstate commerce, the Supreme Court found that the N.R.A. extended federal power past its constitutional bounds.

Question 18

A.A.A.

Answer 18

The Agricultural Adjustment Act had a more enduring effect on the U.S. Establishing a national system of crop controls, the A.A.A. offered subsidies to farmers who agreed to limit production of specific crops. The subsidies, funded by taxing the processors of agricultural goods, were meant to give farmers the same purchasing power they had had during the time before WW1. But to reduce production, the nation’s farmers agreed to destroy 8.5 million piglets and to plow under crops. The A.A.A. was also terrible for tenant farmers and sharecroppers. In 1936, the Supreme Court found that the A.A.A. was unconstitutional for having a discriminatory processing tax. However, it was too popular with its constituency to disappear. The legislation was rewritten to meet the Court’s objections.

Question 19

First Hundred Days

Answer 19

During the 99-day-long special session of Congress, the federal government took on dramatically new roles. Roosevelt aided by a group of advisers, who were collectively named “the Brain Trusts”, set out to revive the economy. They had no single, coherent plan, and Roosevelt’s economic policies fluctuated between attempts to balance the budget and deficit spending. The first priority was economic recovery. Two basic strategies emerged during the First Hundred Days. New Dealers experimented with national economic planning, and they created a range of “relief” programs to help those in need.

Question 20

Second Hundred Days

Answer 20

During the Second New Deal, Roosevelt introduced a range of progressive programs aimed at providing “greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history in America.”

Question 21

Father Charles Coughlin

Answer 21

A Roman Catholic priest whose weekly radio sermons reached up to 30 million listeners, spoke to those how felt they had lost control of their lives to distant elites and impersonal forces. Increasingly anti-New Deal, he was also increasingly anti-Semitic, telling his listeners that an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers caused their problems.

Question 22

Dr. Francis E. Townsend

Answer 22

A public health officer in Long Beach, California, who was thrown out of work at age 67 with only $100 in savings. His situation was not unusual. With social welfare left to the states, only about 400,000 of the 6.6 million elderly Americans received any sort of state supplied pension. Many older people fell into desperate poverty. Townsend proposed that Americans over the age of 60 should receive a government pension of $200 a month, financed by a new “transaction” (sales) tax. In fact, his plan was fiscally impossible and profoundly regressive. Thus he actually sought a massive transfer of income from the working poor to the nonworking elderly.

Question 23

Huey Long

Answer 23

Perhaps the most successful populist demagogue in American history. Long was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928 with the slogan “Every Man a King, But No One Wears a Crown.” As a U.S. senator, he initially supported the New Deal but soon decided that Roosevelt had fallen captive to big business. He countered in 1934 with the hare Our Wealth Society, advocating the seizure of all income exceeding $1 million a year and of wealth in excess of $5 million per family. From these funds, the government would provide each American family an annual income of $2,000 and a one-time homestead allowance of $5,000. He was killed before he could try for president.

Question 24

Eleanor Roosevelt

Answer 24

She played a crucial role in the Roosevelt administration. She worked tirelessly for social justice and human rights, bringing reformers, trade unionists, and advocates for the rights of women and African Americans to the White House. She took public positions far more progressive than her husband’s administration. In some ways she served as a lightning rod, deflecting conservative criticism from her husband to herself. But her public stances also cemented the allegiance of other groups to the New Deal.

Question 25

Frances Perkins

Answer 25

America’s first woman cabinet member.

Question 26

Social Security Act

Answer 26

The Social Security Act created, for the first time, a federal system to provide for the social welfare of American citizens. Its key provision was a federal pension system in which eligible workers paid mandatory Social Security taxes on their wages and their employers contributed an equivalent amount; these workers then received federal retirement benefits. It also created several welfare programs. This system was fairly conservative compared to its European counterparts. First, the government did not pay for old-age benefits; workers and their bosses did. Second, the tax was regressive in that the more workers earned, the less they were taxed proportionally. Finally, the law did not cover agricultural labor, domestic service, and “casual labor not in the course of the employer’s trade or business.”

Question 27

New Deal Coalition

Answer 27

This new alliance pulled together groups from very different backgrounds and with different interests: the urban working class, organized labor, the eleven states of the Confederacy, and northern blacks. The New Deal was opposed by rich businessmen and Republicans.

Question 28

Craft and Industrial Unions

Answer 28

The rapid growth and increasing militancy of the movement exacerbated an existing division between “craft” and “industrial” unions. Craft unions represented labor’s elite: the skilled workers in a particular trade. Industrial unions represented all the workers, skilled and unskilled, in a given industry.

Question 29

A.F.L. vs. C.I.O.

Answer 29

Craft unions usually dominated the American Federation of Labor. Most A.F.L. leaders offered little support for industrial organizing. Unlike the A.F.L., the C.I.O. included women and people of color in its membership. Union membership gave these “marginal” workers greater employment security and benefits of collective bargaining.

Question 30

National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act)

Answer 30

This act guaranteed workers the right to organize unions and to bargain collectively. It outlawed “unfair labor practices”, prohibited management from sponsoring company unions, and required employers to bargain with labor’s elected union representatives to set wages, hours, and working conditions.

Question 31

Wagner Act’s enforcement mechanism

Answer 31

Critical for its success, the Wagner Act created the National Labor Relations Board. Although labor-management conflict continued, by the end of the decade, the N.L.R.B. played a key role in mediating disputes.

Question 32

Committee of Industrial Organization

Answer 32

In 1935 the industrial unionists made their move. John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers and the nation’s most prominent labor leader, resigned as vice president of the A.F.L. He and other unionists created the Committee for Industrial Organization; the A.F.L. responded by suspending all C.I.O. unions. In 1938, renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations had more members than the A.F.L.

Question 33

Sit-Down Strikes

Answer 33

When you go on strike in the factory.

Question 34

New Deal in the West

Answer 34

Federally sponsored construction of dams and other public works projects reshaped the region’s economy and environment. During the 1930s, the federal Bureau of Reclamation, an obscure agency created by the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to provide irrigation for small farms and ranches, expanded its mandate dramatically to build large multipurpose dams that controlled entire river systems. The federal government also brought millions of acres of land under its control.

Question 35

New Deal for Native Americans

Answer 35

In 1933 Roosevelt named one of the B.I.A.’s most vocal critics to head the agency. John Collier, founder of the American Indian Defense Agency, meant to completely reverse the course of America’s Indian policy, and his initiatives had many positive results. The Indian Reorganization Act went a long way toward ending the forced assimilation of native people and restoring Indian lands to tribal ownership.

Question 36

New Deal in the South

Answer 36

New Dealers had set out to transform the South. Well before the depression, the South was mired in widespread poverty.

Question 37

Tennessee Valley Authority

Answer 37

Authorized by Congress, it was created to develop a water and hydroelectric power project similar to those in the West. Dams would not only control flooding but also produce electric power. Through the T.V.A., the federal government promoted economic development, helped bring electricity to rural areas, restored fields worn out from overuse, and fought malaria. Although, this program started to pollute many water sources.

Question 38

Mass Media

Answer 38

The radio was used to help connect people throughout the depression. There were many channels that were different for everyone.

Question 39

Court Packing Plan

Answer 39

Roosevelt wanted to safeguard his progressive agenda. The greatest danger he saw was from the U.S. Supreme Court. Citing the advanced age and heavy workload of the nine justices, he asked Congress for authority to appoint up to 6 new justices. However, many people saw this as an attack on the constitutional government. But, because of New Deal legislation, justices soon retired, and Roosevelt appointed around 7 new judges.

Question 40

Recession of 1937 - 1939

Answer 40

Despite his use of deficit spending, Roosevelt had never abandoned his commitment to a balanced budget. In 1937, confident that the depression had largely been cured, he began to cut back on government spending. At the same time, the Federal Reserve Board, concerned about an increasing inflation rate, tightened credit. The two actions sent the economy into a tailspin. Soon Roosevelt resumed deficit financing.

Question 41

Why did Roosevelt ran for a third term

Answer 41

Roosevelt seemed undecided, but when Hitler’s military advances in Europe apparently convinced him to stay on.

Question 42

Race and the limits of the New Deal

Answer 42

The New Deal fell short of equality for people of color for two major reasons. First was the relationship between local and national power. In the South, African Americans received lower relief payment than whites and were paid lower wages in W.P.A. jobs. Second, the gains made by people of color under the New Deal were limited by the political realities of southern resistance. Roosevelt needed the support of southern Democrats to pass his legislative program and they were willing to hold him hostage over race. However, African Americans still supported the New Deal because almost one-third of African American households survived on income from a W.P.A. job. African Americans also held significant positions in the Roosevelt Administration.

Question 43

The major failure of the New Deal

Answer 43

New Deal pumped a lot of money into the economy, however, more than 10 million men and women were jobless, and the nation’s unemployment rate stood at 19 percent.

Question 44

What really ended the depression?

Answer 44

In the end it was massive government spending during the Second World War that brought full economic recovery.