The Great Depression and the New Deal (Part II) : The Social Reforms of the Second Roosevelt Administration

Many state and local case studies of the New Deal tended to be interested in state government, local administrators, and political leaders. They tended to look at actual members of the unemployed, individual workers, and farmers as passive objects acted upon by New Deal programmes. Historians have recently become very interested in the histroy of 'the inarticulate many as well as the articulate few'. Taking advantage of oral history and the vast amoung of social investigation carried out in the 1930s, they have started to focus on the experience during the Great Depression of the unemployed, of particular ethnic groups, of blacks, of Indians, of women, of rural poor. Some of this work naturally highlights grass-roots radical protest in the 1930s-by rank-and-file labour militants, by unemployed councils. My preconceptions and conclusions will soon become clear in accordance with this paper : that the New Deal did represent a sharp break with the past; that the New Deal's impact was nevertheless precisely circumscribed, often constrained by forces over which the New Dealers had little control; that in the end the New Deal functioned very much as a 'holding poeration' for American society; and that for many Americans the decisive change in their experiences came not with the New Deal but with World WarII.departmental bulletin pape