The 1930s opened with a Depression and ended with a World War. The years in between weren't much better. One would be hard-pressed to find a more miserable decade in American history.
The economic chickens of laissez-faire GOP policies toward big business and social reform came home to roost in a major way during the early 1930s as bank failures and unemployment raged across the country like wildfire. In 1930 Congress poured gas on the flames when it passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff over the objections of many economists. Their prognostications of economic disaster if the tariff was enacted were sadly accurate.
Dorothea Lange's iconic photo, "Migrant Mother"
In the South, a strike in Harlan County and the brutal treatment of miners at the hands of coal operators drew the attention of prominent American writers such as John Dos Passos and Theodore Dreiser. The trials and subsequent imprisonment of the Scottsboro Boys for the alleged rape of a white girl brought worldwide attention to race relations in America. Less tragic but no less significant was the refusal of the Daughters of the American Republic in 1939 to allow singer Marian Anderson to stage a concert in Constitution Hall. Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for Anderson to sing to a crowd of some 75,000 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
In the summer of 1932, a group of unemployed World War I veterans borrowed a page from Jacob Coxey's playbook and marched on Washington, DC, demanding early payment of their service bonuses. In July, the "bonus marchers" were rousted from their encampment by the US Army under orders from President Herbert Hoover. Their mistreatment undoubtedly hurt Hoover in his re-election campaign against Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
During his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, Roosevelt promised a New Deal for all Americans. After his landslide victory in November, he set out to make good on his promise. After declaring that the "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" in his inaugural address, his Administration offered a dizzying array of programs, beginning with the Emergency Banking Act, to return the nation to solvency. On its heels came a slew of government initiatives aimed at getting America on its feet again. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Recovery Act, the Security Exchange Act, the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration, among others, all achieved some success. Several, most important the Social Security Act (which grew out of the widely popular Townsend Plan), have had a profound impact on Americans.
One change that had been gathering momentum through the 1920s and early '30s was the repeal of Prohibition. Organized crime, which had received a huge boost from Prohibition, did not, as hoped, disappear with legalization. When Public Enemy No.1 John Dillinger was shot and killed by the FBI in July 1934, he was simply replaced by another gangster who became Public Enemy No. 1.
For the most part, the New Deal itself was unable to ameliorate the impact of the Depression. Labor strife continued throughout the decade in places such as Toledo and San Francisco, although New Deal-backed legislation, such as the Wagner Act, made it easier for workers to organize, and labor saw its first real gains in nearly half a century. Sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan, forced General Motors and Chrysler to recognize the United Auto Workers. Labor also faced internal disputes that split the movement into two major unions, the American Federation of Labor and the newly organized Congress of Industrial Organizations, led by John L. Lewis.
In response to the hard times, many Americans turned toward the left. A number of writers on the left created a new genre of fiction called the "proletarian novel." Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre were two of them. The most popular novel of the decade was Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. The progressive writer Upton Sinclair put his politics where his pen was and ran for governor in California, nearly pulling off a huge upset in 1934. Novelist Sinclair Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Five years later, he wrote a haunting novel, It Can't Happen Here, about a fascist takeover of the United States. John Dos Passos produced his USA trilogy in the 1930s, while John Steinbeck published his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, in 1939. Another artist at the top of his game was Charlie Chaplin, whose cinematic classics City Lights and Modern Times both appeared in the 1930s. Radio serials were also popular. Many people believed the lives being acted out in the studio were real. That was driven home to a frightening degree when hundreds of people listening to a dramatization of War of the Worlds in 1938 actually believed that Martians had invaded the Earth.
America lost its most beloved humorist when Will Rogers and famed aviator Wiley Post were killed in an air crash in Alaska. The courageous Amelia Earhart was also killed when her plane went down in the Pacific. Charles Lindbergh suffered a different kind of tragedy when his infant son was kidnapped and killed. Richard Hauptmann was tried and convicted for the murder. He proclaimed his innocence up until his execution. The assassination of Huey Long, who had been considered a potential rival of FDR, occurred in 1935.
Although Roosevelt was easily re-elected over Alf Landon in 1936, several of his programs faced opposition from Congress and the courts. When the US Supreme Court invalidated the National Industrial Recovery Act, Roosevelt decided to reshape the Supreme Court, but his "court-packing" plan failed to get by Congress.
While FDR grappled with the Depression, the signs were equally ominous from overseas. Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Germany reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936. That same year, Italy, now ruled by Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia, while Francisco Franco opened his rebellion against the Spanish Republic. In 1937, several thousand Americans helped form the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight with the Loyalists. Most of the volunteers were killed or wounded, and with the aid of Germany, Franco completed his takeover in 1939. In the Far East, Japan moved into Manchuria in 1931 and began a full-scale invasion of China in 1937. Japan's treatment of Chinese civilians was brutal. An estimated 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed in Nanking alone.
In 1938, Germany annexed Austria. That September, Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed in Munich to allow Hitler to move into Czechoslovakia in exchange for peace. Eleven months later, on August 23, 1939, Germany and Russia signed a nonaggression treaty. A week later, Germany invaded Poland. Two days after that, England and France declared war, and World War II was under way.
The 1920s
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