Making a New Deal by Cohen Lizabeth

Author:Cohen, Lizabeth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Plate 29. By 1939, a third of all people employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Chicago were black, suggesting how important federal programs like the WPA were to blacks’ survival during the depression and to their political reorientation toward the Democratic Party and the national government.

The same way that the WPA recruited urban blacks, the CCC, and less so the NY A, made the state a concrete reality for a significant group of working-class young people from cities like Chicago. Although it may be hard to believe that youth from neighborhoods like South Chicago by the steel mills or Back of the Yards were the core of the two and a half million young men who went into CCC camps in rural Wisconsin, Oregon, and Washington to replant forests and conserve the soil, the evidence suggests it was so. The program was aimed at low-income boys with little educational or vocational background. Nation-wide in January 1937, 37 percent of a sample of CCC enrollees had fathers who identified themselves as working in manufacturing and industry. Another 10 percent of the fathers did WPA or other emergency government work, making about half of the recruits boys who might have lived in Chicago’s working-class neighborhoods. When a group of teenagers from South Chicago heard a rumor in September 1935 that the minimum age for entrance into the CCC camps had been lowered from eighteen to seventeen, they were jubilant. In no time the news spread like wildfire through the neighborhood, inspiring reactions like Harry’s: “I wanna get in right away, by the first of October, if I can! We’re getting help from the city and the county, so’s I oughta have no trouble gettin’ took.” Upon their return from a year at camp, two Chicago youths testified to how much the experience had changed them, particularly how it had exposed them to different kinds of people from all over the country. They claimed that these “jobs” they had gotten with the national government had broadened their horizons beyond their families, neighborhoods, and even cities.66

Fortune magazine asked Americans of all income levels in 1935, “Do you believe that the government should see to it that every man who wants to work has a job?” Yes, replied 81 percent of those considered lower middle class, 89 percent of those labeled poor, and 91 percent of blacks, whereas less than half of the people defined as prosperous shared this view. The editors of Fortune concluded somewhat aghast, “public opinion overwhelmingly favors assumption by the government of a function that was never seriously contemplated prior to the New Deal.”67

Workers were all the more enthusiastic about the government’s new role in employment because their bosses deeply resented the state’s intrusion into matters they considered their own prerogative. The evidence from Chicago argues powerfully against the “corporate liberal” analysis that the New Deal represented an effort by clever corporate capitalists to revitalize the economy with the help of a state that they dominated. Although industrialists may

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