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by David M. Kennedy
Oxford University Press
Copyright © 1999 All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0195038347
FREEDOM FROM FEAR
Like an earthquake, the stock market crash of October 1929 cracked
startlingly across the United States, the herald of a crisis that
was to shake the American way of life to its foundations. The events
of the ensuing decade opened a fissure across the landscape of American
history no less gaping than that opened by the volley on Lexington
Common in April 1775 or by the bombardment of Sumter on another
April four score and six years later.
The ratcheting ticker machines in the autumn of 1929 did not merely
record avalanching stock prices. In time they came also to symbolize
the end of an era. The roaring industrial expansion that had boomed
since the Civil War hushed to a near standstill for half a generation.
The tumult of crisis and reform in the ten depression years massively
enlarged and forever transformed the scanty Jeffersonian government
over which Herbert Hoover had been elected to preside in 1928. And
even before the battle against the Great Depression was won, the
American people had to shoulder arms in another even more fearsome
struggle that wreathed the planet in destruction and revolutionized
America's global role.
None of this impending drama could have been foreseen by the tweedy
group of social scientists who gathered at the White House for dinner
with President Hoover on the warm, early autumn evening of September
26, 1929. The Crash, still four weeks away, was unimagined and almost
unimaginable. Nearly three decades of barely punctuated economic
growth, capped by seven years of unprecedented prosperity, gave
to the mood in the room, as in the entire country, an air of masterful
confidence in the future. The president personified the national
temper. Attired as always in starched high collar and immaculate
business suit, he greeted his guests with stiff, double-breasted
dignity. He exuded the laconic assurance of a highly successful
executive. He was arguably the most respected man in America, a
man, said the novelist Sherwood Anderson, who had "never known
failure." A wave of popular acclamation had lifted him to the
White House just six months earlier, after a famously distinguished
career as a mining engineer, international businessman, relief and
food administrator in the Great War of 1914-18, and exceptionally
influential secretary of commerce in the Republican administrations
of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
Hoover was no mossback conservative in the Harding-Coolidge mold,
and the men gathered in the White House dining room knew it. "[T]he
time when the employer could ride roughshod over his labor is disappearing
with the doctrine of `laissez-faire' on which it is founded,"
he had written as early as 1909. Long sympathetic to the progressive
wing of his party, Hoover as secretary of commerce had not only
supported the cause of labor but also urged closer business-government
cooperation, established government control over the new technology
of radio, and proposed a multibillion-dollar federal public works
fund as a tool to offset downswings in the business cycle. As president,
he meant to be no passive custodian. He dreamt the progressive generation's
dream of actively managing social change through informed, though
scrupulously limited, government action. "A new era and new
forces have come into our economic life and our setting among nations
of the world," he said in accepting the Republican presidential
nomination in 1928. "These forces demand of us constant study
and effort if prosperity, peace, and contentment shall be maintained."
Organizing that study was the dinner meeting's agenda. The little
assemblage around the president's dining table symbolized, in a
sense, the core progressive faith in knowledge as the servant of
power. Hoover intended to possess knowledge, and with it to rule
responsibly. After methodically interrogating each of his guests
over the coffee cups as the table was cleared, Hoover explained
his ambitious project. He meant to recruit the best brains in the
country, he said, to compile a body of data and analysis about American
society that would be more comprehensive, more searching, and more
useful than anything ever before attempted. Their findings, he went
on, would serve as "a basis for the formulation of large national
policies looking to the next phase in the nation's development."
The following month's upheavals in the financial markets, and
their aftershocks, rendered ironic Hoover's confident anticipation
of "the next phase in the nation's development." Underscoring
the irony, Hoover eventually disowned the study he so confidently
commissioned on that Indian summer evening. In the four years between
its conception and its publication--the four years of Herbert Hoover's
presidency--the world changed forever. Among the casualties of that
violent mutation was Hoover's research project and the hope of an
orderly command of the future that it represented--not to mention
his own reputation. A massive dreadnought of scholarship, its pages
barnacled with footnotes, it was launched at last in 1933 onto a
Sargasso Sea of presidential and public indifference.
Useless to Hoover in 1933, the scholars' work has nevertheless
provided historians ever since with an incomparably rich source
of information about the pre-Depression period. Entitled Recent
Social Trends, it ran to some fifteen hundred pages densely packed
with data about all aspects of American life. It ranged from an
inventory of mineral resources to analyses of crime and punishment,
the arts, health and medical practice, the status of women, blacks,
and ethnic minorities, the changing characteristics of the labor
force, the impact of new technologies on productivity and leisure,
and the roles of federal, state, and local governments. From its
turgid prose and endless tables emerged a vivid portrait of a people
in the throes of sweeping social, economic, and political change,
even before they were engulfed by the still more wrenching changes
of the Depression era.
President Hoover's charge to the assembled scholars at that hopeful
supper registered his commitment to what Walter Lippmann in 1914
had called mastery, not drift, in the nation's affairs and to government
as the instrument of that mastery. Hoover's dinner-table speech
to the social scientists also accurately reflected their shared
sense--indeed the sense of most Americans in pre-Crash 1929--that
they dwelt in a land and time of special promise. "A new era,"
Hoover called it, one that was witnessing breathtaking transformations
in traditional ways of life and that demanded commensurate transformations
in the institutions and techniques of government.
This sense of living through a novel historical moment pervaded
commentaries on American society in the 1920s. Even the sober academic
authors of Recent Social Trends marveled at the social and economic
forces that "have hurried us dizzily away from the days of
the frontier into a whirl of modernisms which almost passes belief."
The same sense of astonishment suffused the pages of the decade's
most famous sociological inquiry, Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd's
Middletown, drawn from an exhaustive examination of Muncie, Indiana,
in 1925. Measuring from the baseline of 1890, the Lynds found dramatic
alterations in every conceivable aspect of the Middletowners' lives.
"[W]e today," they concluded, "are probably living
in one of the eras of greatest rapidity of change in the history
of human institutions."
The list of changes in the generation since the close of the nineteenth
century seemed endlessly amazing. Recent Social Trends began with
a brief recital of some of the "epoch-making events" that
had filled the first third of the twentieth century: the Great War,
mass immigration, race riots, rapid urbanization, the rise of giant
industrial combines like U.S. Steel, Ford, and General Motors, new
technologies like electrical power, automobiles, radios, and motion
pictures, novel social experiments like Prohibition, daring campaigns
for birth control, a new frankness about sex, women's suffrage,
the advent of mass-market advertising and consumer financing. "These,"
the researchers declared, "are but a few of the many happenings
which have marked one of the most eventful periods of our history."
The sheer scale of America in the 1920s was impressive, and its
variety was downright astonishing. The nation's population had nearly
doubled since 1890, when it had numbered just sixty-three million
souls. At least a third of the increase was due to a huge surge
of immigrants. Most of them had journeyed to America from the religiously
and culturally exotic regions of southern and eastern Europe. Through
the great hall in the immigrant receiving center on New York's Ellis
Island, opened in 1892, streamed in the next three decades almost
four million Italian Catholics; half a million Orthodox Greeks;
half a million Catholic Hungarians; nearly a million and a half
Catholic Poles; more than two million Jews, largely from Russian-controlled
Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania; half a million Slovaks, mostly Catholic;
millions of other eastern Slavs from Byelorussia, Ruthenia, and
Russia, mostly Orthodox; more millions of southern Slavs, a mix
of Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, and Jew, from Rumania, Croatia, Serbia,
Bulgaria, and Montenegro. The waves of arrivals after the turn of
the century were so enormous that of the 123 million Americans recorded
in the census of 1930, one in ten was foreign born, and an additional
20 percent had at least one parent born abroad.
Immigrants settled in all regions, though only scantily in the
South and heavily in the sprawling industrial zone of the Northeast.
To an overwhelming degree they were drawn not to the land but to
the factories and tenements of the big cities. They turned urban
America into a kind of polyglot archipelago in the predominantly
Anglo-Protestant American sea. Almost a third of Chicago's 2.7 million
residents in the 1920s were foreign born; more than a million were
Catholic, and another 125,000 were Jews. New Yorkers spoke some
thirty-seven different languages, and only one in six worshiped
in a Protestant church.
Everywhere immigrant communities banded together in ethnic enclaves,
where they strove, not always consistently, both to preserve their
old-world cultural patrimony and to become American. They were strangers
in a strange land, awkwardly suspended between the world they had
left behind and a world where they were not yet fully at home. They
naturally looked to one another for reassurance and strength. The
Jewish ghettoes and Little Italys and Little Polands that took root
in American cities became worlds unto themselves. Immigrants read
newspapers and listened to radio broadcasts in their native languages.
They shopped at stores, patronized banks, and dealt with insurance
companies that catered exclusively to their particular ethnic group.
They chanted their prayers in synagogues or, if they were Catholic,
often in "national" churches where sermons were preached
in the old-world tongue. They educated their children in parish
schools and buried their dead with the help of ethnic funeral societies.
They joined fraternal organizations to keep alive the old traditions
and paid their dues to mutual aid societies that would help when
hard times came.
Times were often hard. Huddled on the margins of American life,
immigrants made do with what work they could find, typically low-skill
jobs in heavy industry, the garment trades, or construction. Isolated
by language, religion, livelihood, and neighborhood, they had precious
little ability to speak to one another and scant political voice
in the larger society. So precarious were their lives that many
of them gave up altogether and went back home. Nearly a third of
the Poles, Slovaks, and Croatians returned to Europe; almost half
the Italians; more than half the Greeks, Russians, Rumanians, and
Bulgarians. Old-stock Americans continued to think of the foreigners
who remained in their midst as alien and threatening. Many immigrants
wondered if the fabled promise of American life was a vagrant and
perhaps impossible dream.
The flood of newcomers, vividly different from earlier migrants
in faiths, tongues, and habits, aroused powerful anxieties about
the capacity of American society to accommodate them. Some of that
anxiety found virulent expression in a revived Ku Klux Klan, reborn
in all its Reconstruction-era paraphernalia at Stone Mountain, Georgia,
in 1915. Klan nightriders now rode cars, not horses, and they directed
their venom as much at immigrant Jews and Catholics as at blacks.
But the new Klan no less than the old represented a peculiarly American
response to cultural upheaval. By the early 1920s the Klan claimed
some five million members, and for a time it dominated the politics
of Indiana and Oregon. The nativist sentiment that the Klan helped
to nurture found statutory expression in 1924, when Congress choked
the immigrant stream to a trickle, closing the era of virtually
unlimited entry to the United States. The ethnic neighborhoods that
had mushroomed in the preceding generation would grow no more through
further inflows from abroad. America's many ethnic communities now
began to stabilize. Millions of immigrants awaited the day when
they might become American at last.
From peasant plots in the basins of the Volga and Vistula, from
rough pastures high in the Carpathians and Apennines, as well as
from the cotton South and the midwestern corn belt, new Americans
as well as old flowed to the throbbing industrial centers in the
northeastern quadrant of the United States. The region of settlement
defined as the "frontier" had officially closed in 1890.
By 1920, for the first time in the nation's history, a majority
of Americans were city dwellers. In the following decade, some six
million more American farmers quit the land and moved to the city.
Yet the urbanization of early twentieth-century America can be
exaggerated. More than one in five working Americans still toiled
on the land in the 1920s. Forty-four percent of the population was
still counted as rural in 1930. Well over half the states of the
Union remained preponderantly rural in population, economy, political
representation, and ways of life.
In many respects, those country ways of life remained untouched
by modernity. The fifty million Americans who dwelt in what F. Scott
Fitzgerald called "that vast obscurity beyond the city"
still moved between birth and death to the ancient rhythms of sun
and season. More than forty-five million of them had no indoor plumbing
in 1930, and almost none had electricity. They relieved themselves
in chamber pots and outdoor latrines, cooked and heated with wood
stoves, and lit their smoky houses with oil lamps. In the roadless
Ozark mountains, future Arkansas governor Orval Faubus's mother
could not do the family laundry until she had first boiled the guts
of a freshly butchered hog to make lye soap. In the isolated Texas
Hill Country, future president Lyndon Johnson's mother grew stoop-shouldered
lugging buckets of water from well to kitchen. As it had for most
of mankind for all of human memory, sunset routinely settled a cloak
of darkness and silence over that immense domain where the fields
of the republic rolled on under the night. Another Texas Hill Country
woman remembered from her girlhood the scary after-dark trips to
the outhouse: "I had a horrible choice of either sitting in
the dark and not knowing what was crawling on me or bringing a lantern
and attracting moths, mosquitoes, nighthawks and bats."
The widening gap between country and city life had helped to fuel
the Populist agitation of the late nineteenth century and had prompted
Theodore Roosevelt to appoint a Commission on Country Life in 1908.
By the 1920s a stubborn agricultural depression, the product of
war and technological change, badly exacerbated the problems of
the countryside. When the guns of August 1914 announced the outbreak
of fighting in Europe, American farmers had scrambled to supply
the world's disrupted markets with foodstuffs. They put marginal
lands under the plow, and they increased yields from all acreage
with more intensive cultivation, aided especially by the advent
of the gasoline-engine tractor. The number of motorized farm vehicles
quintupled in the war years, to some eighty-five thousand. With
the return of peace this trend accelerated. By the end of the 1920s
nearly a million farmers chugged along their furrows mounted atop
self-propelled tractors. And as tractor-power substituted for horse-
and mule-power, some nine million work animals were destroyed, releasing
an additional thirty million acres of pastureland for the planting
of wheat or cotton or for the grazing of dairy animals.
After the armistice of November 1918, however, world agricultural
production returned to its familiar prewar patterns. American farmers
found themselves with huge surpluses on their hands. Prices plummeted.
Cotton slumped from a wartime high of thirty-five cents per pound
to sixteen cents in 1920. Corn sank from $1.50 per bushel to fifty-two
cents. Wool slid from nearly sixty cents per pound to less than
twenty cents. Although prices improved somewhat after 1921, they
did not fully recover until war resumed in 1939. Farmers suffocated
under their own mountainous surpluses and under the weight of the
debts they had assumed to expand and to mechanize. Foreclosures
increased, and more and more freeholders became tenants. The depopulation
of the countryside proceeded ever more rapidly.
Congress tried repeatedly to find a remedy for the ills of farmers
in the 1920s. As the agricultural depression persisted through the
decade, the federal government assumed regulatory control over commodity
markets and eventually established a modestly funded federal agency
to provide financing for agricultural cooperatives. Congress twice
passed, and President Coolidge twice vetoed, the McNary-Haugen Bill.
It proposed that the federal government should become the buyer
of last resort of surplus farm products, which it should then dispose
of--or "dump"--in overseas markets.
Herbert Hoover needed no comprehensive study to know that the
farm issue was urgent. Virtually his first act as president, even
before he commissioned his wide-ranging examination of recent social
trends, was to convene a special congressional session to resolve
the farm crisis. It produced the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929,
which created several government-sponsored "stabilization corporations"
authorized to buy surpluses and hold them off the market in order
to maintain price levels. But as the agricultural depression of
the 1920s merged with the general depression of the 1930s, the corporations
quickly exhausted both their storage capacity and their funds. The
misery of rural America knew no relief. As the decade of the Great
Depression opened, the already reeling farmers would be its hardest-hit
victims.
The South in the 1920s was the nation's most rural region. Not a
single southern state met the superintendent of the census's modest
definition of "urban" in 1920--having a majority of its
population in cities of twenty-five hundred or more souls. From
the Potomac to the Gulf the land looked little different than it
had at the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s. Inhabiting a region
of scarce capital and abundant labor, southerners planted and picked
their traditional crops of cotton, tobacco, rice, or sugarcane with
mules and muscle, just as their ancestors had done for generations.
And like their forebears, they bled not only against the blade of
chronic agricultural depression but also against the uniquely American
thorn of race.
The Great War had drawn some half a million blacks out of the
rural South and into the factories of the North. With the throttling
of immigration in 1924, northern industry needed to find new sources
of fresh labor. Southern blacks (as well as some half a million
Mexicans, who were exempted from the new immigration quotas) seized
the opportunity. By the end of the 1920s another million African-Americans
had left the old slave states to take up employment in the Northeast
and upper Midwest (only about a hundred thousand blacks dwelt west
of the Rockies). There they found jobs in metalworking shops, automobile
factories, and packing houses. The political implications of this
migration were vividly illustrated in 1928 when Chicago alderman
Oscar De Priest, a Republican loyal to the party of the Great Emancipator,
became the first black elected to Congress since Reconstruction
and the first ever from a northern district.
Yet as late as 1930 more than four out of five American blacks
still lived in the South. There they tortuously made their daily
way through what the historian C. Vann Woodward has called an "anthropological
museum of Southern folkways," which history knows as the Jim
Crow system. Despite its antiquated and grotesquely burdensome character,
that system was deeply entrenched in southern life. Indeed, as Woodward
notes, it "reached its perfection in the 1930s."
Jim Crow meant, above all, that blacks could not vote. They had
been almost universally disfranchised throughout the South in the
post-Reconstruction decades. In the eleven states of the former
Confederacy, fewer than 5 percent of eligible African-Americans
were registered to vote as late as 1940. Jim Crow also meant social
and economic segregation. Blacks sat in separate waiting rooms in
railroad and bus stations, drank from separate drinking fountains,
worshiped in separate churches, and attended strictly segregated
and abysmally inferior schools. The South's few industrial jobs
were largely barred to them. Southern blacks thus constituted an
extreme case of rural poverty in a region that was itself a special
case of economic backwardness and isolation from modern life. Hoover's
social scientists discovered that infant mortality rates for blacks
were nearly double those for whites in 1930 (10 percent and 6 percent
respectively) and that blacks had an average life expectancy fifteen
years shorter than whites (forty-five years compared with sixty).
African-Americans in the South were bound as fast to the land by
debt, ignorance, and intimidation as they had been by slavery itself.
As for the white folk of the South, declared the eminent southern
historian Ulrich B. Phillips in 1928, they shared "a common
resolve indomitably maintained--that it shall be and remain a white
man's country."
To Americans who were white and lived in the city, blacks were needy
invisible and the complaints of the farmers seemed a distant annoyance,
the mewlings of laughably untutored hayseeds as modernity passed
them by. Urban sophisticates snickered with approval when H. L.
Mencken lampooned the South as the "Sahara of the Bozart."
They nodded knowingly when Sinclair Lewis, in books like Main Street
(1920) and Babbitt (1922), satirized the same midwestern small towns
from which many of them had fled to the metropolis. They clucked
appreciatively when Lewis unmasked the tawdry hypocrisy of rural
America's fundamentalist faiths in Elmer Gantry (1927). They smirked
at the biblical literalism of the "yokels" who swarmed
out of the east Tennessee hills in 1925 to gape at the trial of
John T. Scopes, indicted for violating Tennessee law by teaching
Darwinian evolution to high school students. They smiled with satisfaction
when street-smart Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow humiliated rural
America's historic paladin, William Jennings Bryan, in the course
of that trial.
Bryan's mortification symbolized for many the eclipse of rural
fundamentalism and the triumphant ascendancy of the metropolis as
the fount and arbiter of modern American values. New national magazines,
like Time, first published in 1923, Mencken's American Mercury in
1924, and the New Yorker, whose first issue appeared in 1925, catered
to the "caviar sophisticates" and testified to the new
cultural power of the great urban centers. Urban America was confident
that the city--like Darrow's and Carl Sandburg's Chicago, "stormy,
husky, brawling ... proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker
of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation"--was
the big-shouldered master to whom rural America must pay tribute.
But to thoughtful observers and policymakers the contrast between
country and city life was a matter for neither laughter nor poetry.
They worried obsessively about "balance" between rural
and urban America, which Recent Social Trends called "the central
problem" of the economy. Politicians sought interminably for
ways to solve it.
The economic disparities between the agricultural and industrial
sectors were gaping. Both areas of the economy had grown since the
turn of the century, but the urban-based manufacturing sector had
expanded far more robustly. While American farmers brought about
50 percent more product to market in 1930 than they had in 1900,
manufacturing output had doubled and redoubled again over the same
period, to four times its earlier level. Factory workers had achieved
remarkable productivity improvements of nearly 50 percent, thanks
largely to more efficient means of industrial organization and to
the revolutionary introduction of electrically driven machinery
on the shop floor. Fully 70 percent of American industry was powered
by electricity in 1929, much of it from generating plants fueled
by oil from newly developed fields in Texas, Oklahoma, and California.
By 1925 a completely assembled Model T Ford rolled off the continuously
moving assembly line at Henry Ford's Highland Park plant every ten
seconds. Just a dozen years earlier it had taken fourteen hours
to put together a single car.
Shrinking export markets, along with the dampening of American
population growth after the closure of immigration, spelled stable
or even declining demand for American agricultural products. Yet
the capacity of Americans to buy ever more industrial goods seemed
limitless, as the automobile revolution vividly illustrated. Essentially
a cottage industry when the century opened, automobile manufacturing
accounted for 10 percent of the nation's income two decades later
and employed some four million workers. The motorcar in 1900 had
been the plaything of the rich, who purchased some four thousand
vehicles. By 1929 ordinary Americans were driving more than twenty-six
million motor vehicles, one for every five people in the country.
They bought nearly five million vehicles in that year alone, and
they paid far less for them than they had a generation earlier.
In a stunning demonstration of the fruitful marriage of innovative
technologies to mass markets, the effective price of an automobile
fell steeply from the century's opening onward. A car that cost
the average worker the equivalent of nearly two years' wages before
the First World War could be purchased for about three months' earnings
by the late 1920s. This low-price, high-volume marketing strategy
was among the miracles of mass production--or "Fordism,"
as it was sometimes called in honor of its most famous pioneer.
Largely an American invention, the technique of mass-producing standardized
products was in a sense an American inevitability, as, in its time,
would be the revolution in consumer electronics: a means to tap
the economic potential of a democratic society whose wealth was
nearly as widely diffused as its formal political power.
Yet even this fabulously successful strategy had limits. Mass
production made mass consumption a necessity. But as Hoover's investigators
discovered, the increasing wealth of the 1920s flowed disproportionately
to the owners of capital. Workers' incomes were rising, but not
at a rate that kept pace with the nation's growing industrial output.
Without broadly distributed purchasing power, the engines of mass
production would have no outlet and would eventually fall idle.
The automobile industry, where Fordism had begun, was among the
first to sense the force of this logic. A spokesman for General
Motors Corporation acknowledged in 1926 that
while the industry has been subject to an unusually rapid rate
of expansion in the past, the volume has now reached such large
proportions that it seems altogether unlikely that tremendous annual
increases will continue. The expectation is rather for a healthy
growth, in line with the increase in population and wealth of the
country, and the development of the export market.
Here was among the first recognitions that even a youthful industry
like automobile manufacturing might rapidly grow to "maturity."
The carmakers had apparently saturated available domestic markets.
The introduction of consumer credit, or "installment buying,"
pioneered at General Motors in 1919 with the creation of the General
Motors Acceptance Corporation, constituted one attempt to stretch
those markets still further by relieving buyers of the need to pay
full cash for cars at the moment of sale. The explosive growth of
advertising, an infant industry before the 1920s, provided further
sign of the fear that the limits of "natural" demand were
being reached. General Motors alone annually spent some $20 million
on advertising in the 1920s in an effort to nurture consumer desires
that transcended consumer needs. Together, credit and advertising
sustained automobile sales for a time, but without new foreign outlets
or a significant redistribution of domestic purchasing power--especially
to the impoverished rural half of the country--the boundaries of
consumer demand were apparently being approached.
Yet in the pulsing industrial cities, virtually all Americans
dramatically improved their standards of living over the course
of the post-World War I decade. While farmers' living standards
eroded through the 1920s, real wages for industrial workers rose
by nearly 25 percent. By 1928 average per capita income among nonagricultural
employees had reached four times the average level of farmers' incomes.
For urban workers, prosperity was wondrous and real. They had more
money than ever before, and they enjoyed an amazing variety of new
products on which to spend it: not only automobiles but also canned
foods, washing machines, refrigerators, synthetic fabrics, telephones,
motion pictures (with sound after 1927), and--along with the automobile
the most revolutionary of the new technologies--radios. In the unelectrified
countryside, of course, many of these modern conveniences were nowhere
to be found.
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