Several policies unjustly shortchanged the 40 percent of Black Americans who were working in agriculture at that time. For example, many Black sharecroppers never received payments for which they were eligible, either because the local office of the Adjustment Agency failed to disburse the funds to them, or landowners held the money back on the pretext of covering bills. Some plantation owners who were paid to take their cotton crop out of production would evict the Black tenant farmers who were cultivating that land. Meanwhile, another New Deal headliner, the Social Security Act, did not cover farm laborers or domestic workers, and two-thirds of all Black people employed at the time were working in those occupations.28
One of the more courageous and tenacious campaigns of resistance to the New Deal’s built-in racial discrimination was launched in 1934 by the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Black and white sharecroppers and farmworkers across northeast Arkansas, angered with being cheated by planters and the Agricultural Adjustment Agency, began organizing door-to-door and field-to-field, with encouragement from the Socialist Party and its leader, Norman Thomas. By late 1935, they had formed two hundred local chapters with a total of 25,000 members. In September of that year, five thousand members of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union staged a successful strike for higher wages. That brought a surge of enthusiasm and a flood of new members.29 In his May 1936 account of the Arkansas rebellion, Jerold Auerbach wrote:
Union members marched hundreds abreast across the cotton fields to gather additional recruits. Instead, they incensed planters and politicians. Memphis police broke picket lines at the Harahan bridge; striking croppers were arrested and leased to planters to work off their fines and court costs; and a Crittenden County landlord built and filled a small concentration camp. On the fourth day of the strike Governor Futrell sent in National Guardsmen and State Rangers and the union quietly surrendered.30
In another incident, cops assaulted and jailed the organizer of a new chapter of the union, a Black minister. A delegation of fifty white sharecroppers with a lawyer in tow managed to get the minister released. But Arkansas landowners, local cops, and the state government were proving to be crueler and more recalcitrant than the local officials from the Adjustment Agency and the New Dealers in Washington.31
The union’s strategy was to combine “relentless pressure on the New Deal with trade union tactics,” but, wrote Auerbach,
Viewed from the perspective of traditional trade unionism, the organizing drive of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union seemed an anomaly. Its most effective weapons were agitation and publicity, not strikes or collective bargaining. During these early years, the union’s organizing drive always had twin objectives: recruitment of new members and propagation of radical alternatives to New Deal agricultural policy. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union sought to organize a protest movement no less than to organize the sharecroppers.32
The union newspaper’s call to action was, “Raise plenty of Hell and you will get somewhere.”33 The hell-raisers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union deserve much credit for bringing to America’s attention the racial injustices that were built into the New Deal.
THE WAR CURE
Roosevelt worried that if his efforts failed and the Depression dragged on, it would send a message to the world that democracies are ill-equipped to deal with severe economic crises, and this at a time when fascism was on a winning streak in Europe and Japan. Early on, the head of the National Recovery Administration, Hugh Johnson, and other New Dealers had even openly admired the way the dictator Benito Mussolini was handling Italy’s economy, but that sort of talk ended in 1935 with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.34 Then, in a quick twist of history, it was the 1940s fight against fascism that finally brought full employment and prosperity back to the United States. (Almost eight decades later, the Green New Deal is being envisioned at a time when Americans are once again confronting a slide toward authoritarianism, if not full-blown fascism—this time not only in Europe and Asia but in Washington, DC, as well.35)
In 1936, the Roosevelt administration, concluding that the recovery it had jump-started could sustain itself, decided to start easing off the stimulus spigot. Federal spending dropped by 25 percent over two years, and unemployment promptly leaped by a quarter, to 19 percent by 1938. This economic decline was even steeper than that of 1929–33, and unemployment remained above 14 percent until 1941.36
Supplying allied nations already at war in Europe while at the same time building up the U.S. arsenal and inducting millions into the military finally accomplished what the New Deal could not. By 1940, Congress had spent $62 billion over eight years trying to dig itself out of the Depression. In the next five years, it would spend $321 billion on World War II—according to Patrick Renshaw, more than the U.S. government had spent in total from 1790 to 1940. Heavy spending on the war buildup and consequent massive hiring by both the military and the private sector worked like magic. Over the next four years, the gross national product doubled and the unemployment rate fell to a mere 1.2 percent.37
The fact that U.S. industries could ramp up production to a historically unprecedented output within months in support of urgent national goals has inspired present-day visions of a similar industrial mobilization to combat greenhouse warming. There has been less discussion of the deep adaptations that were required of the wartime economy. Overnight, a government that had struggled for a decade with an excess of production and a deficit of consumer buying power had to figure out how to start serving a population that had plenty of money to spend but now faced shortages of goods on which to spend it. The economy had gone from cash-limited to resource-limited. If nothing were done, Depression-era price deflation would flip into just-as-destructive hyperinflation. The federal government responded, tiptoeing into the murky waters of price controls. Under the Office of Price Administration, the process began in 1940 with voluntary campaigns, one commodity at a time, and by 1943 had escalated into a mandatory clampdown on prices throughout the economy.38
Enforcing ceilings on prices is a sure, direct way to stop inflation, but it doesn’t guarantee fair access. Suppressed prices boost the demand for goods but not the supply. And in the 1940s, supplies of goods were further limited by the diversion of workers and resources into the effort to win the war. The U.S. government was eventually forced into a second level of intervention to make sure that the entire population had access to an adequate supply of food, shelter, clothing, and other basic necessities.
SHRINK, STANDARDIZE, SIMPLIFY
Washington had thrown in the towel in its effort to institute economic planning during the Depression. Now, with a resource-intensive effort to win a war in Asia and Europe, and with the threat of critical shortages at home, planning of production and consumption would become the rule in both the military and civilian economies. A month after the United States entered World War II, a War Production Board (WPB) was created to allocate resources between the military and civilian sectors, ensure an adequate flow of resources to industries supplying crucial civilian goods, and regulate or ban production of other goods.
The degree to which the War Production Board was able to successfully restructure the economy was astonishing. It ordered a halt to all car manufacturing in Detroit and converted the factories for production of tanks and other military vehicles. Non-military sales of mechanical refrigerators were barred in February 1942, and all production was halted in April, saving a quarter-million tons of critical metals over the next year. WPB blocked production of any new air conditioners used “solely for personal comfort” and ordered that air-conditioning systems in some big-city retail stores be removed and installed in far-flung armament factories. Other regulated goods included lumber, bolts, industrial chemicals, bedsprings, farm equipment, cooking stoves, coal- and oil-fired heating stoves, pressure cookers, and even used washing machines.39
Authorities sought ways of deeply reducing civilian rail travel to conserve coal. Brewers were restricted in the number of railcars they could use per month for shipping beer, and they were prohibited from hiring trucks to haul additional product. Shipping of retail packages measuring less than sixty inches in length plus girth or weighing under five pounds was prohibited. With ammonia manufacturers feeding the production of explosives for the military,