New Deal Coalition Fact 6: African Americans had been severely hit by the Great Depression as the group most devastated by unemployment. The Civil Works Administration had provided more than a quarter of a million young black men with jobs. Most importantly support given to the cause of civil rights by both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt gave the African American community hope for the future.
Other women gained important administrative positions in a variety of New Deal agencies and programs. The influence of Eleanor Roosevelt had an enormous impact on American women. The National Industrial Recovery Act NIRA had given workers the right to organize and bargain collectively and established codes to address many issues including minimum wages, working hours and productivity.
New Deal Coalition Fact The Unemployed, Senior citizens and the disabled gave FDR support due to the prospect of Social insurance which would establish a national pension fund and an unemployment insurance system. In addition to this many felt that the Democrats lacked an inspirational leader that could command the respect and authority that Roosevelt had done. Finally many from the coalition joined the Republicans during the late 70s and early 80s as Reagan Democrats.
Company Reg no: VAT reg no Main menu. When Roosevelt took office in , he acted swiftly to stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief to those who were suffering. The next day, Roosevelt declared a four-day bank holiday to stop people from withdrawing their money from shaky banks. At the end of the year, Congress ratified the 21st Amendment and ended Prohibition for good. In May, he signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act into law, creating the TVA and enabling the federal government to build dams along the Tennessee River that controlled flooding and generated inexpensive hydroelectric power for the people in the region.
That same month, Congress passed a bill that paid commodity farmers farmers who produced things like wheat, dairy products, tobacco and corn to leave their fields fallow in order to end agricultural surpluses and boost prices. Despite the best efforts of President Roosevelt and his cabinet, however, the Great Depression continued. Unemployment persisted, the economy remained unstable, farmers continued to struggle in the Dust Bowl and people grew angrier and more desperate.
So, in the spring of , Roosevelt launched a second, more aggressive series of federal programs, sometimes called the Second New Deal. The WPA also gave work to artists, writers, theater directors and musicians. In July , the National Labor Relations Act , also known as the Wagner Act, created the National Labor Relations Board to supervise union elections and prevent businesses from treating their workers unfairly.
In August, FDR signed the Social Security Act of , which guaranteed pensions to millions of Americans, set up a system of unemployment insurance and stipulated that the federal government would help care for dependent children and the disabled.
This FDR had come a long way from his earlier repudiation of class-based politics and was promising a much more aggressive fight against the people who were profiting from the Depression-era troubles of ordinary Americans. He won the election by a landslide. Still, the Great Depression dragged on.
Workers grew more militant: In December , for example, the United Auto Workers strike at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan lasted for 44 days and spread to some , autoworkers in 35 cities. These newlyweds would provide the United States with a "baby boom" during those first several years following the end of the war. Second, government and private spending during the war produced jobs, many of which—because men were increasingly joining the military—went to women.
Indeed, women joined the workforce in such unprecedented numbers—19 million undertook wage-work at some point during the war years—that "Rosie the Riveter," the iconic female laborer publicized by the War Manpower Commission, became a staple of wartime propaganda. Between and , the number of persons of Mexican descent living in the American southwest jumped from , to well over 1.
Mexicans and Mexican Americans found employment, as well as back-breaking and low-paying work, on large farms. The Great Depression, however, reduced the need for farm labor and caused unemployment among Mexicans living in the United States and Mexican Americans to soar. At the behest of politicians and community leaders in the southwest looking to solve the region's unemployment problem, the U.
Those Mexican and Mexican Americans who remained in the United States faced grinding poverty and little help from the New Deal, which too often failed to help agricultural workers and people of color. Roughly , Mexican Americans would serve in the American military. On the home front, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, like blacks and women, took advantage of new and more lucrative employment opportunities in military-related industries.
They moved increasingly into urban areas to work these better paying jobs, though they were not always welcomed with open arms. This racial and ethnic hostility erupted in June when rampaging American sailors attacked young Mexican Americans known as "zoot-suiters," in reference to their distinctive style of dress in the streets of Los Angeles. The police and military refused to intervene in what became known as the "zoot suit riots. The war had one more important consequence: it reversed the flow of immigrants between the United States and Mexico yet again.
The agricultural sector in the southwest needed Mexican labor to meet war-time demands, and the U. The bracero program, which brought more than , Mexicans to the United States the majority to California during the war, remained in place until the s.
Between and , union membership grew from less than 3 million workers to 14 million workers, a number which accounted for nearly thirty percent of all American workers. This fantastic growth resulted largely from changes in American politics and economics wrought by the Great Depression and the New Deal.
The passage of the NIRA in , with its "Section 7a" that gave workers the rights to organize and bargain collectively, accelerated the growth of union membership. Workers and unions now had tangible evidence that the American government stood behind them. When Roosevelt came to power, almost no factory worker in America belonged to a union.
In no other developed country in the Western world was that true. But during the FDR years, a new labor coalition, the congress of Industrial Organizations CIO , unionized the steel, automobile, textile, and other large industries.
Lewis, chief of the United Mine Workers, welcomed assembly line laborers, who often came from religious and ethnic minorities; in contrast, the American Federation of Labor AFL was interested primarily in craft workers, such as carpenters with northern European backgrounds. When in , the auto workers launched sit-down strikes, Roosevelt refused to sanction the use of force to dislodge them.
As a result, General motors and other firms were compelled to recognize these new unions. African American workers increasingly joined unions to protect their employment rights as well. One of the most powerful of such organizations was the Sleeping Car Porters' Union, a group of railroad-passenger attendants that was almost completely composed of African Americans.
Led by the tireless, charismatic A. Philip Randolph , the union languished for years until Roosevelt's legislation made it legally viable. In , the Porters' Union forced a virulently anti-union company, the makers and operators of Pullman passenger cars, to sit at the bargaining table with the union's members. After two long years of struggle, Pullman agreed to terms, a milestone event in American civil rights history. During World War II, the effort to make the United States the "arsenal of democracy" aided American workers by making jobs plentiful and raising wages.
Most unions agreed to a no-strike pledge at the beginning of the war. Nonetheless, conflict between labor and management still arose, largely over who controlled the shop floor, and who set work rates and salaries.
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