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43 books match the query 'New Deal, 1933-1939'
A Carpetbagger in Reverse
Arthur W. Mitchell, America's First Black Democratic CongressmanJohn Morris Knapp
University of Alabama Press, 2025
From Alabama to Congress—Arthur W. Mitchell’s fight for justice rewrote the rules of Black political power.
A Carpetbagger in Reverse offers a landmark reassessment of the life, career, and accomplishments of groundbreaking Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell, the first Black Democrat elected to Congress and the only Black member of Congress during his four terms of service from 1935 to 1943.
Born to former enslaved people in Alabama in 1883, Mitchell studied with Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute and later moved to Washington DC and became a lawyer. He continued his career in Chicago, where the Great Migration had helped transform the city’s South Side into a vibrant, multiracial enclave.
As a congressman, Mitchell helped to create an enduring alliance between Black Americans and the Democratic party. Seeing his primary role as representing the South’s disempowered Black population, his belief that solutions to the region’s racial problems should arise from a new cadre of locally trained leaders brought him into frequent, vituperative conflict with the NAACP, the Republican Party, and the Black press. The first Black lawyer to argue successfully before the Supreme Court, his unanimous victory in Mitchell v. United States would have long-term consequences for the Civil Rights Movement.
A Carpetbagger in Reverse is the first publication significantly based on Mitchell’s papers, an essential and often overlooked source of insights about the development of Black political and culture life in the 1930s and 1940s.
A New Deal for All?
Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era BaltimoreAndor Skotnes
Duke University Press, 2012
A New Deal for Native Art
Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933-1943Jennifer McLerran
University of Arizona Press, 2009
In A New Deal for Native Art, Jennifer McLerran reveals how positioning the native artist as a pre-modern Other served the goals of New Deal programs—and how this sometimes worked at cross-purposes with promoting native self-sufficiency. She describes federal policies of the 1930s and early 1940s that sought to generate an upscale market for Native American arts and crafts. And by unraveling the complex ways in which commodification was negotiated and the roles that producers, consumers, and New Deal administrators played in that process, she sheds new light on native art’s commodity status and the artist’s position as colonial subject.
In this first book to address the ways in which New Deal Indian policy specifically advanced commodification and colonization, McLerran reviews its multi-pronged effort to improve the market for Indian art through the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, arts and crafts cooperatives, murals, museum exhibits, and Civilian Conservation Corps projects. Presenting nationwide case studies that demonstrate transcultural dynamics of production and reception, she argues for viewing Indian art as a commodity, as part of the national economy, and as part of national political trends and reform efforts.
McLerran marks the contributions of key individuals, from John Collier and Rene d’Harnoncourt to Navajo artist Gerald Nailor, whose mural in the Navajo Nation Council House conveyed distinctly different messages to outsiders and tribal members. Featuring dozens of illustrations, A New Deal for Native Art offers a new look at the complexities of folk art “revivals” as it opens a new window on the Indian New Deal.
A Passion for the True and Just
Felix and Lucy Kramer Cohen and the Indian New DealAlice Beck Kehoe
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Kehoe argues that, due to anti-Semitism in 1930s America, Cohen could not speak for his legislation before Congress, and that Collier, an upper-class WASP, became the spokesman as well as the administrator. According to the author, historians of the Indian New Deal have not given due weight to Cohen’s work, nor have they recognized its foundation in his liberal secular Jewish culture. Both Felix and Lucy Cohen shared a belief in the moral duty of mitzvah, creating a commitment to the “true and the just” that was rooted in their Jewish intellectual and moral heritage, and their Social Democrat principles.
A Passion for the True and Just takes a fresh look at the Indian New Deal and the radical reversal of US Indian policies it caused, moving from ethnocide to retention of Indian homelands. Shifting attention to the Jewish tradition of moral obligation that served as a foundation for Felix and Lucy Kramer Cohen (and her professor Franz Boas), the book discusses Cohen’s landmark contributions to the principle of sovereignty that so significantly influenced American legal philosophy.
American Rhetoric in the New Deal Era, 1932-1945
A Rhetorical History of the United States, Volume VIIThomas Benson
Michigan State University Press, 2006
The New Deal era is hard to define with precision—in time or in ideology. Some historians use New Deal to designate the intense period of domestic reform legislation of the first Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, 1933–37. Others confine discussion of the era to the legislation of 1933, and identify another wave of legislation in 1935 as a Second New Deal. Most of the essays in this book focus on the prewar period, with glimpses that look forward to the rhetoric of the approach to and engagement in World War II.
An Appalachian New Deal
West Virginia in the Great DepressionJerry Bruce Thomas
West Virginia University Press, 2011
In this paperback edition of An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression, Jerry Bruce Thomas examines the economic and social conditions of the state of West Virginia before, during, and after the Great Depression. Thomas’s exploration of personal papers by leading political and social figures, newspapers, and the published and unpublished records of federal, state, local, and private agencies, traces a region’s response to an economic depression and a presidential stimulus program. This dissection of federal and state policies implemented under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program reveals the impact of poverty upon political, gender, race, and familial relations within the Mountain State—and the entire country. Through An Appalachian New Deal, Thomas documents the stories of ordinary citizens who survived a period of economic crisis and echoes a message from our nation’s past to a new generation enduring financial hardship and uncertainty.
Bridgeport's Socialist New Deal, 1915-36
Cecelia Bucki
University of Illinois Press, 2001
In November 1933, the Socialist Party of Bridgeport, Connecticut put slate roofer Jasper McLevy in the mayor's seat and nearly won control of the city council. Cecelia Bucki explores how labor gained first a foothold and then a stronghold in local politics as broad debates pitted previously unengaged working-class citizens against local business leaders and traditional party elites.
In the heat of the Great Depression, the skilled union craftsmen who made up the bulk of the city's Socialist Party filled a political void created by the crumbling of mainstream parties, the disintegration of traditional modes of ethnic politics, and the city's acute fiscal crisis. In time, however, legislative measures and compromise politics blunted the progressive agenda. The local party split from the Socialist Party of America and became narrowly focused and reformist while still serving as the voice of the working class.
A portrait of a stunning moment in American politics, Bridgeport's Socialist New Deal, 1915-36 offers a fascinating look at the volatility of politics in the early years of the Great Depression.
Cry from the Cotton
The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the New DealDonald Grubbs
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
Deconstructing the Monolith
The Microeconomics of the National Industrial Recovery ActJason E. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 2019
The NIRA is generally viewed as a monolithic program, its dramatic and sweeping effects best measurable through a macroeconomic lens. In this pioneering book, however, Jason E. Taylor examines the act instead using microeconomic tools, probing the uneven implementation of the act’s codes and the radical heterogeneity of its impact across industries and time. Deconstructing the Monolith employs a mixture of archival and empirical research to enrich our understanding of how the program affected the behavior and well-being of workers and firms during the two years NIRA existed as well as in the period immediately following its demise.
Democratic Art
The New Deal's Influence on American CultureSharon Ann Musher
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In Democratic Art, Sharon Musher explores these questions and uses them as a springboard for an examination of the role art can and should play in contemporary society. Drawing on close readings of government-funded architecture, murals, plays, writing, and photographs, Democratic Art examines the New Deal’s diverse cultural initiatives and outlines five perspectives on art that were prominent at the time: art as grandeur, enrichment, weapon, experience, and subversion. Musher argues that those engaged in New Deal art were part of an explicitly cultural agenda that sought not just to create art but to democratize and Americanize it as well. By tracing a range of aesthetic visions that flourished during the 1930s, this highly original book outlines the successes, shortcomings, and lessons of the golden age of government funding for the arts.
False Dawn
The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947George Selgin
University of Chicago Press, 2025
CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2025
A definitive history of the United States’ recovery from the Great Depression—and the New Deal's true part in it.
FDR’s New Deal has long enjoyed a special place in American history and policy—both because it redefined the government’s fundamental responsibilities and because Roosevelt’s “bold experimentation” represented a type of policymaking many would like to see repeated.
But “the thing about bold experiments,” economist George Selgin reminds us, “is that they often fail.” In False Dawn Selgin draws on both contemporary sources and numerous studies by economic historians to show that, although steps taken during the Roosevelt administration’s first days raised hopes of a speedy recovery from the Great Depression, instead of fulfilling those hopes, subsequent New Deal policies proved so counterproductive that over seventeen percent of American workers—more than the peak unemployment rate during the COVID-19 crisis—were still either unemployed or on work relief six years later.
By distinguishing the New Deal’s successes from its failures, and explaining how the U.S. finally managed to lay the specter of mass unemployment to rest, Selgin draws salient lessons for dealing with future recessions.
Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Politics, and the Great Depression
Charles J. Masters
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Gumshoe America
Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal LiberalismSean McCann
Duke University Press, 2000
Gumshoe America traces the way those problems surfaced in hard-boiled crime fiction from the1920s through the 1960s. Beginning by using a forum on the KKK in the pulp magazine Black Mask to describe both the economic and political culture of pulp fiction in the early twenties, McCann locates the origins of the hard-boiled crime story in the genre’s conflict with the racist antiliberalism prominent at the time. Turning his focus to Dashiell Hammett’s career, McCann shows how Hammett’s writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s moved detective fiction away from its founding fables of social compact to the cultural alienation triggered by a burgeoning administrative state. He then examines how Raymond Chandler’s fiction, unlike Hammett’s, idealized sentimental fraternity, echoing the communitarian appeals of the late New Deal. Two of the first crime writers to publish original fiction in paperback—Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford—are examined next in juxtaposition to the popularity enjoyed by their contemporaries Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald. The stories of the former two, claims McCann, portray the decline of the New Deal and the emergence of the rights-based liberalism of the postwar years and reveal new attitudes toward government: individual alienation, frustration with bureaucratic institutions, and dissatisfaction with the growing vision of America as a meritocracy. Before concluding, McCann turns to the work of Chester Himes, who, in producing revolutionary hard-boiled novels, used the genre to explore the changing political significance of race that accompanied the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and the 1960s.
Combining a striking reinterpretation of the hard-boiled crime story with a fresh view of the political complications and cultural legacies of the New Deal, Gumshoe America will interest students and fans of the genre, and scholars of American history, culture, and government.
Hollywood's New Deal
Giuliana Muscio
Temple University Press, 1997
Despite the economic hardship of the thirties, people flocked to the movies in unprecedented numbers. At the same time, the Roosevelt Administration was trying to implement the New Deal and increase the influence and power of the federal government. Weaving together film and political history, Giuliana Muscio traces the connections between Depression Era Hollywood and the popularity of FDR, asserting that politics transformed its public into spectators while the movie industry transformed its spectators into a public. Hollywood's New Deal reveals the ways in which this reciprocal relationship between politics and film evolved into a strategic effort to stabilize a nation in the clutches of economic unrest by creating a unified American consciousness through national cinema.
Muscio analyzes such regulatory practices as the Hays Code, and the government's scrutinizing of monopolistic practices such as block booking and major studio ownership of movie theaters. Hollywood's New Deal, focusing on the management and structure of the film industry, delves deep into the Paramount case, detailing the behind-the-scenes negotiations and the public statements that ended with film industry leaders agreeing to self regulate and to eliminate monopolistic practices.
Hollywood's acquiescence and the government's retreat from antitrust action show that they had found a mutually beneficial way of preserving their own spheres of power and influence. This book is indispensable for understanding the growth of the film industry and the increasing political importance of mass media.
In the series Culture and the Moving Image, edited by Robert Sklar.
Isabella Greenway
An Enterprising WomanKristie Miller
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Isabella Greenway's life was linked with both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her infancy was spent on a snow-swept ranch in North Dakota, where young TR was a neighbor and a friend. In her teens, she captivated Edith Wharton's New York as a glamorous debutante. A bridesmaid in the wedding of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Isabella was the bride of Robert Ferguson, a Scottish nobleman and one of TR's Rough Riders. They went west when he developed tuberculosis; after his death, she married his fellow Rough Rider, Arizona copper magnate John Greenway.
In Tucson, the energetic Isabella ran an airline, worked with disabled veterans, and founded the world-famous Arizona Inn. When the Great Depression brought hard times, Eleanor Roosevelt recruited Isabella to work for the Democratic Party. Isabella played a decisive role in Franklin Roosevelt's nomination to the presidency in 1932; the New York Times called her "the most-talked-of woman at the National Democratic Convention." She was elected to Congress as Arizona's only US Representative, and again drew national media attention when she challenged FDR for not being sufficiently progressive.
Miller's meticulous biography captures a life of adventure and romance, from southern tobacco country to the ballrooms of New York, from western ranches to the dome of the US Capitol. She shows national politics played out behind the scenes, Isabella's lifelong friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, and the drama of a loyal wife caring for a dying husband despite having fallen in love with a younger man. The book also shows Greenway's considerable influence on the development of Arizona's business and politics in the early decades of statehood. Although Isabella Greenway died in 1953, the Arizona Inn—a tribute to her enterprise—remains a premier resort hotel, celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2005. This book, too, celebrates Isabella's energy, vision, indomitable spirit, and love of life.
Jumping the Abyss
Marriner S. Eccles and the New Deal, 1933–1940Mark Wayne Nelson
University of Utah Press, 2017
Mark Wayne Nelson details the efforts of one of America’s most underappreciated public servants. In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt invited Marriner S. Eccles, a Mormon from Utah, to join his administration. As a Republican businessman, Eccles seemed an unlikely candidate for the role of leading crusader for a fairer and more economically sound distribution of the nation’s wealth. From his first position in the Treasury Department, though, he emerged as the central mover in revolutionizing the mortgage structure of the private home market in the United States.
After FDR appointed him to head the Federal Reserve, Eccles drafted legislation that restructured that institution as well. Throughout the remainder of the New Deal, he was the most powerful advocate of what came to be called “Keynesian Policy,” which involved direct federal stimulus of the economy. Presenting the first comprehensive and independent analysis of Eccles’s influential career, Jumping the Abyss wrestles with economic issues that remain relevant today.
Finalist for the Utah State Historical Society Best Book Award.
Kansas in the Great Depression
Work Relief, the Dole, and RehabilitationPeter Fearon
University of Missouri Press, 2007
No part of the United States escaped the ravages of the Great Depression, but some coped with it better than others. This book examines New Deal relief programs in Kansas throughout the Depression, focusing on the relationship between the state and the federal government to show how their successful operation depended on the effectiveness of that partnership.
Ranging widely over all of Kansas’s 105 counties, Peter Fearon provides a detailed analysis of the key relief programs for both urban and rural areas and shows that the state’s Republican administration—led by FDR’s later presidential opponent Governor Alf Landon—effectively ran New Deal welfare policies. As early as 1933, federal officials reported the Kansas central relief administration to be one of the most efficient in the country, and funding for farm policies was generous enough to keep many Kansas farm families off the relief rolls. Indeed, historically high levels of social spending ensured that New Deal initiatives were radical for their day, but Fearon shows that, especially in Kansas, fears of the debilitating effects of the dole and the insistence on means testing and work relief served as conservative balances to the threat of a dependency culture.
Drawing on extensive research at the county level, Fearon examines relief problems from the perspective of recipients, social workers, and poor commissioners, all of whom had to cope with inadequate and fluctuating funding. He plumbs the sometimes volatile relationships between social workers and their clients to illustrate the formidable difficulties faced by the former and explain reasons for—and effects of—strikes and riots by the latter. He also investigates the operation of work relief, considers the treatment of women and blacks in the distribution of welfare resources, and assesses the effects of the WPA on employment—showing that the majority of those eligible were unable to secure positions and were forced to fall back on county relief.
Kansas in the Great Depression is an insightful look at how federal, state, and local authorities worked together to deal with a national emergency, revealing the complexities of policy initiatives not generally brought to light in studies at the national level while establishing important links between pre-Roosevelt policies and the New Deal. It reaffirms the virtues of government programs run by dedicated public officials as it opens a new window on Americans helping Americans in their darkest hours.
Managing Legal Uncertainty
Elite Lawyers in the New DealRonen Shamir
Duke University Press, 1995
Applying the insights of Weber and Bourdieu to the sociology of the legal profession, Shamir shows that elite members of the bar had a keen self-interest in blocking the expansion of administrative law. He dismisses as oversimplified the view that elite lawyers were "hired guns" who argued that New Deal legislation was unconstitutional solely because of their duty to represent their capitalist clients. Instead, Shamir suggests, their alignment with the capitalist class was an incidental result of their attempt to articulate their vision of the law as scientific, apolitical, and judicially oriented—and thereby to defend their own position within the law profession. The academic legal realists on the other side of the constitutional debates criticized the rigidity of the traditional judicial process and insisted that flexibility of interpretation and the uncertainty of legal outcomes was at the heart of the legal system. The author argues that many legal realists, encouraged by the experimental nature of the New Deal, seized an opportunity to improve on their marginal status within the legal profession by moving their discussions from academic circles to the national policy agenda.
Modern Housing for America
Policy Struggles in the New Deal EraGail Radford
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Modernizing Main Street
Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New DealGabrielle Esperdy
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Esperdy argues that these updated storefronts served a range of complex purposes, such as stimulating public consumption, extending the New Deal’s influence, reviving a stagnant construction industry, and introducing European modernist design to the everyday landscape. She goes on to show that these diverse roles are inseparable, woven together not only by the crisis of the Depression, but also by the pressures of bourgeoning consumerism. As the decade’s two major cultural forces, Esperdy concludes, consumerism and the Depression transformed the storefront from a seemingly insignificant element of the built environment into a potent site for the physical and rhetorical staging of recovery and progress.
Mr. Democrat
Jim Farley, the New Deal and the Making of Modern American PoliticsDaniel Scroop
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Mr. Democrat tells the story of Jim Farley, Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign manager. As party boss, Farley experienced unprecedented success in the New Deal years. And like his modern counterpart Karl Rove, Farley enjoyed unparalleled access and power. Unlike Rove, however, Farley was instrumental in the creation of an overwhelming new majority in American politics, as the emergence of the New Deal transformed the political landscape of its time.
Mr. Democrat is timely and indispensable not just because Farley was a fascinating and unduly neglected figure, but also because an understanding of his career advances our knowledge of how and why he revolutionized the Democratic Party and American politics in the age of the New Deal.
Daniel Scroop is Lecturer in American History, University of Liverpool School of History.
New Deal / New South
An Anthony J. Badger ReaderAnthony J. Badger
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee
Intellectual, Methodological, and Theoretical ContributionsEdited by David H. Dye
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Exploring how New Deal innovation transformed archaeology in the American South.
New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee tells the engrossing story of Southeastern archaeology in the 1930s. The Tennessee Valley Authority Act of May 1933 initiated an ambitious program of flood control and power generation by way of a chain of hydroelectric dams on the Tennessee River. The construction of these dams flooded hundreds of thousands of square miles of river bottoms, campsites, villages, and towns that had been homes to Native Americans for centuries. This triggered an urgent need to undertake extensive archaeological fieldwork throughout the region. Those studies continue to influence contemporary archaeology.
The state of Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley were especially well suited research targets thanks to their mild climate and long field seasons. A third benefit in the 1930s was the abundance of labor supplied by Tennesseans unemployed during the Great Depression. Within months of the passage of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, teams of archaeologists fanned out across the state and region under the farsighted direction of Smithsonian Institution curators Neil M. Judd, Frank H. H. Roberts, and Frank M. Setzler. The early months of 1934 would become the busiest period of archaeological fieldwork in US history.
The twelve insightful essays in New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee document and explore this unique peak in archaeological study. Chapters highlight then-new techniques such as mound “peeling” and stratigraphic excavation adapted from the University of Chicago; the four specific New Deal sites of Watts Bar Reservoir, Mound Bottom, Pack, and Chickamauga Basin; bioarchaeology in the New Deal; and the enduring impact of the New Deal on contemporary fieldwork.
The challenges of the 1930s in recruiting skilled labor, training unskilled ancillary labor, developing and improvising new field methods, and many aspects of archaeological policies, procedures, and best-practices laid much of the foundation of contemporary archaeological practice. New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee offers an invaluable record of that pivotal time for professional, student, and amateur archaeologists.
New Deal Archaeology in the West
Edited by Kelly J. Pool and Mark L. Howe
University of Utah Press, 2023
Descriptions of New Deal projects and their contributions to our understanding of the past, as well as the stories of those involved—archaeologists, avocationalists, and others—are woven together across the chapters. Also documented are lost or scattered artifacts, records, and ancestors’ remains; incomplete analyses; unpublished reports; inconsistent application of scientific methodology; and the loss of Native sacred sites and traditional lands and lifeways. Authors highlight characteristics that distinguished the American West from the East during the Depression and affected the nature of New Deal projects, including the extent of federal land available in the West, the reliance of sparsely populated areas upon tourism, the presence of large resident Native populations with deep histories, and the wide-ranging degree of existing archaeology infrastructure in each state. This volume demonstrates that despite regional differences, New Deal-funded archaeological and cultural heritage projects created a legacy of knowledge and practice across the nation.
New Deal Modernism
American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare StateMichael Szalay
Duke University Press, 2000
Szalay situates his study within a liberal culture bent on security, a culture galvanized by its imagined need for private and public insurance.
Taking up prominent exponents of social and economic security—such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, and John Dewey—Szalay demonstrates how the New Deal’s revision of free-market culture required rethinking the political function of aesthetics. Focusing in particular on the modernist fascination with the relation between form and audience, Szalay offers innovative accounts of Busby Berkeley, Jack London, James M. Cain, Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, Betty Smith, and Gertrude Stein, as well as extended analyses of the works of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright.
New Deal Photographs of West Virginia, 1934-1943
Betty Rivard
West Virginia University Press, 2012
New Deal Radio
The Educational Radio ProjectDavid Goodman
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Contextualizing the different series aired by the Educational Radio Project as part of a unified project about radio and citizenship is crucial to understanding them. New Deal Radio argues that this distinctive government commercial partnership amounted to a critical intervention in US broadcasting and an important chapter in the evolution of public radio in America.
Organizing the Lakota
The Political Economy of the New Deal on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud ReservationsThomas Biolsi
University of Arizona Press, 1992
Biolsi pays particular attention to the administrative means by which the OIA retained the power to design and implement tribal "self-government" as well as the power to control the flow of critical resources—rations, relief employment, credit—to the reservations. He also shows how this imbalance of power between the tribes and the federal bureaucracy influenced politics on the reservations, and argues that the crisis of authority faced by the Lakota tribal governments among their own would-be constituents—most dramatically demonstrated by the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation—is a direct result of their disempowerment by the United States.
Outside the Magic Circle
The Autobiography of Virginia Foster DurrHollinger F. Barnard
University of Alabama Press, 1990
Winner of the Alabama Library Author Award
Outside the Magic Circle tells the remarkable story of Virginia Foster Durr, a southern white woman born into privilige who (along with her husband Clifford Durr, a lawyer best known for defending Rosa Parks), nonetheless devoted her life to Civil Rights activism.
Outside the Magic Circle is the powerful and deeply personal autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, a Southern woman who defied the expectations of her privileged upbringing to become one of the most courageous voices for civil rights and social justice in 20th-century America. Born into a wealthy, white Alabama family, Durr was raised in a world steeped in segregation and conservative values. Yet through a journey marked by moral reckoning, intellectual awakening, and political activism, she stepped outside the “magic circle” of Southern gentility to confront the injustices that shaped her world.
With a foreword by renowned oral historian Studs Terkel, this memoir captures Durr’s transformation from reluctant conformist to outspoken advocate. Her story spans decades of American history—from the Great Depression and New Deal politics to the McCarthy era and the Civil Rights Movement. Alongside her husband, attorney Clifford Durr, Virginia became a key figure in progressive circles, working to abolish the poll tax, defend civil liberties, and support Black activists in the segregated South.
Told in Durr’s own voice, the narrative is rich with anecdotes, reflections, and encounters with historical figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. It is both a personal reckoning and a political document, offering rare insight into the inner conflicts of white Southern liberals and the cost of dissent in a deeply divided society.
Outside the Magic Circle is more than a memoir—it is a testament to the power of conscience, the courage of transformation, and the enduring fight for justice. It remains a vital resource for readers interested in civil rights history, feminist thought, and the complexities of Southern identity.
Political Vocabularies
FDR, the Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political ArgumentMary E. Stuckey
Michigan State University Press, 2018
Shovel Ready
Archaeology and Roosevelt's New Deal for AmericaBernard K. Means
University of Alabama Press, 2013
John L. Cordell / John F. Doershuk / David H. Dye /Scott W. Hammerstedt / Janet R. Johnson / Kevin Kiernan /Gregory D. Lattanzi /Patrick C. Livingood / Anna R. Lunn / Bernard K. Means / Stephen E. Nash / Amanda L. Regnier / Sissel Schroeder / James R. Wettstaed
Sounds of the New Deal
The Federal Music Project in the WestPeter Gough
University of Illinois Press, 2015
From the onset, administrators and artists debated whether to represent highbrow, popular, or folk music in FMP activities. Though the administration privileged using "good" music to educate the public, in the West local preferences regularly trumped national priorities and allowed diverse vernacular musics to be heard. African American and Hispanic music found unprecedented popularity while the cultural mosaic illuminated by American folksong exemplified the spirit of the Popular Front movement. These new musical expressions combined the radical sensibilities of an invigorated Left with nationalistic impulses. At the same time, they blended traditional patriotic themes with an awareness of the country's varied ethnic musical heritage and vast--but endangered--store of grassroots music.
The Greater Good
Media, Family Removal, and TVA Dam Construction in North AlabamaLaura Beth Daws and Susan L. Brinson
University of Alabama Press, 2019
For poverty-stricken families in the Tennessee River Valley during the Great Depression, news of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal plans to create the Tennessee Valley Authority—bringing the promise of jobs, soil conservation, and electricity—offered hope for a better life. The TVA dams would flood a considerable amount of land on the riverbanks, however, forcing many families to relocate. In exchange for this sacrifice for the “greater good,” these families were promised “fair market value” for their land. As the first geographic location to benefit from the electricity provided by TVA, the people of North Alabama had much to gain, but also much to lose.
In The Greater Good: Media, Family Removal, and TVA Dam Construction in North Alabama Laura Beth Daws and Susan L. Brinson describe the region’s preexisting conditions, analyze the effects of relocation, and argue that local newspapers had a significant impact in promoting the TVA’s agenda. The authors contend that it was principally through newspapers that local residents learned about the TVA and the process and reasons for relocation. Newspapers of the day encouraged regional cooperation by creating an overwhelmingly positive image of the TVA, emphasizing its economic benefits and disregarding many of the details of removal.
Using mostly primary research, the volume addresses two key questions: What happened to relocated families after they sacrificed their homes, lifestyles, and communities in the name of progress? And what role did mediated communication play in both the TVA’s family relocation process and the greater movement for the public to accept the TVA’s presence in their lives? The Greater Good offers a unique window into the larger impact of the New Deal in the South. Until now, most research on the TVA was focused on organizational development rather than on families, with little attention paid to the role of the media in garnering acceptance of a government-enforced relocation.
The Insider
How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall StreetRob Wells
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022
When Willard M. Kiplinger launched the groundbreaking Kiplinger Washington Letter in 1923, he left the sidelines of traditional journalism to strike out on his own. With a specialized knowledge of finance and close connections to top Washington officials, Kiplinger was uniquely positioned to tell deeper truths about the intersections between government and business. With careful reporting and insider access, he delivered perceptive analysis and forecasts of business, economic, and political news to busy business executives, and the newsletter’s readership grew exponentially over the coming decades.
More than just a pioneering business journalist, Kiplinger emerged as a quiet but powerful link between the worlds of Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, and used his Letter to play a little-known but influential role in the New Deal. Part journalism history, part biography, and part democratic chronicle, The Insider offers a well-written and deeply researched portrayal of how Kiplinger not only developed a widely read newsletter that launched a business publishing empire but also how he forged a new role for the journalist as political actor.
The New Deal's Black Congressman
A Life of Arthur Wergs MitchellDennis S. Nordin
University of Missouri Press, 1997
In this fascinating biography, Dennis S. Nordin chronicles the life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell, the first black Democrat to be elected to Congress. Although he is now one of history's forgotten figures, Mitchell was once almost as well known among black college students as Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. Nordin, however, shows that Mitchell's achievements and thus his fame were the direct result of his dishonorable deeds.
Mitchell's life began humbly in rural Alabama in 1883. After a memorable boyhood, he studied briefly at Tuskegee Institute, which had a major effect on Mitchell's outlook. He went on to study law in Washington, D.C., and thereafter became involved in politics when the Republicans sent him to Chicago in 1928 to campaign for Herbert Hoover. Impressed by Chicago's ward system and patronage politics, he returned to the city and made a bid for a congressional seat, changing political parties in an effort to oust black Republican Congressman Oscar DePriest. To accomplish this, Mitchell resorted to "Uncle Tomming," ingratiating himself with the white bosses of the Chicago Machine.
Within five years a Machine nomination was in hand, and Mitchell found himself owing his political success and thus his loyalty to the Chicago Machine. Because he was under strict orders from Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly not to cause problems or be confrontational, Mitchell rarely, if ever, supported the interests of his constituents.
It was only in the later years of his political career that Mitchell began to show opposition to his Machine backing. He had been an opponent of the NAACP in his first years in Congress, but later became a strong supporter of an NAACP antilynching bill. In 1937, Mitchell sued three railroad companies for not offering equal treatment and accommodations for all passengers. The case went to the Supreme Court, which gave Mitchell a favorable ruling. As a result of these "confrontational" acts, the Chicago Machine quickly decided not to endorse Mitchell in the elections of 1942.
In his research, Nordin relies on such primary sources as manuscripts, newspapers, and court records, as well as information from interviews with Mitchell's friends, neighbors, colleagues, political rivals, and widow. Woven tightly together, these sources form a narrative that reveals a most complex and intriguing individual, a man whose political and moral views and acts were strongly linked to the goals of the great Chicago political Machine.
The Path to a Modern South
Northeast Texas between Reconstruction and the Great DepressionBy Walter L. Buenger
University of Texas Press, 2001
The forces that turned Northeast Texas from a poverty-stricken region into a more economically prosperous area.
Winner, Texas State Historical Association Coral H. Tullis Memorial Award for best book on Texas history, 2001
Federal New Deal programs of the 1930s and World War II are often credited for transforming the South, including Texas, from a poverty-stricken region mired in Confederate mythology into a more modern and economically prosperous part of the United States. By contrast, this history of Northeast Texas, one of the most culturally southern areas of the state, offers persuasive evidence that political, economic, and social modernization began long before the 1930s and prepared Texans to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the New Deal and World War II.
Walter L. Buenger draws on extensive primary research to tell the story of change in Northeast Texas from 1887 to 1930. Moving beyond previous, more narrowly focused studies of the South, he traces and interconnects the significant changes that occurred in politics, race relations, business and the economy, and women's roles. He also reveals how altered memories of the past and the emergence of a stronger identification with Texas history affected all facets of life in Northeast Texas.
The Ritual Landscape of Late Precontact Eastern Oklahoma
Archaeology from the WPA Era until Todayby Amanda L. Regnier, Scott W. Hammerstedt, and Sheila Bobalik Savage
University of Alabama Press, 2019
As part of Great Depression relief projects started in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sponsored massive archaeological projects across Oklahoma. The WPA crews excavated eight mound sites and dozens of nonmound residential sites in the Arkansas River Valley that date between AD 1000 and 1450. These sites are considered the westernmost representations of Mississippian culture in the Southeast.
The results of these excavations were documented in field journals and photographs prepared by the field supervisors and submitted in a series of quarterly reports to WPA headquarters. These reports contain a wealth of unpublished information summarizing excavations at the mound sites and residential sites, including mound profiles, burial descriptions, house maps, artifact tables, and artifact sketches. Of the excavated mound sites, results from only one, Spiro, have been extensively studied and synthesized in academic literature. The seven additional WPA-excavated mound sites—Norman, Hughes, Brackett, Eufaula, Skidgel, Reed, and Lillie Creek—are known to archaeologists outside of Oklahoma only as unlabeled points on maps of mound sites in the Southeast.
The Ritual Landscape of Late Precontact Eastern Oklahoma curates and contextualizes the results of the WPA excavations, showing how they inform archaeological understanding of Mississippian occupation in the Arkansas Valley. Regnier, Hammerstedt, and Savage also relate the history and experiences of practicing archaeology in the 1930s, incorporating colorful excerpts from field journals of the young, inexperienced archaeologists. Finally, the authors update current knowledge of mound and nonmound sites in the region, providing an excellent example of historical archaeology.
The Thousand-Year Flood
The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937David Welky
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In the early days of 1937, the Ohio River, swollen by heavy winter rains, began rising. And rising. And rising. By the time the waters crested, the Ohio and Mississippi had climbed to record heights. Nearly four hundred people had died, while a million more had run from their homes. The deluge caused more than half a billion dollars of damage at a time when the Great Depression still battered the nation.
Timed to coincide with the flood's seventy-fifth anniversary, The Thousand-Year Flood is the first comprehensive history of one of the most destructive disasters in American history. David Welky first shows how decades of settlement put Ohio valley farms and towns at risk and how politicians and planners repeatedly ignored the dangers. Then he tells the gripping story of the river's inexorable rise: residents fled to refugee camps and higher ground, towns imposed martial law, prisoners rioted, Red Cross nurses endured terrifying conditions, and FDR dispatched thousands of relief workers. In a landscape fraught with dangers—from unmoored gas tanks that became floating bombs to powerful currents of filthy floodwaters that swept away whole towns—people hastily raised sandbag barricades, piled into overloaded rowboats, and marveled at water that stretched as far as the eye could see. In the flood's aftermath, Welky explains, New Deal reformers, utopian dreamers, and hard-pressed locals restructured not only the flood-stricken valleys, but also the nation's relationship with its waterways, changes that continue to affect life along the rivers to this day.
A striking narrative of danger and adventure—and the mix of heroism and generosity, greed and pettiness that always accompany disaster—The Thousand-Year Flood breathes new life into a fascinating yet little-remembered American story.
The World through the Dime Store Door
A MemoirAileen Kilgore Henderson
University of Alabama Press, 2020
A coming-of-age memoir evoking farm, mining, and small-town life in Alabama’s Tuscaloosa County as the world transitions from the Great Depression to World War II.
In the 1930s, the rural South was in the throes of the Great Depression. Farm life was monotonous and hard, but a timid yet curious teenager thought it worth recording. Aileen Kilgore Henderson kept a chronicle of her family’s daily struggles in Tuscaloosa County alongside events in the wider world she gleaned from shortwave radio and the occasional newspaper. She wrote about Howard Hughes’s round-the-world flight and her horror at the rise to power in Germany of a bizarre politician named Adolf Hitler. Henderson longed to join the vast world beyond the farm, but feared leaving the refuge of her family and beloved animals.
Yet, with her father’s encouragement, she did leave, becoming a clerk in the Kress dime store in downtown Tuscaloosa. Despite long workdays and a lengthy bus commute, she continued to record her observations and experiences in her diary, for every day at the dime store was interesting and exciting for an observant young woman who found herself considering new ideas and different points of view.
Drawing on her diary entries from the 1930s and early 1940s, Henderson recollects a time of sweeping change for Tuscaloosa and the South. The World through the Dime Store Door is a personal and engaging account of a Southern town and its environs in transition told through the eyes of a poor young woman with only a high school education but gifted with a lively mind and an openness to life.
To The City
Urban Photographs of the New DealAuthored by Julia L. Foulkes
Temple University Press, 2011
In the 1930s and 1940s, as the United States moved from a rural to an urban nation, the pull of the city was irrepressible. It was so strong that even a photographic mission designed to record the essence of rural America could not help but capture the energy of urbanization too. To the City showcases over 100 photographs from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project along with extracts from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) guidebooks and oral histories, to convey the detail and dimensions of that transformation.
This artfully grouped collection of photographs includes magnificent images by notable photographers Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Gordon Parks, among many others. Foulkes organizes this history of Americana into five themes: Intersection; Traffic; High Life and Low Life; The City in the Country; and Citizens to illuminate the changes in habits, landscapes, and aspirations that the march to cities encompassed.
As the rural past holds symbolic sway and the suburb presents demographic force, the urban portion of our history—why and how cities have been a destination for hope—recedes from view. To the City is a thoughtful, engaging reminder.
Urban Farming in the West
A New Deal Experiment in Subsistence HomesteadsRobert Carriker
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Robert Carriker examines for the first time the intricate histories of these subsistence homestead projects, which have long been buried in bureaucratic records and clouded by misunderstanding, showing that in many ways they were among the agency’s most successful efforts. He provides case studies of the projects, rescuing their obscure histories using archival documents and rare photographs. He also reveals the machinations of civic groups and private citizens across the West who jockeyed for access to the funds being allotted for New Deal community building.
By describing what took place on these western homesteads, Carriker shows that the DSH’s agenda was not as far-fetched as some have reported. The tendency to condemn the Division and its projects, he argues, has failed to appreciate the good that came from some of the individual homestead communities—particularly those in the Far West.
Although overshadowed by the larger undertakings of the New Deal, some of these western communities remain thriving neighborhoods—living legacies to FDR’s efforts that show how the country once chose to deal with economic hardship. Too often the DSH is noted for its failures; Carriker’s study shows that its western homesteads were instead qualified accomplishments.
War on Crime
Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass CulturePotter, Claire Bond
Rutgers University Press, 1998
Anxieties about crime today have become a familiar route for the creation of new government agencies and the extension of state authority. It is important to remember the original "war on crime" in the 1930s-and the opportunities it afforded to New Dealers and established bureaucrats like J. Edgar Hoover-as scholars grapple with the ways states assert influence over populations, local authority, and party politics while they pursue goals such as reducing popular violence and protecting private property.
Well Worth Saving
How the New Deal Safeguarded Home OwnershipPrice Fishback, Jonathan Rose, and Kenneth Snowden
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Well Worth Saving tells the story of the disastrous housing market during the Great Depression and the extent to which an immensely popular New Deal relief program, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), was able to stem foreclosures by buying distressed mortgages from lenders and refinancing them. Drawing on historical records and modern statistical tools, Price Fishback, Jonathan Rose, and Kenneth Snowden investigate important unanswered questions to provide an unparalleled view of the mortgage loan industry throughout the 1920s and early ’30s. Combining this with the stories of those involved, the book offers a clear understanding of the HOLC within the context of the housing market in which it operated, including an examination of how the incentives and behaviors at play throughout the crisis influenced the effectiveness of policy.
More than eighty years after the start of the Great Depression, when politicians have called for similar programs to quell the current mortgage crisis, this accessible account of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation holds invaluable lessons for our own time.