Examining the Dust Bowl Era

A Review of T. H. Watkins’s Great Depression: America in the 1930s

T. H. Watkins (1936-2000) was the Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University. He authored, coauthored, and edited 28 books, including Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes. Watkins also wrote, advised, and commented on various PBS documentary films about the West.

BY JONATHAN YEH

In his Great Depression: America in the 1930s, T. H. Watkins scrupulously documents the most devastating economic crash of the 1930s, which turned the lives of ordinary Americans upside down and left an indelible mark on the nation’s psyche. Incorporating more than 150 heartrending photographs and documents into his book, Watkins vividly captures the essence—miseries, fears, hopes—of the Great Depression; he presents an engaging study of the era, revealing not only the causes and effects of the economic crash, but also the reactions of the people and government. For example, the government under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt orchestrated “massive relief efforts in early years of the New Deal, acts of mercy that would be felt and remembered on very personal levels.”1 In effect, the federal government became a living part of American society, and most Americans began to share a bond and new kind of intimacy among themselves, their government, and their president.

Watkins’s narrative begins with an overview of the causes of the Great Depression. Many believe that the stock market crash on October 29, 1929 caused the terrible economic collapse. However, the American economy had already been quite fragile before the Crash due to underlying malignant problems. More accurately, Robert McElvaine relates the situation to someone becoming ill after catching a chill; the “cold reduces the body’s resistance to microorganisms already present in it, when then are able to cause the illness.”2 The Crash merely helped to weaken the economic body of the nation and expose it fully to the problems that already existed. In reality, causes include not only the stock market crash, but also international economic instability created by World War I, U.S. assumption of the role of the world’s creditor nation afterward, decline in unionism, and overproduction of crops and goods. The first president to face this tough economic situation, Herbert Hoover felt helpless to halt the decline, profoundly investing in the virtues of self-reliance and individual initiative. He and his administration believed that “hard work, honesty, and independence had brought this country to the forefront of nations,” and anything that might have weakened that tradition’s integrity would have weakened fundamental national ideals.3 Government charity would have robbed Americans of that individual initiative—the very embodiment of error. The Hoover administration believed that the federal “government should stay out of the personal lives of its citizens, even if they were in trouble.”4 Though this hard theory might seem unreasonable, it had been part of the accepted wisdom, and to abandon this belief, even in the face of the present situation, was unthinkable for Hoover. Advocating self-reliance among his people, Hoover largely placed the burden of charities such as Red Cross on state drought committees and insisted that local communities depended on volunteers and money from local regions.

While Hoover and his administration continued to flail amidst the turmoil the Depression, communist societies gained momentum. Because the Communist Party offered a world without class divisions and of shared property, membership grew as many people were attracted by the calls for rebellion against capitalism. Additionally, the Trade Union Unity League, devoted to promoting worldwide communism, organized and helped lead Mexican-American migrant farm workers in agricultural strikes in the Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys in California. Also, the Communist-dominated National Miners Union helped to “lead strikes that were met with extraordinary violence in the Appalachian coal region, earning the county the name of ‘Bloody Harlan.”5 Meanwhile, Walter Waters led the Bonus Expeditionary Force on a historic march to Washington. Veterans from World War I banded together and traversed to Washington to demand bonus payment in person, and the movement grew to over twenty-five thousand petitioners. However, the result was bitter, as the bonus marchers were dispersed with tear gas and physical attacks from troops. With this event playing out unfavorably, Hoover’s hopes for reelection were dashed, already weakened by his administration’s failure to remedy the ongoing crisis. As the election of 1932 drew nearer, Roosevelt at first seemed an unlikely candidate to lead thepeople out of the pit of depression. Nevertheless, he would prove to be the most active and progressive president the nation had ever seen.

After Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, he brought to Washington men and women who shared his determination, a group known collectively as the New Dealers. They consisted of “intellectuals, politicians, reformers, [and] educators” who acted as advisors to Roosevelt and carried out his programs.6 With a willing Congress, Roosevelt and the New Dealers set in motion numerous administrative actions and initiated influential legislation in a dizzying span of weeks that would come to be called the Hundred Days. Such legislation included the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which paid $500 million to states as outright grants and “matching grants—one dollar of federal money for every three dollars of local money allocated for relief” and the Civilian Conservation Corps, which took able, young men out of the urban tangle of hopelessness where so many resided, introducing them to the intricacies and healing joy of the great outdoors.7 Although the work-relief programs of the Hundred Days were only temporary expedients, they were absolutely necessary for the short-term survival of millions of people. After the Hundred Days, New Dealers continued to churn out relief programs, including the Public Works Administration (PWA), which spent over $2 billion to help various federal agencies transform much of the physical character of the West. Fifty million dollars of PWA money also went to help finance the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which established hydropower sites on the banks of the Tennessee River. By the beginning of World War II, the TVA would be “furnishing more than two billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to eighty-three municipally owned utility companies in Tennessee and the surrounding states.”8 Some three million farmers also participated in the programs of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which included the killing of piglets and calves in order to stabilize prices and control overproduction.

With the Democratic triumph in the 1934 elections, Roosevelt’s administration launched a surge of effective, long-lasting reforms that came to be known as the Second New Deal. Roosevelt’s highest legislative priority was a new work-relief program called the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed “more than 8.5 million people in three thousand counties across the land on 1.4 million individual projects” and “affected more individual lives more directly than any other” New Deal invention.9 The Second New Deal also included the Social Security Act, which provided an “old-age pension system, workman’s compensation, national health insurance, and unemployment insurance.”10 Furthermore, after Roosevelt won the 1936 presidential election, he attempted to restructure the United States Supreme Court with his court-packing plan. For nearly two years, Roosevelt quietly grudged the Supreme Court, “whose conservative majority, coupled with the honest fear of centralization, was industriously disemboweling his most ambitious programs.”11 Over the next several years, deaths and retirements among the older justices enabled Roosevelt to liberalize the Court. Additionally, with the economy enjoying a steady recovery by autumn of 1937, Roosevelt decreased funding for emergency employment projects, believing the Great Depression to be almost over. However, the sudden loss of income from federal jobs contributed to another economic crisis known as the Roosevelt recession. The stock market sagging, Roosevelt quickly “asked Congress to authorize $3.75 billion in new spending.”12 Sure enough, by the summer the stock improved, and a recovery seemed underway once again by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Hitler was rising to power in Germany, and tens of thousands of Jews in Germany and Austria were being imprisoned in concentration camps. The overwhelming “majority of Americans were dead against the idea of the United States becoming entangled in any more foreign wars,” but after France fell to Germany in June, 1940, Great Britain stood as the only remaining major power opposing Hitler’s ambitions.13 Soon, there was “less and less discussion in Congress about reform measures” and “much more consideration of how much to appropriate for the national defense.”14 Although Roosevelt truly did not want war, as time went on his actions demonstrated a growing conviction that the nation was probably not going to be able to avoid it. By the middle of 1941, the prewar economy had enhanced the financial landscape as nothing had in nearly two decades. Employment was up by more than two million jobs and thousands of new jobs were being created every day. The bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by the Japanese was a symbolic punctuation mark that ended the era of the Great Depression and sent America headlong into World War II.

In his book, T. H. Watkins maintains in his thesis that the cause of the Great Depression was not the stock market crash of 1929, but rather a combination of economic factors, such as the loans America gave to the allied nations after World War I, that marred the American economy over time. The stock market crash merely represented the final blow in the a long history of abuses, and it opened the door for the “microorganisms already present in it” to cause the illness.15 It did not directly effect the sickness, but paved the way for the bacteria and germs to thrive in the weakened immune system of the American economy by depressing consumer buying and causing thousands of banks to fail.

The point of view that Watkins holds includes a rather warm view of Franklin Roosevelt and hostile view of Herbert Hoover because the latter neglected to try actively to save the American people as the former did. He criticizes the Hoover administration for the lack of aid offered when the Great Depression hit, and he condemns Hoover for placing the burden of relief effort onto state and local committees. Conversely, Watkins hails Roosevelt as an activist and progressive president who changed “the very nature of the presidency itself,” establishing an intimate connection with the American people, a connection that millions of Americans still yearn for today after no comparable figure has risen up to lead the nation since his time in office.16
The Progressive school of historiography heavily influences Watkins because he covers the decade of the 1930s up to the start of World War II. His themes reflect the issues and concerns of that time, largely focusing on political and economic forces that caused and resulted from the Great Depression. He also spends time commenting on social factors, including conflicts between big business and labor unions such as the violent “hunger march on the Ford Motor Company” by the Trade Union Unity League.17 Watkins influences historiography by imposing a rather prejudiced view of the Hoover and Roosevelt presidencies, painting Hoover in a disdainful light and Roosevelt in a reverent one.
Eiichi Akimoto of Chiba University in Japan reviews Watkins’s book, praising his photographic storytelling, as one-third of the book contains pictures and documents conveying the 1930s social atmosphere. However, she criticizes his depiction of the peaceful revolution within the Roosevelt government due to his rather random organization of uprisings against the government. She comments that he “[fails] to see the inevitable connection between the economic orientations of the insurgencies and the resulting New Deal policies.”18 She does note, though, that Watkins correctly evaluates the legacy of the New Deal’s efforts. In contrast, Lois Scharf of Case Western Reserve University slams Watkins as lacking “neither judgments nor perspective.”19 Criticizing Watkins for being too critical of some ineffective phases of the New Deal, she mentions how he devotes more attention to the PWA and WPA than to social security legislation, though he makes clear that America’s social welfare programs were greater achievements than public works accomplishments.

Watkins’s triumphs in his Great Depression: America in the 1930s range from the multitude of vivid, emotional pictures the book provides to the detail and passion that Watkins imbues into seemingly tepid topics, such as the “Trade Union Unity League [leading] agricultural strikes” in California during the Great Depression.20 He presents countless facts and statistics as evidence and reflects on the many labor unions that existed during the period. However, the weaknesses of his book include a tendency to jump randomly from a social issue to a political or economic matter, which causes confusion at times. Also, he often neglects to provide insightful commentary; rather, he objectively states the facts. Overall, though, Watkins is agreeable and legitimate because he provides factual evidence.
According to Watkins, the era of the Great Depression marked a huge watershed in American political, economic, and cultural history. Everything changed after such devastation. He notes that “the Depression” ended up being “a way of life for [some],” that the corporate world was tied down by restrictions and regulations for years in the aftermath, and that the Great Depression would “witness the blossoming of the regulatory state.”21 It changed previously-held practices, ideas, and values in that it revealed a negative view of individualism because, to millions, it seemed that individualism appeared to have brought disaster upon the nation by “encouraging self-centered industrialists and wildcatters of speculation.”22 The nature of the presidency and the bond between government and people also developed on a more intimate and personal level. The impact that the era has had on America today ranges far and wide, including current social security legislation, an increase in the amount of power executive branch holds, and the role of the federal government when it comes to national emergencies. Also, certain New Deal work-relief products such as bridges, roads, and sanitation plants are still in use today.

With the Roosevelt administration taking active measures to ensure the survival of the people, the amount of legislative activity that brewed in Washington was unprecedented. Relying on government aid and work programs, the people felt closer to their government than ever before. It assumed and altered the ideals, thoughts, and customs of America before-depression because federal government essentially created the welfare state—that is, a state in which the government becomes responsible for the economic and social well-being of its citizens. The American people, therefore, had come to view the government in a warmer regard as it protects and provides for them. The impact that the era of the Great Depression has had on America today is far-reaching. New Deal acts such as the landmark Social Security Act, with “its permanent dent in the paychecks of every American, [have made] it certain that the government [continue] to play a role in the lives of millions for generations to come.”23 The creation of the welfare state has also become inextricably bound with the everyday life of ordinary Americans.

Chronologically exploring the events that caused and resulted from the Great Depression, Watkins provides an informative glimpse at the economic crash that transformed the outline of American life and government in his Great Depression: America in the 1930s. From unprecedented federal programs such as Social Security and the Civilian Conservation Corps to the bombing at Pearl Harbor, which effectively represented “the final dying of the Great Depression,” Watkins’s narrative describes in explicit detail the events and measures that took place during the decade of the 1930s.24

Endnotes

Student Bio

Jonathan Yeh was born in Irvine, California on January 9, 1993. He is currently a junior at Irvine High School. In the future he would like to travel to Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Australia.