AP US History Great Depression & New Deal DBQ

It’s one of the great mysteries of the city where women go and when they are out of work and
hungry. There are not many women in the bread line. There are no flop houses wor women as
there are for me, where a bed can be had for a quarter or less. You don’t see women lying on the floor of the mission in the free flops. They obviously don’t sleep… under newspapers in the park. There is no law I suppose against their being in these places but the fact is they rarely are.

Yet there must be as many women out of jobs in cities and suffering extreme poverty as there are men. What happens to them?

It seems very apparent to me that the Administration at Washington is accelerating it’s [sic] pace toward socialism and communism. Nearly every public statement from Washington is against stimulation of business which would in the end create employment. 

Everyone is sympathetic to the cause of creating more jobs and better wages for labor; but, a program continually promoting labor troubles, higher wages, shorter hours, and less profits for business, would seem to me to be leading us fast to a condition where the Government must more and more expand it’s [sic] relief activities, and will lead in the end to disaster to all classes.

The New Deal, being both a philosophy and a mode of action, began to find expression in diverse forms which were often contradictory. Some assisted and some retarded the recovery of industrial activity… An enormous outpouring of federal money for human relief and immense sums for public-works projects started to flow to all points of the compass… Six billion dollars was added to the national debt… a bureaucracy in Washington grew by leaps and bounds… and finally, to lend the picture of the heightened academic touch, John Maynard Keynes, of Cambridge, England… commenced the plan of buying Utopia for cash.

The question of chief importance relates to the provision of the codes to the hours and wages of those employed… It is plain that these requirements are imposed in order to govern the details of defendants’ management of their local business. The persons employed… are not employed in interstate commerce. Their wages have no direct relation to interstate commerce…

The authority of the federal government may not be pushed to such an extreme.

It is the refusal of employers to grant such reasonable conditions and to deal with their employees through collective bargaining that leads to widespread labor unrest. The strikes which have broken out… especially in the automobile industry, are due to such “employee trouble.”

Huge corporations, such as United States Steel and General Motors… have no right to transgress the law which gives to the workers the right of self-organization and collective bargaining.

To declare that the Roosevelt administration has tried to include the Negro in nearly every phase of its program for the people of the nation is not to ignore the instances where government policies have harmed the race…

At Boulder Dam, for example, the administration continued the shameful policy begun by Hoover of forbidding Negroes to live in Boulder City, the government-built town. And in its own pet project, the TVA, the administration forbade Negroes to live in Norris, another government-built town at Norris Dam.

[The] most important contribution of the Roosevelt administration to the age-old color line problem in America has been its doctrine that Negroes are a part of the country and must be considered in any program for the country as a whole. The inevitable discrimination notwithstanding, this thought has been driven home in thousands of communities by a thousand specific acts. For the first time in their lives, government has taken on meaning and substance for the Negro masses.