This link takes you to recommendations about writing.  I take this aspect of your work in the course very seriously

Questions for take-home exams will be distributed on the dates indicated in the syllabus. I'll also post them on the course website. Students are expected to choose one question on which to write and to produce a well-crafted essay that responds to the question thoughtfully.
 

1. In grading these papers, I give great weight to the first paragraph. It must contain your most significant conclusions about the subject under discussion. It is likely that you will re-write the first paragraph after finishing the main body of the essay because it is often the case that a writer gains a full sense of her or his argument only after working through the issues.
 

2. Papers must be typed and double-spaced. Staple the pages.
 

3. Answers must not exceed 1500 words (the equivalent of 6 typed, double-spaced sheets).
 

4. In developing your response to the question you choose to write on, in addition to reference to relevant class-required readings, select and make serious use of a significant scholarly book relevant to your subject. How to find "a significant scholarly book relevant to [the]. . . subject:

• Carefully examine the bibliographical and footnote material in class-required readings for possible outside sources.

• With a list in hand, go to the library and examine some of these.

• While there, shelf-read for other relevant titles. Check out a couple of the most promising.

5. Respond to the question in your own words, drawing on class presentations, required readings, and the selected additional source (see no. 4 above). Don't overquote.

6. Refer specifically to the readings, both class-required and outside, upon which you draw, whether you quote them or merely refer to them. Always make the identity of the author clear. ("As Woodly Darrow argues. . ."; or, "Contrary to the view of Frieda Burpp. . .").

7. Be precise in references to people, organizations, legislative acts, court decisions, and so forth. Make sure the essay contains frequent references to chronology and that it develops in a clear chronological fashion.

8. See the section Zieger's Writing Rules in the term project assignment handout for more detailed advice about writing and mechanics.

9. Questions, suggestions, advice, encouragement? I'm your guy.
 
 

First paragraph. 15 pts.

Cogency of overall approach. 25 pts.

Factual accuracy and chronological development. 15 pts.

Use of required readings. 10 pts.

Quality of and engagement with student-selected sources. 15 pts.

Quality of writing (organization, clarity, observance of writing rules). 20 pts.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This is a running record of class sessions.  Posted here will be outlines, questions, quizzes, and reflections on the class sessions.  On occasion I will post a forthcoming quiz.

Note:  The chronology at the beginning of America's Great War  is a useful resource.

August 27, 29.  Class was/will be based on student questions revolving around the theme of neutrality vs. non-intervention and on some propositions relating to chapters 1 and 2 of America's Great War:
 
 

1. The US played no role in the outbreak of war but soon became central to its conduct.

2.  Both Germany and Great Britain violated US conceptions of neutral rights.

        But it is only to be expected that the US would have tilted toward Britain and France.

3.  The author downplays the role of economic factors in the shaping of US policy, 1914-17.

4.  Advocates of preparedness were as concerned about the character of American society as they were with defense against hostile forces

5.  Woodrow Wilson had a providential sense of America's role in the world.

6.  Wilson was sincere in his efforts to bring the war to a halt without US military participation.

7.  By late 1916, it appeared that Wilson had been successful in combining avoidance of war with untrammeled US economic opportunity.
.
8.  For the next class session (Sept. 3), we will have read Wilson's speech asking for a declaration of war.  Would it be interesting to compare and contrast his presentation of April 2, 1917, with the explanations given by the current administration for the war in Iraq?

Woodrow Wilson’s speech, April 2, 1917, asking for a declaration of war against Germany.

It is, Wilson says, “a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars. . . “ So why is he doing it?  How does Wilson attempt to relate the fairly narrow and even arcane issues of neutral shipping rights to broader purposes that would justify so terrifying a step as waging war?

Wilson says that “we have no quarrel with the German people.”  Do you believe him?

Wilson says that “We have no selfish ends to serve.  We desire no conquest, no dominion.  We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.”  What DO we seek?

What reference does Wilson make to those alongside whom we will be fighting?  Britain, Italy, France, Russia?
 

*****
September 3, 2003

First, who was Du Bois?

 b. 1868; d. 1963

 His academic work.  Rivalry with B. T. Washington.  Role in NAACP.  Attitude toward World War I.  Work in Pan-African movements.  Du Bois and Communism.  Final years.

In America’s Great War, I use Du Bois as something of a foil with respect to Wilson.  Note, e.g., pages 54-55.

Looking at “The African Roots of the War,” you might want to consider these questions:

1.  How, then, does the recent (post-1870) tide of imperialism differ from the earlier version?

2.  Du Bois holds that the recent “scramble for Africa” is directly related to the expansion of democracy in the West.  How so?

3.  What are the internal implications of what he might call the “democratization of imperialism”?  That is, what sort of relationship does he posit between the once-despised and powerless white working class of the imperialist countries, on the one hand, and exploited people of color, both colonial and domestic?

--In other words, Du Bois seems to be saying that the rise of democracy and the improvement of the living standards of the Euro-American working class are directly connected to the evils of the new imperialism.  Which, in turn, is the root cause of the Great War.

5.  Despite his harsh criticism of the West and his belief in American complicity, Du Bois supported the U.S. war effort in 1917-18.  He does not, of course, touch on this matter in the current essay (published, you will recall, in 1915), but can you speculate as to how someone with Du Bois’s views might have favored U.S. belligerency?

6.  American Negroes, Du Bois suggests, have a critical role to play if humankind is to avert the endless warfare that surely will characterize the post-war world.  Hence a great irony: the most despised Americans can be the West’s salvation.  They alone can make real Wilson’s goal of making the world safe for democracy.

7.  Thus, in the end, for all his criticism, Du Bois is a Wilsonian, n’c’est pas?

Wilson’s speech asking for a declaration of war; America’s Great War, chapter 3

1.  In his speech asking Congress to declare war on Germany, Woodrow Wilson: a) absolved the Germans of all guilt; b) endorsed Allied war aims; c) stressed the economic gains that would stem from US belligerency; d) welcomed the revolution in Russia.

2.  In building an army virtually from scratch, the US: a) relied primarily on voluntary enlistments; b) barred the recruitment of African Americans, owing to the fears of southern whites that arming blacks would disturb the existing racial order in the South; c) resorted quickly to conscription; d) relied primarily on existing National Guard units.

3.  Opposition to the government’s efforts to raise and army met with: a) indifference; b) near-universal resistance; c) general acceptance; d) armed opposition.

4.  Which of the following statements about economic mobilization during World War I is the most accurate: a) the federal government nationalized all basic industries; b) the Wilson administration followed a laissez faire policy with respect to economic regulation; c) with the exception of the railroad, telephone, and telegraph systems, the federal government relied on voluntary methods of directing economic activity; d) the federal government took over the agricultural sector but left manufacturing free of control or regulation.

5.  The Committee on Public Information: a) proved a disastrous failure in its efforts to mobilize public opinion in behalf of the war: b) failed in its efforts to recruit prominent intellectuals and academics, as these (mostly) men refused to compromise their academic integrity; c) ignored African Americans and other minorities in its efforts to generate enlistments, war bond sales, and enthusiasm for the war; d) pioneered in the use of techniques of mass persuasion.

1.  What’s the connection between Wilson’s war aims and Pershing’s insistence on
creation of a separate US military presence in France?

2.  Why did the inability of US industry to produce many significant weapons compromisePershing’s goal?

3.  How did the ruling military doctrine of the US differ from that of the Allies?

4.  How close did Germany come to victory in the spring-summer of 1918?

5.  Why did Pershing—but not his British or French counterparts—urge the invasion
of the Germany homeland in the fall of 1918?

6.  What was the most important contribution of US forces
to the victory over Germany?

September 10, 2003

Showed film excerpts from The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century.  Told class to check website, Sessions link, for a quiz to be handed in on Friday.

America’s Great War, chapter 5.  Quiz.  To be handed in in person, Sept. 12
 

1.  Which of the following statements about the character of labor relations in the US in the 1910s is the most accurate: a) it was one of the most strike-free and harmonious eras in US industrial history; b) before the war, labor strife was extensive, but the patriotic fervor of the war reduced “strike fever” to the vanishing point; c) although labor activism was widespread, the US had no substantial socialist or other anti-capitalist movements of any consequence; d) labor activism, widespread before our entry into the war, actually intensified during the period of US belligerency.

2.  With respect to labor policy, the Wilson administration: a) was the first in which the government developed a form of positive partnership with organized labor; b) resorted primarily to repression to stifle wartime labor unrest; c) tolerated a newly potent labor movement but kept it out of the councils of government; d) prosecuted key labor leaders such as AFL head Samuel Gompers, suspecting them of pro-German sympathies.

3.  During World War I African Americans: a) were used primarily as combat troops, leading to charges that they were being sacrificed so as to save the lives of white soldiers; b) won important new constitutional guarantees requiring equal treatment by government authorities; c) overwhelmingly opposed our entry into the war; d) found new opportunities–and old prejudices–as they moved northward to claim industrial jobs.

4.  Which of the following statements best characterizes the treatment of African American workers by federal labor relations bodies created during World War I: a) though such agencies as the National War Labor Board and the US Railroad Administration occasionally upheld the rights of black workers, the federal government proved not to be a sustained champion of equal rights in the workplace; b) federal authorities collaborated successfully with southern law enforcement officials to stop the migration of southern blacks northward into war industries; d) the egalitarian efforts of the Wilson administration were in vain, as Republican congressional majorities refused to pass civil rights legislation; d) the decision of African American leaders such as W.  E.  B.  Du Bois to opposed US entry into the war caused the Wilson administration to adopt highly repressive policies with respect to African Americans.

5.  As a result of World War I, American women: a) made permanent inroads into such “male” jobs as machinist, railroad worker, street car conductor, and longshoreman (or, I guess, longshoreperson); b) won the constitutional right to vote; c) were relegated even more narrowly to domestic-type jobs; d) withdrew in large numbers from the paid labor force.

K. Walter Hickel, “War, Region, and Social Welfare:  Federal Aid to Servicemen’s Dependents in the South, 1917-1921,” Journal of American History 87:4 (March 2001):  1362-91

By providing allowances and allotments, “the state [now] insinuated itself into family relationships not only as surrogate husband to soldiers’ wives, but as their persistent and beguiling suitor. . . .”

“During World War I many women for the first time established a direct relationship with the national state, bypassing husbands. . . .”

Yet allotments and allowances “rested on a  traditional conception of male citizenship that stressed the virtue, active political participation, and economic self-sufficiency of white men and the dependency of women.”

“The system of allotments and allowances during World War I gave black women an opportunity to improve their economic and employment condition with the help of the federal government. . . .”

Interestingly, southern black women—but not southern white women—had had earlier experience with federal largess derived from their husbands’ or fathers’ military service.  How so?

In the South especially, “allotments and allowances gave . . . Women a new source of economic independence, thereby changing their relationships not only with  their husbands but also with their employers. . . .”

Indeed, “by summer 1918, allotments and allowances were reshaping  the political economy of labor in cotton production and domestic service.”

Both black and white working-class women, though hampered by lack of education and experience with bureaucratic procedures, were aggressive and persistent in their determination to claim benefits and protest denial or delay.

Allowances and allotments empowered women and treated African Americans with a greater degree of dignity and equality than was the case in any other realm of public life.  For some reason—I wonder why—comparable civilian programs were not continued after the war.

Reading: Zieger, AGW, chapter 6; Wilson, Fourteen Points speech.

A reminder to look carefully at the chronology at the beginning of the book and to keep in mind the sequence of these momentous and fast-paced events.

1.  What was the “Wilsonian Vision”?  Is there something unique about it, or is it just a name for the personal stamp that our 26th president imposed on garden variety American themes?

2.  In particular, what relationship did WW make between the US economic system and the role he saw us playing in the world arena?

3.  What does (and did) the word “Armistice” mean in 1918.  WW had championed a “peace without victory”?  Was the 1918 Armistice one?  Why didn’t we do what General Pershing wanted us to do, namely march on to Berlin?

4.  Do you have a clear picture of the diverse national agendas of the victorious powers as they gathered at Versailles?  Who was not there?

5.  What were the key provisions of the treaty to be imposed on Germany and to what extent did they accommodate, or violate, Wilsonian goals as outlined in the Fourteen Points?

1.  Which of the countries was not represented at the Versailles Peace Conference:  a) China;  b)Japan; c) Russia; d) Belgium.

2. German protestations over the alleged harshness of the terms of the Treaty rang hollow in good part because: a) of the terms victorious Germany had exacted earlier in negotiations with Bolshevik Russia; b) in 1871, the Germans had imposed a draconian peace on their French adversaries; c) the German occupation of Belgium, Luxembourg, and northern France had been extremely repressive and exploitative;  d) key German industrial and military leaders had plans for vast territorial and economic acquisitions had the Germans won the war.

3.  This provision of the Versailles Treaty was the most important to Woodrow Wilson: a) the League of Nations Covenant; b) freedom of the seas;  c) arms limitations;  d) reparations.

4.  One of the most controversial features of the Versailles Treaty was: a) its ringing declaration in favor of racial equality; b) the “war guilt” clause; c) its condemnation of Belgian atrocities in the Congo; d) its endorsement of Irish independence.

5.  Which of the following statements best describes the relationship between the Wilson-led US and the Lloyd George-led British in the Versailles Treaty
negotiations in the spring and early summer of 1919:  a) the US followed the British lead in virtually all important controversial issues; b) Wilson and Lloyd George established a warm personal relationship that overrode their common hostility toward the cynical French; c) although the US and the UK shared many common interests and goals, cultural differences, commercial rivalry, and diplomatic differences between them  were deep; d) they clashed over the fate of Germany, with the British aligning themselves with their French allies in seeking total destruction of German economic and military power.

I.  The Bolshevik Revolution and US-Allied intervention in Northern Russia and Siberia

 A.  The October Revolution as the rebirth of hope

 B.  Wilson vs. Lenin

 C.  The legacy of the military intervention

 A.  Objective reasons for concern over radical activism?

 B.  New and frightening powers of government

1.  Military surveillance

2.   FBI etc.

 C.  The dangers of voluntarism, vigilanteism

 D.  Legacy of the Red Scare

 A.  Reconverstion: Progressive hopes betrayed

 B.  Racial conflict

 C.  Labor conflict

  1.  Seattle

  2.  Steel
 

1.  In his Pueblo speech (which, by the way, the website misdates–September 25, 1919 is correct), Wilson: a) agrees to sharp modification of article 10; b) repudiates the granting of six votes in the General Assembly to Britain and the countries of the British Empire; c) claims that much of the opposition to the Treaty and the League is the work of disloyal “hyphenated” Americans; d) claims that he is reversing the policies of previous Republican administrations with respect to China and Japan.

2.  According to the author of AGW, progressives and other erstwhile supporters of Wilson were alienated from him during the debate over the Treaty in part because of: a) his strong support for organized labor during the steel strike; b) his support for women’s suffrage; c) the repression and violations of labor rights that characterized his post-war administration; d) his support for Irish independence.

3.  Article 10: a) could be read as committing the US to go to war without Congressional approval; b) called for abrogation of the Monroe Doctrine; c) repudiated the concept of “collective security”; d) was a “meaningless and inconsequential frivolity,” according to Wilson.

4.  The term “irreconcilable” refers to: a) those adamantly opposed to the peace treaty; b) those who opposed US belligerency; c) those who rejected the Lodge reservations; d) those who stood by Wilson to the bitter end. rigid as the debate evolved.

5. The author of AGW  lays ultimate blame for failure to ratify the treaty on : a) Lodge, because of his personal antagonism toward Wilson; b) the British and French, who adamantly opposed the “reservations” that might have won the necessary Senatorial majority; c) the “yellow press,” which swayed public opinion against the League and the Treaty; d) Wilson, who grew increasingly uncompromising and rigid.

Goldberg, Discontented America, chapter 3.  September 24, 2003

1.  From Goldberg’s discussion, what sense do you have of the constituencies of the two main political parties?  On what sources of voters did LaFollette’s supporters draw in 1924?

2.  How does Goldberg account for the GOP’s overwhelming victories in 1920 and 1924?  How do you account for them?

3.  Is the content and trajectory of “Progressivism” clear to you during this period (c. 1900-24)?

4. What policies and programs are associated with the Republican Party of the 1920s?

5.  How do you account for declining voter participation during the first quarter of the century?

6.  What important political figures died in the 1920s and why does Goldberg see their passing from the scene as emblematic of the country’s political drift in that decade?

1920s--Facts and Figures

1.  In 1920, there are 9 million private autos, one for every 12 people; in 1929, 26.5 million, 1 for every 4.6 people.

2. In 1920, fmers have about 139,000 trucks and 246,000 tractors; in 1930, 900,000 trucks, 920,000 tractors.

3.  Value of radios, radio equipment produced:  1921=$12.9 million; 1929=$388 million.  In 1920, virtually no private ownership of radios; by 1925, 25% of households had one; by 1930, 40%.

4.  In 1920, 38% of households electrified; 1930, 68%.

5.  In the Twenties, horsepower per worker increases by 50% in manufacturing; 60% in mining; 75% in transport.

6.  Output per worker increases by 72%, 1919-1929.

7.  Gainful employment:

 no. employed in mining drops by 80,000
 no. employed in agriculture drops 1 million
 no. employed in manufacturing grows by 100,000
 no. employed in construction grows by 800,000
 no. employed in trade, finance, education, govt. grows by 3.8 million
 no. of females gainfully employed grows by 27.4%

 Immigration from abroad (not inc. W. Hemisphere):

  1910-1914:  1.034 million per year
  1925-29:    304,000

 Between 1915 and 1928, 1.2 million African Americans leave the South for the North and West.

10.  In 1929, 21% of all families make less than $1000 per year; 42 less than $1500; 71% less than $2500.  21.5 million families have no savings; 24,000 families have 34% of all savings.

11.  Strikes

Year               No.                       No of Workers                           % of employed wage earners on strike

11.  Union membership:  1920=5,034,000; 1929=3,625,000

12.  Unemployment:  Ranges between 5.2% and 7.7%, 1925-29.

13.  Education:  1890-1924 number of college students increases 352% (cf. 79% general population increase); between 1900 and 1930, increase is 500% (cf. 69% population growth).  Graduate students:  1900=5832; 1930=47,255.  Between 1900 and 1930, an eightfold increase in high school enrollment.  Number of teachers and professors grows 1920-1930 by 41.5% (cf. population growth of 16%).

14.  Life expectancy.  For white females, at birth:  1910=52.54; 1930=62.67.

Reading: Goldberg, Discontented America, chapter 4

1.  Organized labor entered the postwar era with high hopes.

2.  Wartime experience had intensified employers’ determination to resist unionization.

3.  The federal government continued to play an important role in labor relations

4.  On the whole, industrial workers in the 1920s:

 A.  Were enormously productive

 B.  Were eager to participate as consumers and citizens in the prosperity that the New Era economy made possible

 C.  Experienced a combination of intensified work norms and a reduction in working hours

 D.  Experienced modest increases in wage rates

 D.  Were still haunted by fears of unemployment
 

6.  But, according to Goldberg, there were interesting and potentially important evidences of institutional innovation and grass-roots activism.

7.  Women’s distinctive experiences in the New Era labor force are worthy of closer examination.

1.  The most distinctive aspect of Hall’s research was her reliance on:  a) oral history; b) personal experience in the strike; c) the records of the US Commission on Industrial Relations; d) magazines and newspapers.

2.  Among the workers who toiled  in the rayon plant were:  a) experienced workers brought down from the North because of their industrial skills; b) displaced coal miners; c) African Americans initially imported as strike breakers; d) local women.

3.  The strike that broke out in March, 1929:  a) was fomented by outsiders affiliated with the American Federation of Labor; b) was initiated by the rayon workers themselves, without outside impetus; c) was an immediate failure because only a small handful of workers actually walked out; d) was supported by male workers and opposed by women workers.

4.  Which of the following statements best characterizes the social and cultural perspectives of the rayon strikers:  a) the striking women were naive and innocent provincials, with little knowledge of the modern world of the 1920s; b) the striking women were surprisingly sophisticated and articulate, despite the misconceptions to the contrary harbored by outside organizers and mediators; c) the strikers were folks who had taken industrial employment only as a distasteful and desperate last resort; d) the strikers were highly skilled men who resented management’s abusive treatment.

5.  Which of the following statements best characterizes the public behavior of the rayon strikers, according to Hall:  a) they were inventive and even playful in their interaction with the National Guardsmen sent in to “keep order”; b) though the women began the strike, they willingly retreated to the sidelines once actual picketing began; c) anxious to maintain their reputation in the small town, they quickly and decisively turned against women of questionable morals such as Texas Bill and Trixie Perry; d) they employed typically “female” tactics such as flirtation, submissiveness, and temper tantrums.

6.  With which of these statements would Jacquelyn Hall agree: a)  the "modern world" of films, Fords, and flappers had little resonance in quaint, archaic Elizabethton; b) the bitter defeat of the 1929 strike stunted the lives of the women who conducted it; c) cultural stereotypes prevented "outsiders" such as union organizers, government officials, and subsequent historians from framing an accurate picture of the strikers' lives and values; d) the notion that women might have been the keys to bringing labor organization into the non-union South was an unrealistic fantasy.

1920--3 March:  Final Senate rejection of Versailles Treaty

1921--2 July:  Congress declares war with Germany over

   --12 November:  Washington Armaments Conference opens

1922--6 February:  Washington Armaments Conference closes

1923--11 January:  French troops occupy Ruhr; German passive resistance

1924--9 April:  Dawes plan re reparations, war debts

1926--January:  US Marines sent to Nicaragua (withdrawn 1933)

1928--27 August:  Kellogg-Briand Pact signed

1928--28 December:  Reuben Clark Memorandum

1929--Spring-Summer: Young Plan re war debts, reparations

October 1, 2003.  Reading:  Melvyn P. Leffler, “Expansionist Impulses and Domestic Constraints, 1921-1932"  (1984)

1.  “That they failed to achieve their task [sic] was not because they were naive but because they grew complacent in the late 1920s.”

         --Who were “they”?
         --What was their “task”?
         --What, in this context, does “complacent” mean?

2.  Tell us about the “Open Door” policy as Leffler uses the term.  Why does he associate it with Woodrow Wilson (and not with John Hay)?

     Leffler says:  “the defeat of the League of Nations did not terminate American efforts to create a stable, liberal capitalist order.” (233)

3.  Why did the US continue to refuse to recognize the Soviet Union despite the potentially lucrative business opportunities and abundant raw materials in Russia?

4.   “Throughout the 1920s, Japan and Britain were pinpointed as prospective enemies.”

5.  “Republican officials sought to depoliticize foreign policy issues” in the 1920s.

6.  Will the real Melvin Leffler please stand up:

 Leffler 1: “After World War I, economic considerations assumed a position of primacy in the shaping of American foreign policy.  Economic factors played a decisive role. . . .”  (p.  225)  “

  Leffler 2:  “During the 1920s foreign economic interests did not become proportionately more important [than had earlier been the case] to the functioning of the American economy. . . . their relationship to domestic economic developments. . . was not critical.”  (p.  258)
 
 

 Intellectual and Cultural Currents of the 1920s

 A.  Enhanced economic performance, modern consumerism, and new forms of mass entertainment coexisted with profound intellectual and artistic angst.

 B.  In the 1920s, the US became for the first time a multi-cultural society–and had the scars to prove it.
 

III.  The 1920s–and especially the American 1920s–was a unique and distinctive decade
 

 A.  The problem of production had been solved; the consumer was now king (and queen)

 B.  The legacy of the Great War.  (Although here perhaps America was more sophisticated than Europe.  In view of the carnage of the American Civil War, which claimed over 600,000 lives, often in appalling circumstances, Americans perhaps were more familiar than Europeans, who had enjoyed a century of peace, with themes of mass death. Quote Hemingway here:
 

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage. . . were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

     --A Farewell to Arms

Remarks literary historian Paul Fussell, “In the summer of 1914 no one would have understood what on earth he was talking about.”

Cf.  the paridigmatic Continental texts of the 1920s, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West; T.  S.  Eliot’s The Waste Land. Read Eliot here:
 

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

. . . .
This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man’s hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star

. . .

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kimgdom

The hope only

Of empty men

. . .

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but with a whimper
 
 

 C.  The rawness and immediacy of the clash between old values and cultural patterns and newer values and patterns (e.g., race; sexual mores).  Just  some quick vignettes: 100,000 Klansmen parade down Pennsylvania Avenue; the Scopes Trial; the “New Negro.”

III.  Artistic, cultural, and intellectual life in America was both vibrant and transgressive.  The energy and vigor of US literary and artistic life, from novelists such as Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and Lewis, to artists such as Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, to the explosion of jazz and blues, to the Harlem Renaissance, to the motion pictures, whatever its overt message, asserted American strength and potency.  Moreover, public support for education and cultural production mushroomed.  For example, between 1900 and 1930, the proportion of young people enrolled in institutions of higher education tripled, from 4% to 12.42%.  Enrollment of graduate students increased eightfold in this same period.  Budgets of colleges and universities expanded rapidly, while the number of research institutes, scientific laboratories, scholarly and cultural journals, and fellowships proliferated, as did funding for them.

At the same time, scholars, painters, poets, novelists, social scientists broke free from the traditions of honor and propriety associated with Victorian culture.  Victorian values of stability, order, hierarchy, and propriety dominated the leading magazines, publishing houses, and universities.  Views that challenged patriarchical, Anglo-Saxon, Christian capitalism were not welcome.  Here’s the president of the University of Michigan writing a fellow university president in 1885 about what he was looking for in the appointment of a new faculty member in the Department of History: “In the Chair of History. . . I should not wish a pessimist or an agnostic or a man disposed to obrtude criticism of Christian views . . . or of Christian principles.  I should not want a man who would not make his historical judgments and interpretations from a Christian standpoint. . . .”  Said Daniel Coit Gilman of Hopkins, the universities should be “steady promoters of Knowledge, Virtue, and Faith.”  (Coben, 37)

 The attack on these system-defending intellectual positions had preceded World War I.  Here we can point to the influence of Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Sorel, the cult of the primitive, and so forth, all stirring before the war.  But it is in the 1920s that the ideas flourish.  Increasingly, intellectuals, especially in the social sciences, humanities, and artistic-cultural spheres function as critics and adversaries of their society and its values rather than as upholders.  Charles A.  Beard in History; Robert and Helen Lynd in sociology; Franz Boas and Margaret Mead in anthropology.

Sometimes, the clash between the established order and the new critical, scientific world view was direct and overt, as witnessed by the clash between Clarence Darrow and the biological establishment on the one hand, and William Jennings Bryan, on the other in the Scopes trial of 1924.

 At times the emerging artistic-literary critique of American racial, ethnic, and moral hierarchies became open and public, as in the protracted Sacco-Vanzetti affair.
 

READ MILLAY HERE; SHOW PICTURE

 In general, in academic and intellectual life you have the emergence for the first time as the ordinary stance of writers and scholars a certain adversarial relationship to official culture and values.  Increasingly, it was seen as the job of the writer or scholar to seek truth regardless of its consonance with established, official, standard values and perspectives.  Whether in historical writing, biblical scholarship, sociology, anthropology, literature, or art, the new intellectual environment cultivated a dissident, critical stance.  You might almost say that the modern tradition of intellectual criticism was established in the 1920s, reversing the relationship between intellectual and cultural elites, on the one hand, and “the people” on the other than had previously prevailed.  It used to be that dissent percolated from below and was checked, suppressed, or dismissed by the intellectual and cultural elites.  Increasingly, though, popular culture and consumerism created a mass culture that blunted the dissenting edge of previous outcasts, leaving the job of dissent, criticism, and alienation to university-housed intellectual elites, thus isolating them from the general citizenry.

 The celebration of African-ness and Negro culture, as especially exhibited in the Harlem Renaissance, brings a lot of this together.  Black culture, born in resistance, steeled in tribulation, was deeply authentic.  As exhibited in distinctly American art forms such as the blues and jazz, it exhibited a rawness and power that challenged the genteel tradition.  White musicians and artists and writers began to see in Negro culture the only truly authentic American culture.  The assertion of black power by such figures as Marcus Garvey and the flowering of new black voices such as those of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, [read Hughes] along with the spectacular development of recorded black music and the emergence of such black artists as Horace Pippin  and Palmer Hayden [show pics], brought both a powerful and dynamic vigor to American life and a deeply unsettling set of challenges to traditional seats of culture and learning.

 So the 20s was a kind of cultural hinge–cultural pluralism vs.  the Immigration Act of 1924; surging KKK membership vs. the flowering of black culture and activism; unprecedented resources devoted to education and cultural access vs. the full-fledged emergence of a dissident, transgressive idiom of intellectual and cultural expression.  In a way, it seems to me that the 1920s is closer to our own time than are, for different reasons, the hard-scrabble depression years of the 1930s or the heroic and patriotic years of World War II.
 
 

I.  African American cultural flowering; the New Negro; Harlem Renaissance.

II.  Demographic and economic developments
 

 A.  Migration resumes

 B.  Jobs, votes, unions

 C.  Developments in the South
 

  1.  Yes, mild development of racial amelioration as reflected in Committee on Interracial Cooperation; decline in lynchings

  2.  But intensification of segregation, as, e.g., reflected in Virginia’s 1924 racial purity legislation

  3.  The effects of the boll wievel and related changes in southern agriculture.  As farming becomes more expensive (fertilizers, machinery), black farmers, who had reached an all-time peak c. 1910, can’t compete and are driven off the land
 

 Du Bois and Washington follow up
 Father Divine
 Marcus Garvey
 NAACP--changing character; cf. Reich; cf. Korstad and Lichtenstein
 A. Philip Randolph and the Sleeping Car Porters

David Levering Lewis on white philanthropy channeling money to cultural and legal, as opposed to economic, challenge; black elites, alarmed by the class implications of Garveyite-type black activism, support and encourage this “cultural turn.”

October 8, 2003.  David Golberg, Discontented America, chapter 6
 
 

Racist thought was widespread in the 1920s.

But multi-cultural values also made headway in the “tribal twenties.”

The KKK of the 20s shared little other than its name with the Reconstruction Era Klan.

The Klan “took some positions that could be considered progressive.”  Hmmmm.

Who joined the Klan?

As of 1924, "Southerners formed only 16 percent of its total membership.  Over 40 percent . . . lived in the three midwestern states of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.  The Klan enrolled more members in Connecticut than in Mississippi, more in Oregon than in Louisiana, and more in New Jersey than in Alabama.  Klan membership in Indianapolis [alone] was almost twice that in South Carolina and Mississippi combined."  --Stanley Coben, Rebellion against Victorianism, 136

        In view of the contemporaneous rise of fascist and paramilitary groups in, e.g., Germany, Italy, and France, Goldberg's comments on page 137      are worth noting:  "". . . its rank and file consisted of ordinary, naive, fearful, gullible citizens.  These were not the American equivalents of Blackshirts or Brownshirts; these were not Fascists or even proto-Fascists anxious to spill blood in the streets."

Interestingly, the Klan shared many of the same views on morality and the need for
social discipline as the Roman Catholic Church’s hierarchy.

Klansmen in northern urban areas often had their rights of free speech and assembly
violated by hostile citizens and public authorities.  Poor Klan.

Finally, how significant was the Klan as an indication of social pathology in the
1920s?

Goldberg, Discontented America, chapter 7

1.  The racial assumptions behind the 1924 law and the quota plans developed by governmental officials were polite versions of the racist thinking that spurred the KKK and were promulgated by race theorists such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.

2.  It is important to bear in mind that the racist assumptions that underlay the immigration acts of the 1920s were quite respectable and widespread among scholars, politicians, intellectuals, and clergymen.

3.  The actual quotas provided in the 1924 law were only temporary.  The law charged federal authorities with the task of conducting a special census or survey to determine the demographic make-up of the US, which would serve as the basis for permanent quotas.

4.  Before the 1920s, efforts at restricting immigration had been only marginally effective.  How come?

4.  What can be said about Big Business’s view of immigration and restrictive legislation?

5.  Who was not covered by the restrictive legislation?

6.  Some historians–most recently Gary Gerstle in his book American Crucible–consider the 1924 immigration act as among the half-dozen most important Congressional acts of the 20th century.  How so?  What might some of the others be?

7.  How do you think the authors of the 1924 law and its implementation scheme would view the recent demographic experience of the USA?

Hoover’s speech: What does it say about issues that a national political figure might today highlight:

      Rival systems of belief or socio-political development

       The importance of a strong military presence in a dangerous world

       Europe

        Law and order
 

Hoover’s speech hails the economic growth and prosperity of the US, implicitly claiming that credit for this happy state of affairs belongs in part to the wise and judicious policies of the Coolidge administration, in which he, Hoover, played a major part.

Goldberg suggests that the overwhelming dimensions of Hoover’s victory in the 1928 election is misleading, that social and electoral changes were percolating beneath the surface of American politics.

My father, a naturalized American citizen born in Germany, voted for Al Smith in 1928 despite his distaste for Catholicism and his apprehensions over Papal influence in American life.  I wish I had queried him more closely about the relationship between his religious and political views.

1.  Note the statistics placed on the website re the scope of the crash and depression

2.  Why the Crash?  Both easy and hard to answer.  Easy: a downturn was to be expected; markets are volatile; there had been brief breaks in the market through the summer of 1929.  Hard: Why such a massive sell-off October 23-24?  Why the irreversible downward spiral?  Why didn’t this market “work” the way markets are supposed to–i.e., drive out the speculators, arrive at sensible share prices, and attract capital back in?

3.  Why did the Crash turn into a Depression?  Galbraith specifies five factors:
 

 Maldistribution of income (low wages, low farm prices and income)
 Bad banking structure (no FDIC, regulation)
 Bad corporate structure
 Problems of international trade and finance (Smoot-Hawley Tariff)
 Poor state of economic intelligence

 It occurred at a time when the old international financial institutions, which Britain had overseen for 200 years, were weakened and in disarray owing to the effects of World War I; and before newer arrangements that depended on US world financial leadership were in place.

  It occurred at a time when older industrial sectors (heavy steel, textiles, mining, railroads), which employed millions, were in relative decline, and at which newer, growth and employment producing industries (e.g., light metals; petrochemicals; modern food processing; plastics) were not yet sufficiently large to take up the slack.

  Note here the uneven course of the depression.  There were significant upticks in the economy, as well as “depressions-within-the-depression,” notably the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937-39.  Refer to the chart shown in class.

5.  Why did it last so long?
 

  1.  Conservatives say–Meddling by government, which interfered with the normal workings of the market and created uncertainty and political conflict.  The pain of those disadvantaged, while regrettable, is a necessary component of capitalism’s creative destruction.

  2.  Radicals–Capitalism prone to excess and collapse.  An irrational system always teetering on the verge of chaos.  Survives through exploitation and greed.  The chickens had finally come home to roost.  It’ll take a big war this time to save capitalism’s chestnuts.

  3.  New Deal liberals–The system combines 19th century ideas and complex modern realities.  It needs direction in the form of governmental direction and regulation.  The community needs to mobilize its resources to restore prosperity and to assist those put in need through no fault of their own.  Capitalism is too important to be left entirely to the capitalists.

*****
A Few Numbers

1. Shares traded on the NY Stock Exchange

1923-236 million

1926-451 million

1927-577 million

1929-1.1 billion

2. Market value of shares traded on the NYSE

 
1925-$27 billion

1929 (Ocotober)-$87 billion

1933-$18 billion
 

Average closing value, September, 1929=$366.29 a share

Average closing value, December, 1932=$96.63 a share
 

    NY Times average of representative stocks: September, 1929=452; July 1932=52
 

3. Bank failures

1929-659; $250 million

1930-1352; $853 million

1931-2294; $1.7 billion

1932-1456; $750 million

4. Industrial production, last quarter, 1930, is 26% below peak level of summer, 1929

5. Unemployment

April, 1930-3 million

October, 1930-4 million

October, 1931-7 million

October, 1932-11 million

Marc, 1933-14 million

6. Wages and farm income

Industrial wages drop 42%, 1929-33

Gross farm income (already poor during 1920s) drops by 56%, 1929-33
 

7. Other income indicators, 1929-33

National income drops from $87.8 billion to $40.2 billion

Per capita income drops form %681 to $459

*****

Midterm:

AMH 4231 Mid-term exam.

Directions:  Answer all 5 of the multiple choice questions below.  Each correct answer is worth 5 points.  Then choose one of the multiple choice questions on which to write an essay.  In the essay, defend as vigorously and precisely as possible the answer you choose.  In addition, refute, again as vigorously and precisely as space permits, each of the three wrong answers.   The essay is worth 75 points–50 for the defense of the correct answer and 25 for the refutations, collectively. Be sure to observe the rules for preparing take-home exams and the general rules for writing.  Both can be found on the website syllabus.  In particular, please note the importance of making use of the required readings and of selecting an outside source relevant to your essay in preparing your paper.

1.  Which of the following statements about the lives of American women in the post-World War I period is the most valid: a) having achieved the right to vote, they retreated to pre-Progressive Era patterns of domesticity and submissiveness; b) their entry into the electoral arena created a yawning “gender gap” in regard to voting behavior; c) they developed distinctive modes of dissent and activism that both embraced and protested against the cultural and economic changes associated with the 1920s; d) armed with the right to vote, they moved aggressively to expand women’s rights and to defy repressive male patriarchy.

2.  Which of the following statements about American diplomacy during the period 1914-1932 is the most accurate:  a) the US followed an isolationist course; b) there is much evidence of continuity in basic goals and values over this period; c) we shifted from a pro-British to a pro-German course, and then back again; d) economic factors played little part in shaping or conducting US diplomacy.

3.  Which of the following statements about the American economy in the 1920s is the most accurate: a) the vaunted “prosperity” of the decade is a myth, since most indices of production, wealth, and efficiency declined; b) aggressive wage demands on the part of powerful trade unions helped to fuel the decade’s rampant inflation; c) while newer industries such as food processing, electrical goods manufacturing, and consumer appliances performed disappointingly, old stalwarts such as textiles, steel, and coal mining prospered; d) for the first time in history, problems of consumption replaced those of production as the leading economic dilemma.

4. Which of the following statements best characterizes American society in the World War I-1920s era:  a) the period is notable for the high degree of racial and ethnic tolerance displayed by the American public, despite the strains of war and economic change; b) this was a period of rapid and sustained advance for organized labor; c) both in the heated atmosphere of war and in the prosperous days of peace, the American people displayed an enormous capacity for division, conflict, and intolerance; d) to a remarkable extent, technological advances such as the radio, the automobile, and the motion pictures had the effect of reducing social tensions and bringing about a kinder, gentler America.

5.  Which of the following statements about race relations during the period ca. 1914-1932 is the most valid:  a) while victimization of African Americans continued to be widespread, there was much evidence of political militancy and cultural vigor among African Americans; b) the need for black labor and military manpower during World War I fundamentally changed the policies of the federal government with respect to race; c) during the 1920s, African Americans switched political allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic party in gratitude for Wilson’s staunch support of their goals; d) the pre-World War I migration of African Americans into the North from the rural South came to an abrupt halt.

*****

October 20, 2003.  Reading:  Conkin, The New Deal, chapter 1.

1.  In his inaugural address, Franklin Roosevelt declared that: a) reports of depression and economic downturn were inaccurate and counter-productive; b) the main cause of the depression was a series of natural disasters; c) the only thing that Americans had to fear was fear itself; d) the “great and noble experiment” of prohibition was a failure.

2.  Which of the following sets of terms is most appropriately applied to young Franklin Roosevelt (according to Paul Conkin, anyway): a) pleasure-seeking and irresponsible; b) analytical and rigorous; c) hearty and engaging; d) pious and reverential.

3.  According to Conkin, FDR’s affliction with polio: a) turned out to be a political asset; b) deepened his hitherto rather superficial personality; c) led him to God; d) made him increasingly bitter and cynical.

4.  Of which of the following themes or topics do we learn least about in this essay: a) FDR’s legislative proposals; b) FDR’s marital and family life; c) FDR’s upbringing; d) FDR’s views on foreign policy.

5.  According to Conkin, Roosevelt’s greatest asset as a public figure his: a) optimism and ebullience; b) detailed technical knowledge; c) soaring eloquence; d) consistency.

*****

October 22, 2003

Conkin, The New Deal, chapter 2.

Conkin’s writing is somewhat elliptical, as he assumes a certain amount of knowledge on the part of the reader.  Not, really, an unreasonable expectation, in view of the fact that everyone here has either AP-ed out of US History or has taken AMH 2020, or its equivalent–right?

Who comes off better in the standoff between Hoover and FDR during the interregnum (November-March, 1932-33)?

Rexford Tugwell figures significantly in this chapter.  Who was he?  Why is he an important figure in the Roosevelt entourage?

For all of FDR’s vaunted flexibility and experimentalism, Conkin’s account of the early New Deal stresses Roosevelt’s economic orthodoxy.

On page 32, Conkin outlines possible steps that, had FDR taken them, might have “encouraged a spiral of recovery.”  But he didn’t take them, and there wasn’t a recovery, and Conkin–though a humane and generous-minded man–is glad that he didn’t and that there wasn’t.

Neither of the two mainstays of the early New Deal–the Agricultural Adjustment Act* or the National Industrial Recovery Act–worked very well.  Though both had important, albeit unintended, consequences.
 

_______________________________________________
*Conkin terms the AAA “one of the most important [congressional enactments] in American legislative history.”

****

Quiz for Friday, October 24, 2003 (and remember the groundrules for quizzes:  Must be present for entire class session to get credit.)

October 24, 2003.  Reading:  Lois Rita Helmbold, "Downward Occupational Mobility During the Great Depression:  Urban Black and White Working Women," Labor History 29: 2 (Spring 1988):  135-172
 

1.  During the depression, women were more severely affected by unemployment than were men since most of women’s employment was unessential to the working of the economy.

2.  The proportion of working women who were married grew during the 1930s.

3.  According to Helmbold, the severity of the depression had the curious effect of breaking down traditional walls of racial segmentation in the labor market.

4.  Black women were more likely than white women to express sympathy with fellow victims of depression-era conditions, at least according to Helmbold’s sources.

5.  Federal programs played a major role in rescuing lower income women from the ravages of the depression.

*****

October 27, 2003

Conkin, The New Deal, chapter 3

“Each complex New Deal program was usually a confused compromise. . . .”  (73)

The “wefare state” according to:

        the rigidly orthodox

        “certain avowed radicals”

        most of us
 

Re the allegedly traditional American reliance on opportunity, individual initiative, and private enterprise: “Everyone,” the faith held, “should have an opportunity to own and manage, or at leat to share in the owning and managing, of productive property.”  “Yet,” Conkin says, in the 1930s, “only the faith survived, not the sustaining environment.”  (55)

Indeed, depression or no depression, “By 1930, only a minority of Americans had any realistic opportunity to own and manage productive property.”  Indeed, “opportunity steadily decreased,” to be replaced by “an ersatz type of opportunity. . . and an ersatz type of property.”  (56)

Both the Left and the Right deplored the welfare state.

But the real battle over welfare provisions, then as now, focused on the questions

    “What can I get”?

           and

    “What will it cost me?”

Conkin calls the Social Security Act one of the five most important legislative enactments in American history.  It had three main titles:
 

        Old-age pensions financed via taxes on payrolls.

        Unemployment compensation–funded in part by the federal government but         designed and administered by the states.

“Categorical aid” programs for the aged, blind, disabled, and impoverished (aid to families with dependent children–welfare)

    Re taxes, two statements:

 
1.  “Tax policy was not to play an important role in New Deal economic policy, at least beyond the realm of rhetoric and psychological warfare.”

2. “The tax system became more regressive during the 1930s.”  (67)

Marriner Eccles, John Maynard Keynes, and the role of fiscal policy in a modern capitalist economy.

“By 1936,” writes Conkin, “the depression should have been over.”  (71) Yet, in fact, “By 1936, the New Deal was submerged in irony.”

He goes on to specify that irony on page 76:  “The enemies of the New Deal were wrong.  They should have been [its] friends.”

Conkin’s overall judgment is both reassuring and bleak:

In the last pages of this chapter, Conkin seems to be suggesting that we are all pretty much dependent on big, impersonal corporations, which have to be coddled and appeased lest they malperform and throw us into uncertainty and joblessness.  For all the sound and fury, for all the angry rhetoric, for all FDR’s moralistic castigation of moneychangers and evil men, we’re all ensconced in a system that is impervious to fundamental change, which we probably wouldn’t want anyway lest change jeopardize our generally comfortable and diverting lifestyles.

While Conkin sees the radical reformers (and, to a lesser extent, the unreconstructed free market free booters) as unrealistic, he appears to have a certain admiration for them.  Government-business collaboration a la Keynes, he says, could indeed promote economic growth and widespread, if unequally distributed, affluence.  “Keynes provided a technique for priming the economic pump but no means of purifying the water.”  The reformers “thirsted after the pure product.  Growth,” they believed, “could simply intoxicate the [people]. . ., blunt their sensitivity, and leave them in satiated lethargy, full but unfulfilled . . . . Growth could lead to vast production, to an enormous gross national product, but also to ugliness and spiritual poverty. . . [and] to a society bereft of meaningful work, of personal involvement, even of democratic participation. . . .”  (81-82)

***** October 29, 2003

Labor in the 1930s

Reading: Robert H. Zieger, “Rebirth of the Unions, 1933-1939,” manuscript from American Workers, American Unions:  The Twentieth Century (2002), linked from syllabus page.

 Importance of events of 1930s with reference to organized labor
 

1.  The New Deal “solved” the “labor problem” that had been a central feature of American life since at least the 1870s.

2.  The labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s facilitated the entry of the “new immigrant” generation, and to a lesser extent, African Americans, into the mainstream of American life.

3.  The rise of industrial unions and the New Deal policies that facilitated it gave the US labor movement unprecedented economic and political power, which lasted for almost half a century.

4.  The legitimation and spread of collective bargaining helped to promote the great consumer-driven economic growth of the post-World War II period.

5.  The collective bargaining regime that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s established benchmarks for social provision (e.g., pensions, medical insurance) and workplace relations for both union members and those who were not union members.

6.  The rise of organized labor amid a period of great domestic and international turbulence, perhaps paradoxically, helped to marginalize the role of anti-capitalist radicalism in American life.

STRUCTURAL FACTORS IN THE REBIRTH
OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT IN THE 1930S

1.  Homogenization of the industrial working class

2.  Worker militancy born of the unmet promises of the 1920s

3.  Widespread discrediting of corporate stewardship

4.  Favorable constellation of political and governmental forces

5.  Availability of seasoned radicals

*****

October 31, 2003.  Reading:  Lawrence Levine, “American Culture and the Great Depression”  (CP)

 I wonder about this essay, which was recommended to me by a colleague at another university, himself a distinguished student of American popular culture.  I mean, Levine seems to want it both ways:

Popular culture endorses and reinscribes traditional values and attitudes; popular culture conveys transgressive messages that undermine and subvert traditional values and attitudes.

You can detect change during the decade from patterns of acquiescence and self-blame to more edgy and angry attitudes--or can you?

Doesn't he just seem to be saying that, hey, popular attitudes and popular culture are important and thus far (i.e., 1985) historians have been derelict in neglecting them, concentrating instead on politics, policies, programs, and public affairs?  Fair enough, but what does he leave us with.
 

--"the purpose of this essay has been to scratch the surface."  Mission accomplished, I guess, but what do I do about that itch?

--popular culture and popular attitudes in the 1930s were part of "a complex world of conflicting urges."  Now that's going out on a limb

--the 1930s "is not an easy decade to sum up."  Hey, that was your project.
 

I found myself wondering what a Lawrence Levine might make of popular culture/public mentalite today, using the scattergun method he employers here.  Just for fun, think about a contemporary counterpart to the icons and representations that Levine sees as central to the culture of the 1930s:

1930s

Popular novel/film--Gone with the Wind

Advice guru--Dale Carnegie

Superhero--Superman

Movie genre--Gangster films

Comedy--Screwball comedies (or perhaps Marx Brothers?)

"Serious" novel/film--The Grapes of Wrath

Politician--Who else?
 
 
 

Conkin, The New Deal, chapter 4.

Though he titles this chapter “The Perils of Depression Politics,” Conkin doesn’t actually discuss electoral politics much at all.  He depicts FDR’s electoral triumphs as purely individual victories, yet the Democratic majorities elected in the 1930s controlled Congress with only short interruptions until 1994.  Something more than FDR’s charisma must have been at work.

Conkin calls the controversy over the Supreme Court in 1937 “probably the most important issue to arise in the Roosevelt Administration.”  How so?
 

 Note: At her recent confirmation hearing related to President Bush’s nomination of her to be on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Democratic Senators Schumer, Durbin, and Kennedy queried California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown closely on her remarks, both in a speech and in a judicial decision, that in 1937 the country had started down the slippery road to socialism.

“By 1940,” Conkin says, “. . . military preparations began to replace social welfare, and eventually far outstripped it, as the main type of government investment.”  (100)

Powerful conservative Democratic Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia had “voted for a Cleveland in 1932 but soon found to his dismay that he had helped elect a combination of Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and Eugene Debs.”  (102)

Conkin’s final judgment: “The thirties could have brought so much more, but also so much worse, than the New Deal.”

Ronald Tobey, Charles Wetherell, and Jay Brigham, "Moving Out and Settling in:  Residential Mobility, Home Owning, and the Public Enframing of Citizenship, 1921-1950," American Historical Review 95: 5 (Dec. 1990):  1395-1422

 1.  Which of the following statements best captures the relationship between New Deal housing policies and the overall patterns of New Deal programs and policies:  a) housing policy was an aberration, since it benefitted primarily upper income Americans; b) since New Deal housing policy fostered racial integration, it cut against the grain of other programs; c) New Deal housing policy promoted middle class values of social stability, thus placing it squarely in the mainstream of the New Deal agenda; d) since New Deal housing initiatives relied on the use of non-union labor to keep construction costs low, they contradicted the otherwise pro-labor pattern of the New Deal, as exhibited, for example, in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

2.  Which of the following statements best captures the relationship between New Deal housing policies on the one hand and post-World War II patterns of home-ownership: a) since the FDR frowned on single-family home ownership, the mass expansion of this phenomenon after World War II represents, in effect, a repudiation of New Deal housing policies; b) New Deal programs that insured private lenders (i.e., banks; savings-and-loans) prefigured and encouraged the central tendencies of the postwar home ownership boom; c) since private purchase of single-family residences saddled millions of lower income Americans with debt, FDR’s policies ironically disadvantaged his most loyal constituents; d) as the utility company records that they authors examined reveal, the postwar housing boom was based on postwar defense spending and thus had little or no connection to the limited housing initiatives of the 1930s.

3.)  Roosevelt’s housing policies:  a) stressed massive construction of public housing; b) used direct federal funding, thus bypassing the “greedy and selfish bankers”; c) provided federal guarantees for private lenders; d) are a rare example of the persistence of laissez faire during the New Deal.

4)  Lengthening the repayment period for the typical mortgage:  a) raised monthly payments while lowering equity standards; b) lowered monthly payments while stretching out the buyer’s acquisition of equity in the house; c) made home buying available only to the well-to-do; d) penalized bankers by tying up funds that might have been used for more profitable investments.

5) Which of the following statements best characterizes FDR’s social views with reference to home ownership:  a) residential mobility was a good thing because it encouraged enterprise and innovation; b) home ownership was appropriate for farmers but a liability for urban dwellers; c) bolstering home ownership was crucial if America was to recapture the spirit of community and civic responsibility; d) in contrast to Hoover, FDR paid little attention to housing policy, relying instead on price fixing and government regulation to bring about economic recovery.

I. Consequences of the US rejection of the Versailles Peace Treaty.

    A. Was the US "isolationist" in the 1920s?

1. Economic involvement with Europe

2. The Wilson-Hoover "new world order"

3. Political disengagement
 

1. Revulsion against participation in WWI

2. Strength of non-intervention sentiment

3. Neutrality legislation

A. Italy

B. Germany

C. Japan

    A. The Czechoslovakian Crisis of 1938

    B. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, Aug., 1939

    C. World War II begins, Sept. 1, 1939

    D. Course of the war, 1939-41

        1. Nazi victory; Battle of Britain, 1940--impact on US

        2. German attack on USSR, June 22, 1941

    E. "Undeclared" US war with Germany, 1940-41

        1. Destroyers for bases deal, Sept. 3, 1940

        2. Lend-Lease, March 11

        3. US-German naval conflict, fall, 1941

IV. The road to war in Asia

    A. Japanese activity in Manchuria, 1931-

    B. Japanese-Chinese war, July 1937-

    C. US relations with Japan

    D. Japan moves south, 1940-

    E. The decision for war; Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941

V. Germany declares war against the US, Dec. 11, 1941
 

March 19, 1921: Final Senate rejection of Versailles Treaty

Feb., 1922: Washington Conference Treaties (re Pacific, naval affairs)

April 4, 1924: Dawes Plan (restructuring German finances)

Oct. 1929: US stock market crash

Sept. 18, 1931: Japanese launch Manchuria adventure

Jan. 30, 1933: Hitler becomes German Chancellor

April 12, 1934: US Senate Nye Committee begins hearings (criticizes US entry into WWI)

Jan. 15, 1935: Great Soviet purges begin

Sept. 15, 1935: Nurnberg Laws promulgated against Jews in Germany

Oct. 5, 1935: Italy invades Ethiopia

March 7, 1936: German troops occupy Rhineland

July 18, 1936: Spanish Civil War begins

July 7, 1936: Marco Polo Bridge incident; full-scale Japanese war against China

July 18, 1937: Congress passes most restrictive Neutrality Act

Dec. 1937: "Rape of Nanking"--Japanese ravage Chinese capital

March 13, 1938: Austria absorbed by Germany

Sept. 30, 1938: Munich settlement; Germans begin dismembering Czechoslovakia

Nov. 9-10, 1938: Kristallnacht--full-scale persecution of German Jews begins

Aug. 23, 1939: German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed

Sept. 1, 1939: Germany invades Poland (UK, France declare war, Sept. 3)

June 22, 1940: French capitulate to Germany

Sept. 3, 1940: Exchange of US destroyers for British air and naval bases

Sept. 27, 1940: Tri-partite Pact (Germany-Italy-Japan)

Aug.-October, 1940: Battle of Britain (RAF vs. Luftwaffe; London bombed)

Oct. 16, 1940: Congress passes first peacetime US conscription (by one vote)

March 11, 1941: Congress passes Lend-Lease (aid to Britain, later USSR)

June 22, 1941: Germany attacks USSR ("Operation Barbarossa")

June 24, 1941: Japanese occupy French Indo-China

June 26, 1941: US freezes all Japanese assets

Oct. 30, 1941: US destroyer Reuben James sunk by German u-boat; 100 lost

Dec. 7, 1941: Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor; attack Phillippines, British possessions

Dec. 11, 1941: Germany, Italy declare war on US

November 12, 2003

O'Neill, A Democracy at War, pp. 1-73

1. O'Neill's assessment of FDR's response to international crises of the late 1930s, early 1940s?

2. Democracy is a good thing but it poses some problems during times of crisis. Such as?

3. To what interests of the US, specifically, did Nazi Germany pose a threat, 1939-41?

4. Main reasons for US-Japanese antagonism, 1930s?  Does O'Neill see any justification for Japanese expansion?  Her military conduct?

5. When it comes to US policy vis-à-vis Japan, O'Neill seems to be an appeaser. Fair observation?

6. Why did the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor? What alternatives existed to the course Japan took 1940-41?

7. In what ways were Japanese moves, 1939-41, related to the war raging in Europe?

8. "The United States drifted toward war in the midst of a strategic vacuum."

9.  Check out what O'Neill says in the last paragraph on page 70.  He seems to be suggesting that the Western allies, perhaps subconsciously (?), invited Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia as a way of bailing out the USSR.

I. Bibliography
 

Down and dirty note on historiography: At last count, exactly 8,450,981 books had been published relating to WWII, 30% of them by Stephen Ambrose. The following listing consists of a few personal favorites, nothing more.
 

A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961) (controversial argument that however deplorable Hitler and the Nazis were, the foreign policy goals that he pursued in the 1930s were those that any German regime would have pursued); Bruce Russett, No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry in to World War II (1972; title says it all-provocative); Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (1994; most comprehensive and authoritative recent one-volume survey of, predominantly, military aspects); Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (2000; new, highly regarded entry); Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (1995; excellent overview of military matters by distinguished British scholar).
 

Probably everybody should read Winston Churchill's six volume history of the Second World War (title: The Second World War), with their evocative titles: The Gathering Storm; Their Finest Hour; The Hinge of Fate; The Grand Alliance; Triumph and Tragedy; Closing the Ring, although more nowadays as great public literature than as definitive historical scholarship.
 

Home front: Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941-1945 (1972; thoughtful overview by one of Zieger's favorite historians-cf. O'Neill); John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (1976; a lot of fascinating stuff); James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (1970; the title is somewhat, but only somewhat, ironic).
 
 

The Opposing Sides

A. The Axis. Tripartite Alliance of Sept. 1940.

B. Problems and exceptions: Spain; Iraq and Arabs; Union of South Africa; USSR; Italy. Separate peace with USSR? USSR neutral vis-a-vis Japan til 8\45.

C. The United Nations. Big Four. France? China? USSR?

D. US-UK "special" relationship.
 

Germany

Japan--Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; treatment of native peoples

USSR

UK (India?)

USA-To be (Wilsonian) or not to be (Wilsonian)?
 

A) Eastern Front

B) Mediterranean-Italy

C) Pacific

Central (Midway; islands)

SW (Australia; Guadalcanal; Philippines)

CBI

D) Western Europe

E) Strategic bombing

F) High seas (Battle of the Atlantic)

    A. Wartime conferences

        1. 1\43: Casablanca (US, UK; unconditional surrender)

        2. 12\43: Teheran. 2d front; coordination; UN

        3. 2\45: Yalta (symbol of postwar US-USSR confrontation)

        4. April-June, 1945: UN, SF

        5. 7\45: Potsdam (HST to JS: We have a new weapon)

    B. Perspectives on US diplomacy: Leffler (determination to protect strategic and economic interests); Williams (Pacific War is the War for the American
        Frontier); Kennan (lack of preparedness forces US to rely on Soviets)

Special topics of World War II

A. Casualties  (see below)

B. Treatment of civilians and prisoners (note Soviet treatment of its returning prisoners)

C. The ethics of "area" bombing

D. The Holocaust

E. Character of the fighting

F. The atomic bomb
 

USSR: 7 million battle deaths; 12 million civilian dead
 

US: 291,557 battle dead; 83,000 non-combatant military=374,557 total

about 700,000 wounded

UK: RAF loses 70,253, 47,268 of whom are in Bomber Command. British civilian dead 60,000; 30,000 in London

Stalingrad: Germans lose 300,000

D-Day: 130,000 men land. About 4,000 killed. As of 9-5-44, 2,086,000 Allied troops in France.

Battle of the Bulge is Dec. 16-26, 1944: 77,000 US casualties, 8,000 KIA, 48,000 wounded, 21,000 missing and captured.
     What does O'Neill have to say about the limitations of US manpower policies?

Pacific War (US):
    Iwo Jima, Feb. 19-March 17, 1945: 4189 killed; 15,398 wounded
    Okinawa, March 19-June 21, 1945: 11,260 dead; 33,769 wounded

        Total Pacific war: 41,322 dead; 170,600 all casualties

How many Germans, Japanese killed in aerial attacks?
    Japanese-Dower estimates 400,000

    Germany-About one million? Overy says 600,000.

    Occupied France?-20,000?

1. Wartime legislation revolutionized the country's tax structure and its methods of collecting taxes.

2. World War II resulted in the most significant leveling of income in recent American history.

3. In comparison with World War I, the US record in economic mobilization was remarkably strong.

4. Large corporations, on the defensive in the 1930s, thrived during World War II and dominated war production.

5. Business, generally, recouped the loss of public esteem it had suffered during the 1930s.

6. Women's employment gains once again did not outlive the war.

*****

1.  Despite the stagnation of basic wage rates, workers prospered during World War II, though not as much as farmers or large corporate interests.

2.  Organized labor vigorously supported the war effort and set record production totals.

3.  World War II consolidated and expanded the gains made by the labor movement in the 1930s.  O’Neill’s treatment of this theme is quite good, though lacking in detail.

4.  Organized labor’s reliance on governmental support, and thus on political action, grew during World War II.

5.  “Labor” was probably the country’s most bitterly contested and divisive public issue during and immediately after World War II.

1. The country took important steps toward racial justice.

2. Although in England the experience of war paved the way for major innovations in social programs, in the US World War II marked the end of the New Deal impulse.

3. Organized labor grew substantially but was subjected to a greater degree of control and regulation than ever before.

4. The US compiled a much better record in the protection of civil liberties during World War II than it had during World War I.

-Glaring exception: Incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans.

5. Women's gains in the labor force, while dramatic during the war, did not outlive the war.

1. No group was more dedicated to winning the war and boosting production than the Communists.

2. The "Conservative Coalition" made substantial gains during World War II.

3. World War II was marked by sharp conflict between President and Congress and by a reassertion of Congressional power.
 

Leff, "The Politics of Sacrifice"; Dalfiume, "The 'Forgotten Years' of the Negro Revolution"
 

1. Which of the following statements comparing (and/or contrasting) Mark Leff's treatment of civilian behavior during World War II with that found in the relevant sections of O'Neill, A Democracy at War is the most valid: a) both are cynical about the propensity of the American people to sacrifice during the war; b) O'Neill, but not Leff, condemns the government's resort to flag-waving propaganda as a means of mobilizing the citizenry; c) O'Neill blames government officials for failure to make appropriate use of the people's desire to contribute while Leff stresses public selfishness and pursuit of private goals; d) Leff, but not O'Neill, believes that women's efforts were critical to the war effort.
 

2. The main point of the two case studies that Leff presents is that: a) during World War II, the unique circumstances of the US war effort reinforced America's commitment to private initiative and weakened movements of egalitarian social reform; b) during World War II, the unique circumstances of the US war effort reinforced America's commitment to egalitarian reform and lessened the influence of private interests; c) the Roosevelt administration, as usual, pursued contradictory policies of wartime mobilization; d) the propaganda of the War Advertising Council defeated FDR's popular salary cap proposal.
 

3. Which of the following statements best reflects the difference between attitudes toward World War I and World War II as evinced by African Americans: a) many blacks felt duped by their ill-treatment in World War I; b) blacks supported World War II more enthusiastically because of the virulent nature of Nazi ideology; c) the black masses used the World War I crisis to press for militant demands but were strangely quiescent during World War II; d) since blacks were not permitted to serve in the armed forces during World War I, popular support for the war among the black masses was much more evident during the Second World War.
 

4. According to Dalfiume, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM): a) was a throwback to the old traditions of humble petition; b) gained little support among the black masses, though it was a public relations bonanza; c) prefigured many of the tactics of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; d) achieved most of its modest aims.
 

5. Which of the following statements about the attitudes of southern whites with reference to race relations during WWII is the most accurate: a) Dalfiume detects a massive shift to a pro-civil rights stance; b) southern whites regarded any agitation in behalf of civil rights as tantamount to disloyalty; c) southern whites were indifferent to black protest; d) southern Democrats championed civil rights while southern Republicans remained hostile.
 

Extra credit: Dalfiume's essay was published in: a) 1968; b) 2002; c) 1946; d) 1953.

A couple of points that Richard Dalfiume does not make in his article; nor does O’Neill allude to them:

1.  Note the Supreme Court case of Smith v. Allwright, 1944, in effect outlawing the white primary.  Note that in the 1940s, the number of registered black voters in the southern states doubled.

2.  The connection between labor activism and civil rights.  This takes place in three arenas:
 

1.  The very process of union organizing raises questions of equity, equality, and fairness.  Black workers vote without hindrance in NLRB elections–why not in general elections?

2.  Organizing in many cities is a community enterprise, involving the churches, neighborhood groups, and the like.  In particular, labor activists begin to control NAACP branches.

3.  Progressive unions, mostly in the CIO, were strong supporters of civil rights.  Even where, as in many AFL unions, locals were segregated, union activism provided a base for community leadership.
 

I. How would you describe the war aims of the various belligerents?

 
Germany

Japan

Soviet Union

Britain

US

-With reference to Germany

-With reference to Japan

• With respect to Germany
• •Division into three (later four) zones

• •Agreement over areas of responsibility in the final assaults on Germany-who takes Berlin?

 
• •Debates and dilemmas over reparations, Germany's future, destruction and transshipment of German industrial infrastructure; Morganthau Plan, e.g.

• Note complex dilemmas: Reparations might mean US financing; Brits want to keep German industrial competition down but German production needed so that feeding the population will not be a long-term allied problem; French want role, though not really a major player. Yet US supports owing to its desire not to become a permanent army of occupation.

• •De-nazification and establishment of benign domestic regimes (cf. Western allies and USSR)

 
• •Note that US troops will depart from Europe soon after the fighting

• With respect to Eastern Europe

• •Red Army in control

 
• •Churchill-Stalin agreement re percentages in SE Europe

 
• •Allied control in Italy, France, Low Countries
• With respect to the war in Asia

• •Note that hopes that China could be used to launch the final air and amphibious attacks on Japan were proving unrealistic

 
• •Note bloody fighting in Pacific, CBI

 
• •USSR aid deemed crucial by US, British, and China

 

• With respect to postwar international order

• •Establishment of the United Nations

 
• •FDR determined not to oversell

 
• •Need to secure Soviet support

Part 1. Answer all 10 multiple choice questions on the attached answer sheet. Be sure to put your name on the sheet. These answers are worth 3 points each, for a total of 30 points.

1. Which of the following statements about US social and cultural development during the period ca. 1920-1940 is the most accurate: a) sustained prosperity all but eliminated ethnic and racial discrimination; b) whether in prosperity or depression, socio-cultural tensions remained strong; c) electronic media, notably films and the radio, promoted gender equality; d) such measures as the Immigration Act of 1924 tended to increase the cultural and ethnic diversity of the US.

2. Which of the following statements about major party politics in the period ca. 1917-1945 is the most valid: a) despite Franklin Roosevelt's charismatic appeal, conservative forces remained potent throughout this period; b) increasing Democratic rural strength was offset by GOP gains among urban dwellers; c) Roosevelt's inability to translate his personal popularity into permanent gains for the Democratic party was largely due to the unwillingness of blacks and industrial workers to join the New Deal coalition; d) Republican control of Congress during World War II put an end to the New Deal .

3. With respect to the overall thrust and significance of the New Deal, which of the following statements is the most defendable: a) Roosevelt's doctrinaire notions of public policy locked the country into untenable economic policies that actually retarded recovery; b) the New Deal was notable for its legislative support for the rights and aspirations of women; c) as its housing policies indicated, the New Deal both reinforced and modernized traditional notions of citizenship; d) according to Paul Conkin, the New Deal fundamentally changed the country's basic distribution of power and wealth.

4. Which of the following statements about working-class Americans in the period ca. 1917-1945 is the most accurate: a) union membership shrunk steadily during this period; b) ironically, it was the Republican administrations of the 1920s that were responsible for the key labor legislation of this period; c) the federal government continued in its long-established stance of hostility toward the goals and ambitions of organized labor; d) wartime conditions proved advantageous to the economic interests of workers and the organizational ambitions of the labor movement.

5. Which of the following statements about US foreign policy between the wars is the most accurate: a) the vigorous international stance of the New Deal reversed the isolationist impulse that predominated in the 1920s; b) while the term "isolationism" may fairly be applied to the attitudes that members of Congress and the public in general harbored during the 1930s, it is misleading when applied to the 1920s; c) recent revelations show that under both Hoover and FDR the US secretly encouraged the rise of Hitler as a counterweight to expanding Soviet power; d) Wilsonianism was alive and well throughout the 1930s, as evidenced by the passage of several Neutrality Acts..

6. According to O'Neill: a) the appeasement policy pursued by Roosevelt and other US policymakers with respect to Germany reflected a wise understanding of the limits of American power; b) through the 1930s, the US should have been more accommodating toward Japan; c) US adherence to the Tri-Partite Pact in 1940 made war with Japan inevitable; d) military leaders such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur took all reasonable steps to guard against a Japanese attack but were undermined ("betrayed" is hardly too strong a word) by Roosevelt.

7. In comparing the roles of African Americans in the two world wars, which of the following statements is the most legitimate: a) during WWII, African Americans experienced a vastly expanded military role in comparison with WWI; b) during WWII, the federal government took more vigorous and positive steps to combat racial discrimination than was the case during WWI; c) in WWI, African Americans played a more important and extensive role in the nation's wartime economic mobilization than was the case 30 years later; d) in comparison with African Americans during the Second World War, African Americans during World War I possessed and exerted much greater political clout.

8. During World War II: a) the expansion of the tax base and the introduction of withholding taxes marked drastic changes in the relationship of ordinary citizens to the federal tax system; b) liberal Democrats continued to make gains in Congress at the expense of the so-called "conservative coalition"; c) strikes all but disappeared from American domestic life; d) federal legislation and long-ingrained social conventions kept women out of jobs in defense industry.

9. Which of the following statements comparing Wilson's and FDR's wartime diplomacy is the most accurate: a) though a member of Wilson's cabinet, FDR thoroughly repudiated the Wilsonian world view during WWII; b) Roosevelt often invoked Wilsonian ideals but was much less candid and much more ambiguous in his conduct of wartime diplomacy than his Democratic predecessor; c) both presidents insisted on a policy of unconditional surrender; d) FDR, unlike Wilson, faced a hostile Republican majority in Congress, making his war-making and peace-making tasks much harder.

10. Which of the following statements about diplomatic and military affairs during World War II is the most accurate: a) since official US policy gave the war in Asia the higher priority in the allocation of resources and manpower, the fact that victory came first in Europe is quite remarkable; b) diversion of critical air power to bomb the extermination camps significantly delayed the D-Day invasion; c) like his mentor Woodrow Wilson, FDR refused to engage in international power politics in the conduct of World War II ; d) US strategic and diplomatic goals different significantly from those of America's main World War II allies.

Part 2. Essay. Write an essay on number 3, number 7, or number 10. Follow the same rules that prevailed for the first exam, to wit: Defend in detail the answer you chose and explain briefly, but precisely, why you rejected each of the others. Refamiliarize yourself with and follow the take home exam instructions in the syllabus. This essay is worth 70 points.

Name:_______________
 
 
 

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_______2.
 
 
 

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________4.
 

________5.
 
 
 

_______6.
 
 
 

_______7.
 
 
 

_______8.
 

_______9.
 

_______10.