History of the United States II / Unit 11 USH2 1560 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Whom the New Deal Left Out
The idea
Whom the New Deal left out is the second question, and the anchor answers it directly rather than leaving it to critics. Social Security excluded domestic and farm workers, leaving many women and African Americans outside its benefits. New Deal programmes showed overt discrimination in hiring, and critics renamed the recovery administration the Negro Run Around. Digital History adds the separate pay scales, the segregated conservation camps, the housing agency's refusal to back mortgages for Black buyers in white neighbourhoods, and the more than one hundred thousand Black farmers forced off the land. Roosevelt, needing southern Democrats, declined to back an anti-lynching bill.
In practice
The same programmes seen from inside: three hundred fifty thousand African Americans a year on WPA payrolls, Mary McLeod Bethune directing Negro affairs in the youth administration, and John Collier returning land to the tribes.
Where people slip
Two misreadings sit on either side. The first says the New Deal was for white Americans only; the anchor's employment figures, and the shift of about seventy-five percent of Black voters to the Democrats in nineteen thirty-six, contradict it. The second says the New Deal lifted everyone alike; the exclusions the anchor itself records contradict that. Women's experience was divided too: Frances Perkins sat in the cabinet and Molly Dewson ran the party's women's division, while the Yawp says women failed to receive the full benefits of the programmes. The Indian Reorganization Act reversed the Dawes Act, and Digital History calls the Indian New Deal the only bright spot in the treatment of minorities. The course's position holds both halves together: the New Deal gave Americans, in Digital History's words, economic security they had never known before, and it drew the edges of that security around occupations and regions in ways that left many Black Americans and women outside.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States II