Our titles for the Great Depression and New Deal period include a comprehensive political, economic and social survey in “Depression and New Deal in Virginia”, which we follow with “Talk About Trouble” presenting the lives of Virginias across a variety of types and conditions during this time. “This Business of Relief” studies Richmond Virginia’s private and public efforts to address the needs of the poorest.
A wider focus of the time is taken by “Supreme Court Reborn” that describes how the Court changes from activism resisting New Deal reforms to activism promoting civil rights. “Crabgrass Frontier” describes the growth of suburbia, expecially impacted by the growth of the automobile and government policies such as the New Deal FHA. “Breaking the Land” studies the impact of mechanization on tobacco culture and changes following the 1920-21 agricultural depression that preceded the stock market crash.
For more book reviews at TheVirginiaHistorian.com in this historical era addressing other topics, see the webpage for Gilded Age, New South, Civil Rights, New Dominion (1889-present). General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
These titles are all used in bibliographies found in surveys of Virginia history of scholarly merit that are currently used in Virginia university history departments. Additional insights are used from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.
Depression and New Deal in Virginia
Ronald L. Heinemann wrote Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion in 1983. It is available at Barnes and Noble and online new and used. Heinemann’s book is a political, economic and social history of Virginia in the 1930s. While Virginia gave Franklin Roosevelt landslide victories, it re-elected the New Deal’s greatest critics in Harry Byrd and Carter Glass. The liberal anti-organization Lieutenant Governor James H. Price was elected Governor in 1937, but unable to build an opposing machine, he lost cooperation of the legislature before his term ended.
In 1929, Virginia ranked 19th in total income and 39th in per capita income. Most Virginians were used to hard times. Fiscal conservatism was elevated to a civil religion, pay as you go and don’t go very far. While Virginia was ranked fifth in CCC work, WPA funds were at the bottom because so few were on relief roles; only Delaware and Vermont had smaller percentages. There was substantial Virginian resistance to Social Security, only passing unemployment insurance in 1936 and old age pensions in 1938, the last state to do so.
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Talk About Trouble
Nancy J. Martin-Perdue and Charles L. Perdue, Jr. wrote Talk About Trouble: A New Deal Portrait of Virginians in the Great Depression in 1996. It is now available from the University of North Carolina Press and online new and used. This narrative is divided into nine sections related to categories such as age, gender, race and occupation, supported by illustrating photographs. Virginians in the 1930s emerge as conservative and traditional, complaining about a spoiled younger generation and lamenting lost traditions and mores.
The personal narratives range from displaced coal miner to CCC employee grateful for a job, from destitute farmer and well paid cigarette packer to wealthy cat lady. Men described their lives as a series of jobs held and lost, women as stories of births, deaths and marriage. Virginia was evolving from a traditional rural society to an urban industrial one. Virginians changed many aspects of life, retraining in their work from farms to mills, moving from town to town, hiring on job to job, renting places or living with relatives.
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This Business of Relief
Elna C. Green wrote This Business of Relief: Confronting Poverty in a Southern City, 1740-1940 [Richmond], in 2003. It is now available from the University of Georgia Press and online new and used. This study of social welfare history focuses on Richmond, Virginia and its efforts over two centuries to care for the indigent with a combination of private and public resources. Both city and state resisted welfare innovations if they were tainted as Yankee. But southerner social workers were welcome, recalibrated to a more restricted sphere, and Richmond developed the first southern school of social welfare to meet urban needs.
This book integrates the experience of Richmond as a southern city both into the broad welfare history of the United States and in the context of southern regionalism.
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The Supreme Court Reborn
William E. Leuchtenburg wrote The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt in 1995. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. The pivotal event in modern U.S. political history was the development of the liberal state in the 1930s that also saw a substantial change of direction in the Supreme Court beginning in 1937. The Court withdrew from a judicial activism upholding laissez-faire economics and instead allowed federal regulatory activity. At the same time it initiated an activist role in the realm of civil liberties.
Leuchtenburg describes the early 1930s conservative constitutional culture of the Supreme Court, its denials of early New Deal policy, and Franklin Roosevelt’s court packing plan. He then investigates how the Court reverses itself, eventually codifying a kind of liberal constitutionalism including prioritizing human right above property rights by incorporating the Bill of Rights in decisions against abusive state practices.
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Crabgrass Frontier
Kenneth T. Jackson wrote Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States in 1985. It is now available on Kindle and new in paperback online. From the early 1800s to the 1980s, changing modes of transportation transform the city and create the suburbs. They change from the place of the poor within walking distance to the inner city, expanding to regions where the more wealthy could afford the transit fares of horse cars, trolleys and electric trains.
Jackson discusses the nineteenth century promoters of the suburban ideal and twentieth century developers. He analyzes the politics of municipal planning and annexation, along with changing construction methods and land prices. He points out federal government encouragement through policies of the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration of the New Deal, and later the GI Bill home loans and Internal Revenue Service tax breaks.
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Breaking the Land
Pete Daniel wrote Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 in 1985. It is now available from the University of Illinois Press and available online new and used. Daniel describes the southern agricultural revolution in cotton, rice and tobacco from the 1880s into the 20th century, especially accelerating after the 1920-21 agricultural depression preceding the stock market crash. The labor intensive one mule, one plow system was mechanized. New national merchandizing channels developed, banking practices changed, and the staple crop markets permanently weakened.
New Deal programs attempted to preserve the traditional while both seeking to control production and promote yield per acre. Daniel also investigates the social lives of farmers, their work habits, folk culture, as well as blatant racism and landlord selfishness.
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*Brooks Johnson and Peter Stewart compiled Mountaineers to Main Streets: The Old Dominion as Seen through the Farm Security Administration Photographs in 1985. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “book” at Amazon.com http://amzn.to/2BN9vx9 for your bookshelf.