Public Relief and Private Employment in the Great Depression

1981 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Joseph Wallis ◽  
Daniel K. Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Federal Budget ◽  
Single Factor ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Private Employment

The unemployment relief programs introduced by the federal government in the 1930s were the largest single factor in the growth of the federal budget over the decade. We develop a model that enables us to estimate the effects of the relief programs on private employment. Cross-sectional data bearing on the operation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration rejects the hypothesis that the federal relief programs reduced private employment. Individuals did respond to the incentives of relief benefits, but only by moving between relief and non-relief unemployment.

Organizing Powers in Eventful Times

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth S. Clemens
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Network Ties ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Strategic Response ◽  
Scientific Explanations ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Sequential Comparison ◽  
Historical Periods

Historical and social scientific explanations often rely on major happenings and crises to define the topics of our inquiries or to delineate historical periods. But these models often prove limited and problematic. The challenge is to understand how action unfolds in a crisis and, in the process, reconfigures resources, opportunities, and horizons of possibility for new lines of strategic response. These questions are addressed through a comparison of Herbert Hoover and Harry Hopkins as they dealt with the onset of the Great Depression. Both men had the skills, network ties, and reputational resources that figure centrally in models of effective agency, but the contemporary assessments of their efforts differed dramatically. This pair of lives—Hoover and Hopkins—permits a cross-sectional comparison as both men wrestled with the onset of economic collapse and a sequential comparison as Hopkins inherited responsibility for relieving a crisis that had been shaped and reshaped by Hoover's actions.

Coerced Removal from the Great Depression through Operation Wetback

2020 ◽  
pp. 37-72
Author(s):  
Adam Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Institutional Legitimacy ◽  
Federal Bureaucracy ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Due Process Rights

This chapter analyzes how and why voluntary departure and anti-immigrant fear campaigns became the dominant mechanisms of expulsion during the middle decades of the twentieth century. It also reviews how and why immigration officials came to target Mexicans through a fine-grained analysis of the repatriations of the 1930s and Operation Wetback of the mid-1950s. It looks into the voluntary departures between 1927 and 1964 that outnumbered formal deportations nearly nine to one, representing more than 90 percent of the nearly 6.4 million expulsions the federal government recorded. The chapter discusses the coercive mechanisms that enabled authorities to unilaterally execute mass expulsions on an unprecedented scale and on a shoestring budget, bolstering institutional legitimacy within the growing federal bureaucracy. It also describes the effective denial of due process rights to citizens and noncitizens and infliction of trauma on individuals, families, and communities.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
John Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
The Great Depression

The introduction follows Lorena Hickok, a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Agency, as she circulated about the country during the Great Depression, reporting back to Washington, D.C. what she discovered about how Americans felt during the decade. They felt, to judge by her reports, despair, anger, and pity. The introduction argues, however, that the emotional life of the period exceeded these admittedly widespread responses, and it lays out what a fuller account of the emotional life of the Great Depression would look like. It also describes and defends the study of emotions against recent challenges—made most forcefully by Walter Benn Michaels—that feelings only distract from a properly structural understanding of capitalism. It discusses, too, the continuing presence of the Great Depression, why it matters, and what an emotional history offers to a renewed understanding of it.

scholarly journals Wie Deflationen entstehen - und was (nicht nur) die SPD von Brüning gelernt hat

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (134) ◽  
pp. 105-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Heine
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Wage Cuts

During the years 1930 - 1932 the Bruning government tried to fight against the results of the Great Depression with wage cuts and liscal restraint. In this they followed the advice of the neo-classical school of economics. This article shows that the economic policy of both the SPD-Green Federal Government and the SPD-PDS coalition in Berlin is based on the same logic, but - compared to Bruning - with even weaker arguments. As a result the danger of a deflationary spiral will increase.

Washington Needs the Vote

2018 ◽  
pp. 140-170
Author(s):  
Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Close Proximity

This chapter explores how, during the 1930s, black women waged an early civil rights movement in the nation’s capital. Inspired by the militancy of the Great Depression and influenced by on-going campaigns for safety and economic justice, activists protested racial segregation, lobbied for the passage of a civil rights bill, and pressed for the restoration of voting rights to all eligible residents of Washington, D.C., culminating in a referendum election in 1938. While African Americans waged similar types of movements around the country, activists in Washington, D.C. benefited from their close proximity to the federal government. As memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction surfaced in the 1930s, activists applied the lessons from these eras directly into their political campaigns as they worked to restore the freedoms that their ancestors had once enjoyed in Washington, D.C.

Prohibition: A Very Short Introduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. J. Rorabaugh
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Local State ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Governmental Regulation ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Eighteenth Amendment

Prohibition: A Very Short Introduction traces the origins of prohibition back to the evangelical-based voluntary abstinence temperance movement in the early 1800s. It makes clear that public support for prohibition collapsed due to gangster violence and the need for local, state, and federal government alcohol revenue during the Great Depression. Americans have always been a hard-drinking people, but from 1920 to 1933 the country went dry. After decades of pressure from rural Protestants, the states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution meaning alcohol could no longer be produced, imported, transported, or sold. How and why did prohibition come about? How did it work? And how did prohibition give way to strict governmental regulation of alcohol?

The Distribution of the Income in the Great Depression: Preliminary State Estimates

1983 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Schmitz ◽  
Price V. Fishback
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Capita Income ◽  
State Level ◽  
Per Capita Income ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Per Capita

State-level estimates of income shares for the top one and five percent of the population are presented for 1929, 1933, and 1939. Significant cross-sectional variation is found in 1929, but the range narrows as the shares fall dramatically to 1933. Analysis indicates that property incomes influence the shares but provides little evidence of a tradeoff between per capita income and inequality as measured by the shares.

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