The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941
The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 () is a 1984 history of the Great Depression by acclaimed historian Robert S. McElvaine. In this interpretive history, McElvaine discusses the causes and the results of the worst depression in American history, covering the time from 1929 to 1941. He examines the causes of this cataclysmic event, its impact upon the American people, and the political, governmental, and cultural responses to it. He comes down firmly in favor of the "demand-side" argument that maldistribution of income in the 1920s having left the bulk of potential consumers with too small a share of national income to buy all that mass production was putting on the market was the principal cause of the collapse. Building on his innovative use of letters written by "ordinary" Americans during the Depression that were collected in his first book, "Down and Out in the Great Depression", McElvaine takes readers into the experience of Depression victims to an extent never before achieved.
African-American socialism
The Great Depression of the 1930s began after the stock market crash in 1929. However, it hit the Black population much harder than Whites. Black people were forced out of their already unskilled jobs. This caused them to face an unemployment rate of more that 50 percent, compared to their counterparts of about 30 percent. Black workers were already being paid 30 percent below the white workers. Black people gained no relief of their trials from the Roosevelt administration because the National Recovery Act (NRA) was later referred to, by African-Americans, as the Negro Removal Act. NRA public works rarely hired Blacks during this time, even though the stated goal was to not discriminate while hiring. Although the American Federation of Labor president, William Green, did acknowledge civil rights and asserted to oppose Jim Crow locations, there was nothing enforcing the affiliated unions to follow these allegations. Because many Black laborers were without support, they formed unions of their own, like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Because these men sought their own support, they were often lynched in both the North and the South. This situation was soon turned around in 1934 during a strike wave. Labor strikes spread all over the country from Toledo to Minneapolis to San Francisco. These events consisted of an organization among the unskilled and mass production workers, whom all were not Black. As expected during this time, racism was the center of the industrial unionism. This is a labor union organizing method in which all workers of the same industry are organized into the same union. For instance, workers in the plant industry were placed into the same labor union, nationwide, regardless of an individual's particular job. Blacks, in the most dangerous, dirty and low-paid jobs, were in the same union as better-paid Whites. Because of these racial injustices, African-Americans remained in the lowest ends of poverty, without legal support, throughout the years of the Great Depression.