Lecture Outline:

-The Numbers
-The Better Angels of Our Nature
-“Natural” Disasters, Manmade Disasters & Exodus
-The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover
-The 1932 Election

This is a cartoon from 1933, starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Oswald was originally created by Walt Disney. By the time this cartoon was made, he belonged to Walter Lantz, who went on to create Woody Woodpecker. Confidence shows the effects of the Depression and what people need to get past it.

In the 1936 election, Roosevelt claimed that 85 percent of the newspapers were against him….Roosevelt’s relationship with radio was warmer.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, revised the media rules in profound ways. Like Trump, he feuded with the mainstream media; like Trump, he used a new medium as a direct pipeline to the people. He also used the government’s machinery to suppress unfavorable coverage, a fate we hope to avoid in the age of Trump.

You have been assigned a New Deal program to “sell” to your classmates. Your task is to inform and persuade in equal measure.
Don’t neglect your duty to inform. This is school, after all. Read about your New Deal program. You can’t sell a product that you don’t know thoroughly. Knowledge breeds confidence. Teach your audience about the program.

Your pitch must be 3-4 minutes, you are free to use whatever visual tools (poster, whiteboard, PowerPoint) you want.

Audience is everything. Stay in the time period 1933-38. You are selling to a populace suffering from the Great Depression and anxieties from the rising tide of fascism in Europe. Speak to those people. What is the problem? How will this program solve it

Consider countering claims that opponents of your program might levy. “Some fools may argue that the AAA is unconstitutional, but…” or “uninformed critics bemoan the the program does not relieve all Americans, but…”

Introductions and conclusions matter. First and last impressions are destiny.

A little stagecraft goes a long way; too much showmanship repels the audience. Have fun! Be fun! Do not be boring.

Rubric: 5 points content / 5 points persuasiveness / 5 points timing and style

Here are some models you might consider:

How to advertise considering logos, pathos, and ethos:

Don Draper’s Mark Your Man Pitch:

Don Draper’s Carousel Pitch:

During President Roosevelt’s January 11, 1944 message to the Congress of the United States on the State of the Union, he said the following:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.”^[3] People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

With a scarcity of jobs during the Depression, more than a million people of Mexican descent were sent to Mexico. Author Francisco Balderrama estimates that 60 percent were American citizens.

This table summarizes the New Deal programs we will address in class. It also offers some arguments for/against each program.

Spend some time wrapping your head around the scope of the New Deal reforms.

The first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, Earhart disappeared in 1937 while she was attempting to circumnavigate the world by airplane.

Primary source video footage on TGD art and literature

To some extent, the optimism of the Roaring Twenties was stymied by the financial crash of October 1929 and the economic depression that ensued. Conventional memory of the The Great Depression (TGD) paints a historically inaccurate, often whitewashed, version of life in America during  TGD. To the chagrin of historians of this era, we paint TGD in broad brushstrokes and, as a consequence, overlook the nuances and the diversity of American Experiences during TGD.

Thus, the objective of this lesson is to explore how different people from different walks of life experienced TGD. This era was complex, dynamic, and curious; it was not just Depressing.

To this end, each of you will read 1 of these 4 documents and respond to the questions given

Print your reading responses, bring them to class, and be prepared to discuss the articles.

Group #1: Wall Street Stock Broker
Group #2: American Women
Group #3: White Americans
Group #4: African Americans

If you are really interested in life during TGD, my favorite book on the era, and one of my favorite oral histories, is Hard Times by my hometown hero Studs Terkel

1937. In that year – the fifth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, the US economy had finally matched its size in 1929, the year the stock market bubble popped and the world cascaded into the Great Depression. (The US economy today still has a way to go before it claws back the losses since 2007, but that’s another story).

…almost certainly, a plunge back into recession early next year?

These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations.

Johnny Hodgman is, well, hard to describe. He is overzealously hilarious in an understated way. He is a self-proclaimed genius who knows everything about anything. All tongue-in-cheek.

Anyhoo, here is his satire on the depression life and the films about it.

Here is a 60 minute documentary from our friends at PBS. It is part of the highly regarded American Experience Series. There are 6, 10 minute sections.

Alas for countless pundits and inspirational speakers, it is apparently not the case that the Chinese word for crisis is spelled by joining the characters for danger and opportunity. But that common fallacy nevertheless captures an important metaphorical truth: whatever the perils it brings with it, a crisis can be a grand opportunity. Among those who have understood that truth was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Writing to his fellow Democrats in the 1920s, Roosevelt noted that their party could not hope to return to power until the Republicans led the nation “into a serious period of depression and unemployment.” The Great Depression soon brought a far longer and deeper period of woe than F.D.R. foresaw. But the crisis of the 1930s also provided an object lesson in the relationship between economic danger and political opportunity — a lesson Barack Obama is now trying to follow. Obama, too, came to office in the midst of an economic crisis, and in the solutions he has offered, it appears he has often looked to the example of F.D.R., whose presidency — and the very idea of activist government that it represents — is very much back in the public mind this year. Roosevelt pushed through policies that aimed not just to deal with the immediate challenge of the Great Depression but also to benefit generations of Americans to come. Pulling off a similar feat will require Obama to persuade Americans to see opportunities in the present crisis as well.

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