S4 E6: A New Deal

Scene on Radio: Capitalism

Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

Society & Culture, Audiodoc, Radio, Documentary, Stories

4.9 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2020

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Great Depression presented a crisis not only for the U.S. economy, but for American democracy. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to save the nation’s system of government, and its economic system, while reforming both. What did the New Deal achieve, and not achieve?

Reported and produced by John Biewen, with series collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews with Eric Rauchway and Cybelle Fox. The series editor is Loretta Williams.

Music by Algiers, John Erik Kaada, Eric Neveux, and Lucas Biewen. Music consulting and production help from Joe Augustine of Narrative Music.

Photo: Men fighting during a strike at the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, 1937. Image courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

As mentioned in the episode, an article by public historian Larry DeWitt examining the widespread assertion that the exclusion of some occupations from the original Social Security old-age pension program was insisted on by southern segregationists: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n4/v70n4p49.html

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listen, truthfully, the average in Negro don't know such a thing as depression.
0:06.6	Because from the day he was born, he was born in depression.
0:09.9	As far as a job was concerned, the best he could get would be a job, like I say, driving
0:16.4	team or working in a cold yard, working in some factory.
0:19.9	If he was in a factory, he was a janitor or the porter, which didn't pay much.
0:25.2	So you can understand very clearly why no such thing as depression really meant too much
0:31.1	to him.
0:32.3	Clifford Burke, then a retired transit worker from Chicago, spoke with the radio broadcaster
0:38.0	Studs Turkle around 1970.
0:41.5	Burke said looking back, the people who really couldn't cope with the Great Depression were
0:46.2	white folks.
0:47.2	You take a photo, I had the job say paying him $60 a week, and here I'm making $20.
0:53.1	Now, if I go home and take some beans or anything home my wife, she'll think that.
0:58.3	We said, I will eat it.
0:59.6	It isn't exactly what we want, but we'll eat it.
1:02.9	But this white fellow that's been making this big money, and he could break this home.
1:07.6	That's why I'm going to accept this.
1:10.2	Why did these fellas, all these big wheels, why did they kill themselves?
1:14.4	The American white man has been superior so long.
1:20.1	He couldn't stand the idea of being defeated, see?
1:23.9	And when I say defeated, he couldn't stand the idea of happening to go on relief like
1:28.7	Negro had to go.
	...

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