Churches and Urban Government in Detroit and New York, 1895-1994

2. Churches, Government, and the Great Depression

2 Churches, Government, and the Great Depression The Depression of the 1930s rocked America’s urban churches to their foundations and called into question the adequacy of existing mechanisms for dealing with social problems and relating to city and state political institutions. In the preceding decade, the country’s citywide church federations, while connected in certain ways to local and state governments, had dealt with them mostly episodically and from a distance. While it is true that religious groups were fairly assertive in expressing themselves on moral and ethical issues— with church representatives typically being given a respectful hearing when they approached city hall or the state capitol—there were limits to such involvement. In a survey of twenty-six urban church federations conducted in the last pre-Depression year, 1929, the sociologist H. Paul Douglass found voluntary organizations of this type to be involved with government in various ways. Their divisions of social welfare were in fairly routine contact with state and local authorities in the social service field, and the federations often took responsibility for helping to adjust the tripartite relations between local sectarian welfare agencies, government, and parish churches (Douglass, 1930: 384–409; see also Cayton and Nishi, 1955: 64). Outside the social service field, church groups often gave voice to the churches’ “social ideals,” with government —local, state, and national—serving as the usual target audience. “When the federations sound the slogan, ‘the promotion of moral and social welfare,’ Douglass commented, “they almost always mean attempts to influence government” (Douglass, 1930: 374). Nevertheless, such linkages, while pervasive, remained mostly fragile and unstable. Did the Great Depression change that pattern in some essential way? While the American church history literature (for example, Smith, Handy, 36 and Loetscher, 1963) treats the Depression and New Deal era in some detail, the standard sources are ambiguous as to whether the developments of this period affected the nation’s urban churches in any long-term, fundamental sense. Indeed, this literature can be interpreted as suggesting that the effect was transitory and that church-state relations in the nation’s urban centers and elsewhere returned to an earlier pattern with the passing of the national emergency and with the United States’s subsequent entry into World War II. The New Deal, it should be noted, was mostly transitional: a very large proportion of the policies were justified by the emergency conditions of the time, and there was no intention of sustaining them beyond that point. The present chapter tests a contrasting hypothesis: the possibility that a major watershed occurred in the 1930s with consequences for both churches and public authorities alike. In other words, the premise is that the Depression -related expansion of urban government was more than just temporary in the two cities under discussion, and instead involved a fresh mode of relating: one that would persist, in one form or another, over time. The concept of disturbance remains relevant in this context. I am sensitive to the possibility that in the 1930s externally generated disturbances may have affected religiousgroup behavior, especially among those religious structures not so secure or mature as to be invulnerable to Depression-related rather than government changes. The Depression in National Perspective The stock market crash of 1929, followed by the onset of the Great Depression in 1930, affected all segments of American society. The nation’s index of factory employment reached a pre-Depression high of 110.3 in September 1929, from which point it plummeted: to an average of 92.4 in 1930, to 78.1 in 1931, to 66.3 in 1932 before finally bottoming out at 62.3 in March 1933 (Schneider and Deutsch, 1969: 294). By that year, over 15 million Americans, 25 percent of the total workforce, were unemployed. In March 1933, with the nation’s entire banking system in danger of collapse, President Roosevelt declared a bank holiday, thus gravely threatening the life savings of millions of ordinary citizens. The extent of change occurring at this time in municipal and state government can scarcely be overstated. Prior to the Depression, public welfare agencies had been involved only nominally in institutional services—chiefly in the maintenance of almshouses, poor farms, and county homes. They also The Great Depression 37 provided pauper relief and, in some cases, old-age pensions—always at a bare subsistence level. Yet under the crisis conditions of the 1930s, governments were...