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C H A P T E R 1 HOW TO RESPOND TO A GREAT DEPRESSION The Franklin Roosevelt administration’s response to the greatest depression in American history was one of massive and inspired improvisation. The new president took office with a lot of valuable experience—work relief and conservation being just two problems he had dealt with as governor of New York—but without a clear philosophy or even an integrated set of theories about what to do. In fact, he didn’t like theories and tended to be suspicious of those who offered them. He turned away the advice of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who would later become famous for a theory of deficit spending that explained much about why some New Deal policies worked and some didn’t. ‘‘He hated abstractions,’’ said James MacGregor Burns, ‘‘his mind yearned for the detail, the particular , the specific.’’1 As one adviser, Raymond Moley, later put it: ‘‘to look at [New Deal] policies as the result of a unified plan was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter ’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.’’2 The important thing was that while Roosevelt never entirely shook free of economic orthodoxy, he was able to see its limitations and experiment with new ideas. In fact, he saw experiments as imperative. In an address to the graduating class of Oglethorpe University, he stated: ‘‘This country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, this country demands bold, persistent experimentation . It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.’’ Their challenge, he told the graduates, was not to make their way in the world before them, but to remake it.3 3 4 HISTORY OF PWA IN LOUISIANA Roosevelt was ready to embrace new ideas, but New Deal programs did not spring full-blown from the mind of Roosevelt or his advisers. Most had antecedents in earlier times, particularly the Progressive Era at the beginning of the century, and even in the conservatism of Herbert Hoover. There is a long history of federal involvement in the development of cultural and physical infrastructure. Federal lands were granted to the states for schools in the nineteenth century. In 1887 the Hatch Act provided annual cash grants for agricultural experiment stations, and in 1890 the second Morrill Act did the same for land-grant colleges. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 created the Cooperative Extension Service, which not only provided research and consultation to farmers but also offered ‘‘home economics ’’ advice to their spouses and families. The Country Life movement preceded the New Deal’s efforts to promote a sense of community among the isolated and individualistic farmers and reorganize agriculture along cooperative lines. President Theodore Roosevelt established a U.S. Country Life Commission in 1909 to support farming cooperatives. Marketing cooperatives flourished in the 1920s but soon became centrally controlled, big business enterprises beyond the reach of individual farmers.4 Rural poverty, in the South and elsewhere, was a concern of Progressives , and they looked to schools as the key to modernizing rural life. New, clean, and attractive school buildings would be built and students taught to transform their homes into similarly clean, efficient, and comfortable environments where education would be nurtured. The Progressives originally hoped that the farmers’ wives and daughters would lead the farmers to more modern attitudes and practices, which would pull them out of poverty. However, by the end of the 1920s the reform movement had given up on motivating women to change men and hoping the home would change the rural economy. It withdrew to an entirely domestic and genderspeci fic agenda.5 The home economic cottages with model kitchens, living rooms, laundries, and bedrooms that were added to many Louisiana high schools were the result of this movement. Concern for the education of African Americans was also visible in the Progressive Era. One of its most important manifestations was a private initiative sponsored by the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Rosenwald was the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, the famous mail-order catalog corporation, and his organization helped black communities build their own schools throughout the South.6 Attention to African Americans came gradually in Louisiana but nonetheless had important results. [18.189.170.17...

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