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c h a p t e r t h i r t e e n A New Deal for Disasters When Franklin delano roosevelt (Fdr) took office in march 1933, both supporters and opponents of the new president overestimated the changes he planned to make in American government. many on the left expected him to nationalize banks and intervene with a strong hand to fix the country’s economic ills, while some conservatives expressed fears that he would use the economic crisis as a justification to abandon constitutional limits on his power, ignore congress, and rule by fiat like the fascists in italy and the nazis in Germany. in the ensuing years, however, the new deal administration fulfilled neither the fantasies of the Left nor the paranoia of the right. The new deal social welfare program, funded by large federal outlays but administered at the state and local levels and often operating in partnership with corporate interests, veered away from a consistent revolutionary vision into a messy, sometimes self-contradictory pattern of experimentalism.1 The administration’s response to natural disasters largely followed this pattern. When an earthquake rattled Long Beach, california, a week after Fdr became president , he appeared to reject the red cross model of relief altogether, in favor of a new, federal-state model of government-funded assistance. And when he created the Federal emergency relief Administration (FerA), which would aid victims of natural disasters as well as victims of economic distress, American red cross leaders thought they truly had been replaced by a government agency. FerA, however, soon fell far short of what they expected. At the same time, state and city governments began to engage in disaster planning and response, representing a real incursion into Arc territory . These incremental and federalized changes left wide chasms into which the Arc could wedge its established expertise. The new federal relief agencies, state and local government bodies, and public-minded corporations could be easily folded into a cooperative disaster-relief regime under the Arc’s direction. Floods once again provided a golden opportunity for this arrangement to coalesce. Just as the 1927 mississippi flood had enabled the Arc to pull out of its postwar slump and demonstrate its A New Deal for Disasters 241 relevance in peacetime, the northeast floods of 1936 and the ohio-mississippi flood of 1937 gave the organization a critical chance to reassert its dominance in disaster relief during the new deal years. Tectonic shifts in the early hours of march 11, 1933, the weary new president was awakened and informed that a major earthquake had just rumbled through southern california. The quake consisted of at least fourteen powerful shocks and was felt over a six-thousandsquare -mile area from Ventura to san diego. measuring 6.4 on charles richter’s new scale of earthquake severity, it had reportedly caused at least 115 deaths and thousands of injuries. many buildings in Long Beach, near the apparent epicenter, had been reduced to rubble. President roosevelt, exhausted by a harrowing first week in office addressing a nationwide banking crisis, nevertheless roused himself to deal with the emergency. he did not look to the American red cross the way his cousin Theodore roosevelt had done with the 1906 san Francisco earthquake. instead, the president immediately called upon federal government agencies to provide the first line of disaster response. With help from his secretary and First Lady eleanor roosevelt, he issued a flurry of calls and orders during the early morning hours, sending Pacific officers of the army, the navy, and the Public health service to the scene of the quake; directing the Treasury department to authorize banks to advance needed cash to earthquake victims under a department regulation; and calling upon the Federal reserve to make needed loans to the people because the banks were still closed. (The country was in the midst of a bank holiday the president had called to halt the drain of financial resources from the nation’s lending institutions). he also telegraphed california’s governor, stating, “if there is anything that the government can do, wire me at once.”2 The Arc did not wait for orders from the president to mobilize its relief forces. Payne wired california’s governor directly to offer the services of the organization, while a team of Arc disaster-relief experts and workers from the West coast flew to the scene and national headquarters shipped packages of clothing and bedding to the area. James Fieser wired a...

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