Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of F.D.R
I am a Professor of History at California State University San Marcos where I teach United States Social and Cultural History, African American History, Film History, and Digital History. In addition to The Black Cabinet, I am also the author of three other books. Two of my books have been optioned for film and I have consulted on PBS documentaries. I believe that knowing history is necessary and practical, especially in these times. At this critical point, we can draw much wisdom from the lessons of Black history and the history of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the Presidency in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, most Black Americans lived in poverty and were denied citizenship rights. As his New Deal was launched, a “Black Brain Trust” evolved within the administration and began documenting the inequalities that African Americans faced. Known as the Black Cabinet, they encountered an environment that was often hostile to change.
Black Cabinet members pushed to increase Black access to New Deal relief. Led by the dynamic educator Mary McLeod Bethune, they won several victories—the incorporation of anti-discrimination clauses into federal contracts, the creation of jobs and farming programs, and the growth of Black educational opportunities. But they also experienced defeats—FDR’s refusal to support federal anti-lynching legislation and the overall resistance to extending Black voting rights and ending segregation. The Black Cabinet never won official recognition, and with FDR’s death, it dissolved. But it had successfully laid the foundation for the later Civil Rights Movement.
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From Kyle's list on the history of American conservatism.
Shifting away from the grassroots origins of modern conservatism, Invisible Hands examines how wealthy, conservative businessmen mobilized to counter the power of organized labor, dismantle the New Deal, and propel the right into political power. Phillips-Fein begins her story in the Depression, as a small set of disgruntled industrialists organized against what they saw as creeping socialism, embodied in FDR’s New Deal. Although marginal at first, these titans of capitalism spent great effort and tremendous sums of money to change the tone and tenor of American politics, convincing many Americans to abandon the promises of economic security for the supposed beneficence of the free market.
From Colin's list on Works Progress Administration or by WPA authors.
Several books focused on the Works Progress Administration (WPA), or discreet parts of it, had been published before Borchert’s was released but this is the best of them. I doubt that any other book will ever tell the story of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) quite so well. On one level, it lays out the project’s scope and walks readers through the politics involved with its creation and continued operation. And on another, it explains what the project meant for the writers it employed and how it influenced their work. Every other book on this list was written by an author employed by the project or another part of the WPA; this book will help you understand them as part of a coherent literary moment in American history.
From Scott's list on the New Deal’s contributions to the arts.
This is a scholarly work, but don’t let the unassuming title fool you: Stott’s writing is crisp, elegant, and highly readable, and his insights are crucial to any understanding of the New Deal’s place in American culture. He covers the Roosevelt administration’s cultural undertakings—from the WPA projects to Farm Security Administration photographers to FDR’s own political style and “documentary imagination”—but his real subject is the broader documentary impulse that was expressed so forcefully and variously during the 1930s. This impulse was hardly confined to the federal government’s interventions in the arts. The connections he draws between the New Deal and, say, Martha Graham’s dance productions, or James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, are illuminating and convincing.