in factories and on farms, based on unregulated private capital seeking its own unlimited increase. In the 1920s that culture had created a high-producing, high-consuming life for Americans. Few people at that time questioned its premises; business was the national faith. But it could also be, as both the bread lines and the dust storms of the following decade revealed, a self-destructive culture, cutting away the ground from under people’s feet.19
The immediate economic problem was addressed by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), passed in 1933. Under the act, the Department of Agriculture worked out agreements to reduce production and raise prices to farmers for the major crops and animal products as it sought to get rid of surpluses and expand markets. Later, the Food Stamp Plan was created not only to address widespread hunger, but also to pump up demand for agricultural commodities.20 The most prominent initiative aiming directly at the Dust Bowl was the Soil Conservation Service (SCS). The agency was created in 1935 by Public Law 74-46, which declared that “the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands . . . is a menace to the national welfare.”21 The Soil Conservation Service undertook numerous projects, both in the arid High Plains and also farther east, where rainstorms caused severe “gully erosion.” The efforts included acquiring unoccupied land and running public demonstrations of soil-conservation practices such as terrace-building; planting wind-blocking rows of trees with the U.S. Forest Service; subsidizing farmers’ soil-saving farming methods; organizing watersheds into Soil Conservation Districts in which farmers were officially designated “cooperators”; and launching many valuable research and extension programs.22
Another greenish initiative of the New Deal era was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). With notions of environmentalism as we now know them then still decades in the future, the Conservation Corps grew out of the Progressive-era conservation tradition, focusing on preserving and managing the nation’s “natural” lands rather than preventing ecological damage by industry and agriculture. Between 1933 and 1942, some 3 million young men—and only men—took jobs with the Conservation Corps and headed out to train, live, and work in the nation’s forests and grasslands. They planted 2 billion trees, built eight hundred state parks, addressed erosion on 40 million acres, built 13,000 hiking trails, and stocked rivers with more than a million fish. They also took up emergency assignments such as firefighting and flood control. (Other accomplishments, such as building 46,000 vehicle bridges, 10,000 small reservoirs, and a million miles of fence, as well as eradicating almost a half-million “predatory animals” were, by current standards, not so green.)23
There are obvious echoes of these laws and agencies in the economic justice and stimulus goals of the Green New Deal. Other agencies also were apt precedents. They included the Rural Electrification Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, among others.
THE UPRISING OF 1934
In their study of the two blockbuster recovery bills passed during Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office—the Agricultural Adjustment Act for rural America and the National Industrial Recovery Act for industry—Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold see both measures as efforts to create a new system under which “economic functions formerly shaped by market competition would be planned and regulated in the public interest.” Had that goal been achieved, they write, the United States would have ended up with business and labor working together congenially under a “centralized system of politically managed corporatist capitalism.” But that plan didn’t work out. While the Agricultural Act did lead to long-term federal management of the farm economy, things veered off course in industry, which was dominated by corporations much more powerful than the upstart government agencies that were trying to herd them into collective recovery. Furthermore, the National Recovery Administration’s leading officials had been drawn from the business world and were more sympathetic to its desire to maximize private profit than to the noncommercial goal of collectively advancing the public interest. In the end, write Skocpol and Finegold, “the dream of harmony between corporate management and industrial labor dissolved into even more bitter conflict.”24
The “bitter conflict” was an astonishing labor uprising in 1934 that cross-pollinated with the growing social movements of the unemployed, students, African American communities, and farmers, along with local political movements such as the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the Progressive Party in Wisconsin. A general strike in San Francisco spurred long-term militancy up and down the West Coast. Tens of thousands of unemployed people helped striking workers in Toledo fight off National Guardsmen and scabs. A labor struggle in Minneapolis drew help from the Farmer-Labor Party and a radical group called the Farmers Holiday Association. There was a surge in radical organizing in Detroit’s auto industry. The labor uprising and the violent response to it by police, corporate security forces, and the National Guard struck terror in the hearts of national politicians, some of whom started talking publicly about the prospect of open industrial warfare, revolution, and even the imminent opening of the “gates of Hell.”25
The radical labor upsurge of 1934 was essential to passage of one of the most important pieces of 1930s legislation: the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which would guarantee the right of workers to form independent trade unions. The bill had been fiercely opposed by employers, business owners, many members of Congress, and even some on the Left, who saw it as too business-friendly. But with a labor revolt under way nationwide, mainstream leaders came to see the Labor Relations Act as the necessary alternative to permanent industrial turmoil or even Communism. The bill’s chief sponsor, Senator Robert Wagner of New York, cited the uprising as a compelling reason to pass the act. The unrest posed a dire threat not only to capitalists but also to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the mild-mannered organization that had officially been representing organized labor for decades. Its leader, desperate to see the passage of the Labor Relations Act in order to help quell the uprising, went a little radical himself, announcing to a massive rally in Madison Square Garden that if Congress did not pass the act, the AFL would lead a national general strike.26
The Labor Relations Act ended up passing easily and was signed into law by Roosevelt. It benefited the working class for decades, but, not surprisingly, the 1934 uprising’s aim of reversing the imbalance of power between capital and labor was never achieved. Indeed, in recent decades, the labor movement has lost enough power to take it all the way back to 1932.
Like the Labor Relations Act, ambitious legislation aimed to resolve the climate crisis is likely to pass only if there is a broad-based, grassroots uprising that leaves Congress no option but to pass it. And the Labor Relations Act example suggests that getting laws passed is only the beginning; they have to be backed up by long-term public support demanding that they be enforced in both letter and spirit.
“RAISE PLENTY OF HELL”
The Green New Deal breaks most sharply with its 1930s namesake on one issue in particular: race. Recognizing that the New Deal had the effect of cementing rather than dissolving institutional racism, the drafters of the Green New Deal have kept marginalized communities at the forefront in every document they have turned out so far.
Steve Valocchi of Trinity College in Connecticut was one of many scholars who argued that the New Deal didn’t just ignore racial discrimination; in several ways, it directly harmed Black communities. The Works Progress Administration, for example, allowed payment of locally prevailing wages, which hurt people living in predominantly Black areas. Earlier, the National Recovery Administration had similarly allowed lower wages in the South and in occupations that were dominated by Black workers. The underwriting manual of the Federal Housing Administration required banks to, in effect, perpetuate residential segregation:
Areas surrounding a location are investigated to determine whether incompatible racial and social groups are present, for the purpose of making a prediction regarding the probability of the location being invaded by such groups. If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally contributes to instability and a decline in values.27
Finally, there were no significant New Deal initiatives to guarantee civil rights or voting rights or to fight