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New Deal Activity and the States, 1933 to 1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Don C. Reading
Don C. Reading
Affiliation:
Idaho State University
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Extract

In the three months after his inauguration—the now famous 100 days—Franklin Roosevelt proposed a veritable barrage of programs that were passed by Congress—programs which were to have a profound effect on the American economy. From this beginning sprang forth the economic policy of the 1930's which was aimed at returning the nation to prosperity and changing its social and economic structure. The programs were directed toward specific as well as general problems and affected differently the various geographic areas of the nation.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , December 1973 , pp. 792 - 810
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1973

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References

I wish to thank Evan B. Murray, Gary B. Hansen, and Reed R. Durtschi for their helpful suggestions and criticisms. A special thanks goes to Leonard J. Arrington whose guidance was invaluable and James B. McDonald for direction in statistical problems. I also benefitted from the suggestions of the anonymous referees and the editor. Much of this paper is drawn from an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Utah State University, 1972.

1 Office of Government Reports, Statistical Section, Report No. 10, Volume II, Washington, D.C., 1940, mimeographed. Copy in the library of the Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D.C.; Xerox copy in Utah State University Library, Logan, Utah.

2 Frank F. Smith, Letter to Mr. Bobby M. Corcoran, November 4, 1970. (Mr. Smith is Director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Knoxville, Tennessee.)

3 Zevin, B. C. (ed.), Nothing to Fear: The Selected Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1932–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1946), pp. 34–41.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., p. 39.

5 U.S. President, Message, “Federal Ownership of Real Estate and Its Bearing on State and Local Taxation,” 76th Congress, 1st Session, House Misc. Doc. No. 111, Appendix A (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939).Google Scholar

6 Hurwitz, Abner and Stallings, Carlyle P., “Inter-regional Differentials in Per Capita Real Income Changes,” Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 21, National Bureau of Economic Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), pp. 195–265.Google Scholar

7 The residuals for each regression were very random with no extreme values.

8 This same result was found by Arrington, L. J., “Western Agriculture and the New Deal,” Agricultural History, XLIV (October 1970) 337–353.Google Scholar

9 This important concept was pointed out by an anonymous referee.

10 The wife of the President, Mrs. Roosevelt, stated in a speech in February of 1939 that New Deal programs “helped but they did not solve the fundamental problems.” See Wallace, Henry, The Christian Bases of World Order (New York: Abingdon Cokesbury Press, 1943), p. 17.Google Scholar Also the failure of general reform has been noted by several New Deal historians. (North, Douglass C., Growth and Welfare in the American Past, 1966, pp: 174–180,Google Scholar and Conkin, Paul K.The New Deal, 1967, pp. 172–73.Google Scholar

11 Gavin Wright has found some interesting political measures which seem to be correlated with New Deal spending (forthcoming in Review of Economics and Statistics). He uses electoral votes per capita, the variability of a state's voting pattern (standard deviation), and the absolute difference between .500 and a “predicted” level of Democratic share in 1932. There is a high degree of multicollinearity between several of our independent variables especially electoral votes per capita, percent Federal land owned, and per capita highway miles.