The Great Depression & The New Deal

· The 1930s brought one of the greatest challenges to Texas and the United States since the Civil War.

· Ideas about the role of the government in economic matters were modified as new programs such as Social Security began.

· Texans provided important leadership in solving the nation’s problems.

· Many projects built with federal assistance in the 1930s continue to serve Texans.

· Among these are the Paseo Del Rio (the San Antonio Riverwalk), the San Jacinto Monument, Buchanan Dam, and facilities at many state parks.

· In 1929, early in Republican Herbert Hoover’s presidency, the United States stock market collapsed.

· Many investors, hoping to make quick fortunes, drove up the price of stock.

· Some investors borrowed money heavily to buy stocks, and when stock prices fell, those investors and the banks that loaned them money were wiped out.

· The nationwide crisis was called the Great Depression.

· Hoover greatly underestimated the severity of the crisis.

· He believed that relief efforts should begin at the state and city levels.

· The largest oil field in the United States, at the time, was discovered in East Texas.

· Drilling in the new oil fields provided high paying jobs for drillers, farmers, and timber workers.

· Other businesses also benefited, and the Depression seemed far away.

· Hundreds of small oil drillers, or independents, in the region drilled oil wells everywhere.

· Soon the East Texas Field was producing more oil than the rest of the state combined.

· According to the law of supply and demand, oil prices plummeted with the glut of oil on the market.

· In April 1931, the Texas Railroad Commission issued an order for operators to limit production.

· Independents continued secretly to pump and transport oil.

· Governor Sterling declared martial law and sent the Texas National Guard, but overproduction resumed when martial law ended.

· In 1935, laws succeeded in controlling production, making oil prices more stable.

· In the 1920s the price of cotton declined, and the Great Depression forced the price even lower.

· Stored cotton created a large surplus and further lowered prices.

· The Texas Department of Agriculture urged farmers to reduce the number of acres planted in cotton.

· The Dust Bowl was centered where five states meet – Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas.

· Grasshoppers ate crops down to the ground and even gnawed wooden ax and plow handles.

· One driver caught in a dust storm reported that the wind driven dust completely wore away the paint on one side of his car down to the bare metal.

· After railroads arrived, large ranches of the High Plains were subdivided into farms.

· After World War I, when wheat prices were high, farmers tried to earn more money by planting more crops.

· But, during the 1920s, wheat prices dropped drastically from overproduction.

· Farmers plowed under the grasses of the plains to plant crops, but there was nothing to hold down the soil from strong winds.

· In the 1930s, a severe drought added to the problem as dust storms made the area into a Dust Bowl.

· People became ill from lung diseases, and many families lost their farms because of hard times.

· As banks failed, merchant associations printed coupons that could be used for money.

· Many rural churches paid their preachers with food and some schoolteachers were paid with IOUs.

· Large numbers of Mexicans and Mexican Americans moved to Mexico, either voluntarily or as the United States deported them. Residents of Texas and some United States citizens were forced to go when they could not prove citizenship.

· In 1934, the WPA distributed food and supplies to about 70,550 Texas families per month.

· It employed 87, 879 Texans including teachers, researchers for history projects, artists in the Federal Theater and Writers Project, and other programs.

· The WPA spent a total of nearly $80 million in Texas in five years.

· Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election overwhelmingly with almost 90 percent of Texans supporting him.

· Roosevelt took office in March 1933, and his reform programs were called the New Deal.

· During “the first hundred days”, he closed banks briefly to determine which were strong enough to stay in business.

· Former Texas member of Congress and then Vice President John N. Garner helped push New Deal programs in Congress.

· New agencies to deal with problems of the Depression became known as alphabet agencies because people called them by their initials.

· They included the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which gave states and local agencies funds for unemployed people.

· Agencies to solve unemployment, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), provided outdoor work for young men and helped preserve the nation’s natural resources.

· They developed many state parks, including Garner, Bastrop, and Palo Duro, which are all still in use.

· The National Youth Administration (NYA), hired students for clerical and maintenance jobs in playgrounds, roadside parks, and highways.

· The Public Works Administration (PWA) built bridges, dams, schools, and other permanent structures valuable to the state.

· The Works Progress Administration (WPA) hired people to construct recreation facilities and parks.

· New Deal programs involved government in the arts, supporting artists to paint murals in public buildings, theatrical and musical groups, historians, photographers, and archaeologists.

· The New Deal created programs for farmers, ranchers, and other rural residents.

· In one program, rural people formed cooperatives that borrowed money from the government to pay for electrification.

· The government paid farmers to destroy crops in an attempt to drive up prices.

· Dams were constructed on the Colorado River for electricity, flood control, and water for rice farmers.

· New Deal programs tried to slow down soil erosion to help farmers in the Dust Bowl regions.

· Alternately planting strips of wheat and grain sorghum protected the topsoil from being blown away.

· Farmers plowed at right angles to the wind.

· The federal government paid farmers to plant trees as windbreaks, and by 1938, sand dunes around Dalhart were gone.

· The federal government encouraged cotton farmers to fill up gullies with brush to slow water flow downhill and to use contour plowing.

· They were paid to plant crops such as clover to enhance the soil.

· Federal funds built facilities for the 1936 Texas Centennial celebration in Dallas, mainly at the 185 acre Fair Park.

· New buildings included the Hall of State and the Hall of Negro Life.

· Exhibits highlighted Texas history and examples of Texas products and culture.

· Other celebrations included the San Jacinto Monument erected on the battlefield east of Houston, as well as museums on the Alamo grounds in San Antonio, the University of Texas campus in Austin, and at Canyon, Huntsville, Goliad, and Gonzales.

· The San Jacinto Monument, built in 1936 on the San Jacinto battlefield near Houston, is 570 feet tall, or about four and a half feet taller than the Washington Monument.

· The person responsible for securing the federal funds to build it claimed it would be shorter.

· He feared that the federal government would not provide funds for a building taller than the Washington Monument.

· Miriam “Ma” Ferguson won a close election for her second term as governor of Texas in 1932.

· She asked newly elected President Roosevelt for loans to help make up for lost income from lower cotton prices.

· She successfully pushed for the state to allow $20 million in bread bonds to feed the poor, and she proposed an oil tax.

· Miriam Ferguson’s administration, however, did controversial things, such as firing several experienced Texas Rangers and using pardon powers to release criminals from state prisons.

· She and the legislature struggled unsuccessfully to meet state financial needs when there was not enough money available.

· James Allred became governor in 1935.

· He reorganized the Texas Rangers under the Department of Public Safety.

· He helped create the Board of Pardons and Paroles and teachers’ and state employees’ retirement systems.

· Governor W. Lee O’Daniel, elected in 1938, campaigned around the state promising to raise pensions, abolish capital punishment, and veto any sales tax.

· He won the election overwhelmingly but was not able to deliver on his promises.

· Despite the poll tax and other devices to keep African Americans from voting, some continued to vote.

· In 1923, the Texas legislature passed a law declaring that only whites could vote in the Democratic Party’s primary.

· Dr. Lawrence Nixon, an African American physician from El Paso, sued in the Supreme Court for the right to vote after he was turned away at the polls in 1923.

· The US Supreme Court declared that his rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution had been violated.

· The state continued to try to exclude African Americans from voting, saying that the party, not the legislature, had the power to determine who voted in primaries.

· The Democratic Party then drew up discriminatory rules, and, in 1932, Nixon again sued and won the Supreme Court case.

· The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) founded in Corpus Christi in 1929, worked for Mexican American rights in courts, hiring, and education.

· LULAC fought against school segregation of Mexican American children in Del Rio.

· LULAC had chapters in many communities.

· In 1938 about 10,000 nut shellers, mostly Mexican Americans, went on strike in San Antonio because of inhumane working conditions.

· Police arrested 700 strikers, but both sides eventually agreed to arbitration, and workers won higher pay.

· During the Depression working conditions for miners and farmers worsened.

· New Deal farm programs that paid farmers not to grow crops specified payment would go to landowners.

· Tenants suffered because landowners no longer needed their services and dismissed them.

· After the discovery of the East Texas Oil Field, low petroleum prices meant the demand for coal decreased, so miners were laid off.