Source A

The 1920s may have seen the unprecedented availability of consumer goods. But the decade was also characterised for many Americans by low wages and irregular employment. Even without a Depression many of them could ill-afford to join the consumer society. In 1930 an estimated 16 million families, 60 per cent of the total, representing 70 million people, received less than $2,000 a year, the figure which the Brookings Institution calculated was ‘sufficient to supply only basic necessities’.

Most working-class males and many in the middle class were not paid enough to support their families above a subsistence level on their own. They needed supplementary wage-earners. In the past children, particularly from immigrant families, had often served that role. Increasingly, women had to work. In 1930 women constituted 24.3 per cent of the workforce. A quarter of women. Over the age of 16 worked, 28 per cent of them were married.

A.J.Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940. (Macmillan 1989) p23

Source B

When the Hoovers’ train drew into the Palo Alto station on November 5, a crowd of ten thousand, including most of the Stanford student body and many of the faculty, welcomed them. All along the route to their house, cheering crowds lined the street. That evening, Hoover made a final radio address to the nation from his home, urging the record number of registered voters to turn out and ‘vote seriously and earnestly as conscience and mind direct.’…

Hoover…won an immense victory: 21,427, 123 popular votes to Smith’s 15,015,464; 444 electoral votes to Smith’s 87; 42 states to Smith’s 8.

K. A. Clements, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary 1918-1928(Palgrave 2010) p.421-423

Source C

While Smith could count on urban ethnic support, the majority of Southern, Midwestern and Western voters remained convinced that a Catholic from the sidewalks of New York was unsuited to join the ranks of earlier Protestant presidents. Hoover’s engineering and business background and record of public service closely aligned with the current national mood. The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties, as many dubbed the decade, seemed to be the product of exactly what Hoover and his Republican Party offered the country: a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.’

R. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life. (Allen Lane 2017) p.97

Source D

In the late 1920s, America floated on winds of uplift, which encouraged the myth that human technology had conquered human folly, that a comfortable, secure lifestyle was a reasonable reality for all, that the biblical prescription that the poor would always be with us was mistaken. If pride goeth before a fall, this was a setup for a sucker punch. In his acceptance speech at Palo Alto, Hoover had stated that America was closer to abolishing poverty than any land in history…An opiate of optimism prevailed. Capitalist economies have always operated on cycles, yet in the 1920s some people believed they were exempt from this law of economics…

The prosperity of the 1920s …had numerous weak spots.’

G. Jeansonne, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Fighting Quaker 1928-1933. (Palgrave 2012)p.113

Source A

Representative government was a precious tradition he was intent on preserving. He believed that the United States had the flexibility to find its way through the current crisis with its institutions intact. Because circumstances had made him the focus of mass hopes to preserve America’s constitutional order, he appreciated that he would have a central role in the process. But he wanted a recovery that could be achieved without destroying what set America apart from other countries around the globe.

He relished his emerging role on the world stage, and approached the presidency with the excitement of a born leader who was about to make a lasting mark on the country’s political history. To be sure, the challenge would test his skills as a politician, but he appreciated the chance to lead a transformational administration with the cunning a successful leader needed to use if he were to buoy the economy and put institutions in place that would make America more humane and less vulnerable to future economic downturns.

Roosevelt choreographed every detail of his first days in Washington.

R. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life. (Allen Lane 2017) p.134

Source B

The president’s own inaugural rhetoric, announcing that fear itself was unjustified, had the virtue of avoiding fearmongering, of not promoting hysteria, and thus not worsening the quality of democratic thought and deliberation. Unlike some appeals to fear, it was not a free-floating invocation of insecurity, without content , the all-too-familiar kind that can open the door to demagoguery, manipulation, and control. Insisting that “we are stricken by no plague of locusts,” but in a crisis caused by speculative greed and misguided policy decisions, Roosevelt called for “an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing,” …

By presenting a sober and realistic account of danger without crossing the line into apprehension so acute as to be paralyzing, FDR offered reassurance. His political narrative featured how public policy could overcome fear. This was how his formulation about fear itself was intended, and this, as it turned out, was how he later would represent his administration’s achievements. Accepting his party’s nomination for a second term in June 1936, Roosevelt laid claim to having vanquished fear itself.

I. Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, (Liveright 2014) p 35

Source C

Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency marked the beginning of a ‘new deal order,’ an American-led, rights-based liberalism that Lyndon Johnson would carry into the 1960s. In the nineteenth century, ‘liberalism’ meant advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism. The meaning of the term changed during the Progressive Era, when self-styled Progressives, borrowing from Populism, began attempting to reform laissez-faire capitalism by using the tools of collective action and appeals to the people adopted by Populists; in the 1930s these efforts came together as New Deal liberalism.

All the while, a new kind of conservatism was growing, too. It consisted not only of businessmen who opposed the government regulation of the economy but also of Americans, chiefly rural Americans, who objected to government interference in their lives. These two strands of conservatism were largely separate in the 1930s, but they’d already begun moving closer together, especially in their animosity toward the paternalism of liberalism.

J. Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, (Norton 2018) p444

Source D

The land would not die an easy death. Fields were bare, scraped to hardpan in places, heaving in others. The skies carried soil from state to state. With no appreciable rain for two years, even deep wells were gasping to draw from the natural underground reservoir. One late winter day in 1933, a battalion of heavy cloud massed over No Man’s Land. At midday, the sun disappeared. Lights were turned on in town in order to see. The clouds dumped layers of dust, one wave after the other, an aerial assault that covered streets in Boise City, buried brown pockets of grass, and rolled over big Will Crawford’s dugout and the patch of ground where Sadie had tried to establish her garden with a tin-can irrigation system. They had to shovel furiously to avoid being swallowed by the enraged prairie.

T. Egan, The Worst Hard Time, (Mariner Books 2006) p 136

Source A:

President Truman, Radio address to the American people. January 03, 1946

The Congress is indeed to be congratulated by the people on all that it has contributed toward cooperation among the nations of the world in their search for peace and security. I shall have more to say about the foreign policy of the United States in the annual message to the Congress.

When we turn to our domestic problems, we do not find a similar record of achievement and progress in the Congress.

And yet our domestic post-war problems are just as serious and, in many ways, just as difficult as our international problems. Unless we can soon meet the need of obtaining full production and full employment at home, we shall face serious consequences. They will be serious not only in what they mean to the American people as such, but also in what they can do to our position as a leader among the nations of the world.

With the surrender of Japan last August, we set certain domestic goals to be attained. The tasks before us were clear then; they are clear now.

We had to reconvert our economy from war to peace--as rapidly as possible. We had to keep employment and wages and purchasing power on a high level during the changeover.

We had to keep the prices of commodities from going up too high. We had to get civilian goods produced and put upon the market promptly.

In other words, our primary aim was to bring about an expanded production and steady, well-paid jobs and purchasing power for all who wanted to work--we had to maintain high farm income--and good profits based on big volume.

Reaching that goal means better homes, better food, better health, better education, and security for every citizen of the United States. It means bigger and steadier markets for business. It means world confidence in our leadership.

We had gone a long way in getting our workers and factories back on a peacetime basis. War plants have been cleared in large numbers, and their war contracts settled. Men, machines, and raw materials are already back in peacetime production in greater numbers, and are producing more goods, than any one of us had dared to expect a few months ago. But we are a long way from our goal. The return of the United States to a peacetime economy in 1946 requires the same cooperation that we had during the war years. Industry, labor, agriculture, the Congress, the President--each one of these--is called upon to do certain things. None of them can do the job alone. Together they can.

There is one vast difference, however, between 1941 and 1946. While we were producing to meet the needs of war, we had the great stimulus of the war itself. That stimulus is now gone. The cooperation and teamwork in some quarters, I am sorry to say, have suffered proportionately.

American Presidency Project: Online resource. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu

Source B:

Eisenhower’s Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 7th, 1954

All branches of this Government--and I venture to say both of our great parties--can support the general objective of the recommendations I make today, for that objective is the building of a stronger America. A nation whose every citizen has good reason for bold hope; where effort is rewarded and prosperity is shared; where freedom expands and peace is secure--that is what I mean by a stronger America.

Toward this objective a real momentum has been developed during this Administration’s first year in office. We mean to continue that momentum and to increase it. We mean to build a better future for this nation.

Much for which we may be thankful has happened during the past year.

First of all we are deeply grateful that our sons no longer die on the distant mountains of Korea. Although they are still called from our homes to military service, they are no longer called to the field of battle.

The nation has just completed the most prosperous year in its history. The damaging effect of inflation on the wages, pensions, salaries and savings of us all has been brought under control. Taxes have begun to go down. The cost of our government has been reduced and its work proceeds with some 183,000 fewer employees; thus the discouraging trend of modern governments toward their own limitless expansion has in our case been reversed. The cost of armaments becomes less oppressive as we near our defense goals; yet we are militarily stronger every day. During the year, creation of the new Cabinet Department of Health, Education, and Welfare symbolized the government’s permanent concern with the human problems of our citizens.

Segregation in the armed forces and other Federal activities is on the way out. We have also made progress toward its elimination in the District of Columbia. These are steps in the continuing effort to eliminate inter-racial difficulty.

Eisenhower Library: Online resources. https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov

Source C:

J. F. Kennedy: Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union. January 30, 1961

I speak today in an hour of national peril and national opportunity. Before my term has ended, we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure. The outcome is by no means certain. The answers are by no means clear. All of us together--this Administration, this Congress, this nation-must forge those answers.

But today, were I to offer--after little more than a week in office--detailed legislation to remedy every national ill, the Congress would rightly wonder whether the desire for speed had replaced the duty of responsibility.

My remarks, therefore, will be limited. But they will also be candid. To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies, and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust. And, while the occasion does not call for another recital of our blessings and assets, we do have no greater asset than the willingness of a free and determined people, through its elected officials, to face all problems frankly and meet all dangers free from panic or fear.

The present state of our economy is disturbing. We take office in the wake of seven months of recession, three and one-half years of slack, seven years of diminished economic growth, and nine years of falling farm income.

Business bankruptcies have reached their highest level since the Great Depression. Since 1951 farm income has been squeezed down by 25 percent. Save for a brief period in 1958, insured unemployment is at the highest peak in our history. Of some five and one-half million Americans who are without jobs, more than one million have been searching for work for more than four months. And during each month some 150,000 workers are exhausting their already meager jobless benefit rights.

Nearly, one-eighth of those who are without jobs live almost without hope in nearly one hundred especially depressed and troubled areas. The rest include new school graduates unable to use their talents, farmers forced to give up their part-time jobs which helped balance their family budgets, skilled and unskilled workers laid off in such important industries as metals, machinery, automobiles and apparel.

Our recovery from the 1958 recession, moreover, was anemic and incomplete. Our Gross National Product never regained its full potential. Unemployment never returned to normal levels. Maximum use of our national industrial capacity was never restored.

In short, the American economy is in trouble. The most resourceful industrialized country on earth ranks among the last in the rate of economic growth. Since last spring our economic growth rate has actually receded.

American Presidency Project: Online resource. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu

Source A

By the close of the Cold War, some commentators concluded that America had become all the world, as if the American experiment had ended, in unrivalled triumph.

The American experiment had not ended. A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation funded on universal rights will wrestle against forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquillity. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.

J. Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States. (Norton 2018) p786

Source B

Trump’s election started a tidal wave. Not a few political commentators announced the end of the Republic. Trump’s rhetoric was apocalyptic and absolute; the theme of his inaugural address was “American carnage.” The rhetoric of his critics was no less dystopian – angry, wounded and without hope.

As trump began his term of office, Americans fought over immigration and guns, sex and religion. They fought, too, over statues and monuments, plaques and names. The ghosts of American history rattled their chains. …

The truths on which the nation was founded- equality, sovereignty, and consent- had been retold after the Civil War. Modern liberalism came out of that political settlement, and the United States, abandoning isolationism, had carried that vision to the world: the rule of law, individual rights, democratic government, open borders, and free markets. The fight to make good on the promise of the nation’s founding truths held the country together for a century, during the long struggle for civil rights. And yet the nation came apart all same, all over again.

J. Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States. (Norton 2018) p786-7

Source C

Extracts from the memoirs of Barack Obama, in which he reflects upon the unity created in American society by capture of Osama bin Laden

Was the unity of effort, that sense of common purpose, possible only when the goal involved killing a terrorist? The question nagged at me. For all the pride and satisfaction I took in the success of our mission in Abbottabad, the truth was that I hadn’t felt the same exuberance as I had on the night the healthcare bill passed. I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian. And the fact that this was the case, the fact that we could no longer imagine uniting the country around anything other than thwarting attacks and defeating external enemies. I took as a measure of how far my presidency still felt short of what I wanted it to be – and how much work I had left to do.

B. Obama, A Promised Land ( Penguin Random House 2020) p699

Source D

The industrial leadership of the United States during the 1870-1970 century has given way to a mixture of advance and decline. Though manufacturing employment has declined steadily as a share of the economy, American inventions have established a new phase of dominance. Though few computers and smart devices are being manufactured in the United States, almost all the software and organizational creativity of the modern digital age has originated within U.S. borders. Of the ten most valuable companies in the world, eight are located in the United States. The continuing stream of innovations spawned by America’s inventors is fuelled by funding from America’s sophisticated and aggressive venture capital industry,…

Contemporary America exhibits many other signs of health besides frenetically active markets for inventors and entrepreneurs. Research and development is at an all-time high as a percent of GDP, and the development of new drugs by the pharmaceutical industry is also dominated by American firms. Innovations in the exploration and production of shale oil and gas have reduced America’s import dependence faster than was predicted only a few years ago. America’s top private and public research universities have a near monopoly in the league table of the world’s top thirty institutions of higher education.

R. J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, (Princeton University Press 2016) p643