Chapter Eleven takes up Rogers’ engagment with the Great Depression of the 1930s, the economic disaster that marked the culmination of his influence as a commentator on American political life. The Oklahoman castigated Wall Street for foolish financial practices and criticized Americans for buying on credit, two practices in the 1920s he believed underlay the economic collapse. With typical good-humored civility, he initially sympathized with Herbert Hoover as a victim of circumstances but soon denounced the president’s refusal to promote relief programs and job-creation initiatives. Rogers became an enthusiastic supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The humorist became one of the biggest boosters of FDR’s programs as necessary to save the American system. While suspicious of federal government overreach and the encouragement of labor radicalism, he deemed the New Deal largely a success. Throughout the Depression, Rogers maintained his populist outlook, consistently criticizing economic and social elites while laboring to protect and uplife America’s common, working citizens. His acclaim for "the little fellow" further elevated his public stature in America.

After the Progressive Era of the late 19th century, the unregulated financial markets boomed, encouraging people to go into debt to buy stocks, and when an economic boom went bust, the Great Depression ensued. FDR’s New Deal was a response to the failure of markets to protect people that led to the government taking on the responsibility of preventing, or at least moderating, economic dislocations, regulating the financial and banking systems, providing jobs as an employee of last resort, and establishing a social security system to protect the elderly and disabled Americans. The missing link in these efforts was racial justice, which was largely overlooked for political reasons. While FDR’s critics accused him of betraying capitalism, he in fact saved the market system from destroying itself.

This chapter tracks the changes to the American conservative movement that have unfolded since the heyday of William F. Buckley, who founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955. Centered on Buckley’s defiance of all things left wing and on his provocative writings on welfare, critiques of the New Deal, and Cold War anxieties, this chapter shows the conflicted relationship many contemporary American conservatives have with his legacy. "Serious conservatives" who place themselves in Buckley’s lineage find themselves alienated in the contemporary media landscape, which, although displaying the same incendiary spirit as Buckley’s essays and his television show Firing Line, lacks the intellectual seriousness that many found in his writings. More generally, this chapter identifies the recurrent themes in conservative writing and dwells on the agitational poetics of conservative essayism.

By the end of the Second World War, the professional class presided over a massive alignment of national and global institutions with virtue capitalism. This global ‘welfare state’ moment makes it seem that virtue capitalism went hand in hand with state control. However, professionals were often ambivalent about their connection to the state. When Canada first ventured into nationalised healthcare, for example, doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike to avoid it. Despite often rejecting state interference, which many professionals feared might impede the integrity of their work, professionals held a moral relationship between knowing and doing, where they sought to use expertise to effect material change in the world and in individual lives. Such technocratic planning was fundamentally moral, embedding into mid-twentieth century capitalism the internalized, disciplining practices known as governmentality. Professionals were, to use Giorgio Agamben’s framing of the governmental economy, angels of the state. Human capital investment entangled industry, military, and education but, perhaps most importantly, led to an internalized, universal industriousness. The material effects of this ‘angelic’ work were sometimes deeply damaging, building social and economic ‘dependencies’ through the economy that mirrored, in individual lives, the hierarchies constructed by the colonial world.

This chapter situates the documentary movement of the 1930s and its preoccupation with the folk within the larger history of American modernism. I show how “the culture concept” emerged within the overlapping fields of anthropology and folklore to guide the practice of ethnography and its “study of modernity’s others” in the age of US imperialism and world war. For some Black and Native ethnographers, the folk offered an avenue for staking a claim of history, contribution, and modern belonging. New Deal documentary projects repurposed the folk as stalwart protagonists of the past, the backstory to a centralized narrative of national culture and its constituent parts. By contrast, many documentary books destabilized representations of the folk, producing a more self-reflexive account of social relations of power. While some texts anticipated the Cold War turn to the plight of the individual, others took aim at the racial fault lines of American exceptionalism.

The scale of the Great Depression and the obvious need for federal intervention mooted laissez-faire arguments. Nevertheless, the continuing vitality of laissez-faire sparked debates in law, economics, and public policy about the proper role of government that, in important ways, continue to the present. The chapter locates the rise of infrastructure as a common term within modernization theory and development economics, which provide the post-World War II with a western-centered model of capitalist growth. Modernization theory drew on social science, economics, and political theory to map society and economy as reciprocal systems that were amenable to policy intervention. Infrastructure” begins to circulate in the early 1950s as a novel concept among staffers at the World Bank and later in Congressional debates over the Marshall Plan. It first takes on a narrow meaning of military facilities and the resources that supported those facilities. From there, it becomes a portable concept that development economists could use to predict the “take off” or stagnation of emerging societies measured by rates of growth, GDP, social stability, and technological advance. We see our contemporary sense of infrastructure crystallize in the 1950s and 1960s as the material precondition for a flourishing modern capitalist democracy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal both get mixed reviews in song. The Dust Bowl hits the middle of the country, bringing to the fore not only Woody Guthrie and “Sis” Cunningham but also a stable of lesser-known “Dust Bowl Balladeers.” The Harlan County Wars continue in Kentucky, and the balladry proliferates. Sit-down strikes rock Detroit, and their songs resound. “We Shall Not Be Moved” becomes a Spanish-language anthem, and Rafael Hernández Marín sings of Puerto Rico’s Ponce Massacre. Abel Meeropol takes on lynching with his masterpiece, “Strange Fruit,” and Lead Belly damns the racism of the nation’s capital with his “Bourgeois Blues.” The Popular Front resurrects Lincoln as a working-class hero in song, and the fighters of the Lincoln Battalion in Spain march to their own battle tunes. The arenas of musical theater, dance, classical music, and jazz also become battlegrounds with Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles, William Grant Still’s Lenox Avenue, Helen Tamiris’s How Long, Brethren?, Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free?, and John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concerts. Marian Anderson transforms “America” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Paul Robeson sings a “Ballad for Americans” from coast to coast.

By November 1932 the United States economy was in a deep depression. The unemployment rate was above 20 per cent, the highest it had ever been, and the production of goods and services had fallen by 28 per cent since its peak in 1929. America needed fresh ideas.

It found them in a new president. During the first hundred days of his presidency Franklin D. Roosevelt, together with a largely Democratic Congress, instituted a broad range of spending and lending programmes and various new regulations that would collectively become known as the New Deal. The range of programmes included things such as state and local public works initiatives, temporary relief for the unemployed and the payment of farm subsidies.

In the 1930s, a group of New Deal reformers joined the investment bankers and the credit men to refashion the bargaining environment once again. The consensus that emerged during this decade is the focus of the book’s fourth chapter. The New Deal reformers brought their own distinctive understanding of how judges were to oversee negotiations among creditors and their common debtor. They believed that judges had to take steps to ensure that, at every turn, the bargaining process did not slight the rights of passive investors who had neither the information nor the sophistication to bargain on equal terms with Wall Street insiders.

Dartington Hall was built on a strong, companionate relationship between two complex, contradictory people. This chapter explores the paths that led Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst to marry and start Dartington, illuminating a rich early-twentieth-century landscape of philanthropy, humanitarianism, spirituality and international exchange. It shows how affective relationships fuelled far-reaching collaborative reformism. The chapter also gives an overview of Dartington between 1925 and 1945. It dwells on the Elmhirsts’ desire to combine local roots with international horizons (what Kwame Appiah terms ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’); explores the implications of this progressive experiment’s setting in the conservative county of Devon; traces the project’s trajectory from a small, independent-minded venture in the 1920s to one that, by the late 1930s, aimed to contribute to state-led social reform; and situates Dartington amid myriad other unity-seeking reform projects of the interwar period, from the New Deal to Mass Observation.

This chapter focuses on the writing of Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, specifically their representations of the folk and folk culture in the 1930s. In addition, it charts the development of their work from the 1920s into the 1940s and World War II. Both writers critiqued the practices and discourses of contemporary ethnography and their assertion of the disappearance of the folk and their culture in the face of modernization, a perspective largely adopted by the politics of the New Deal and the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). Both writers confirmed the continued relevance and adaptability of Black culture and its place within both the African Diaspora and the national project of the United States so that their work for the FWP produced a counternarrative to its perspective. This chapter argues that a focus on the work of Brown – himself a self-identified leftist – and Hurston demonstrates that the writing of this period does not break down along strictly oppositional lines but is expansive, dialogic, and malleable.

This chapter examines how and why Black dramatists and dramas of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) were forgotten and the role of the Black Arts Movement in recovering the repertoire of Black federal theatre. Only a fraction of the Black plays held in the FTP archives have been anthologized or staged since the 1930s. This chapter examines the broad range of Black dramas developed on the project and still waiting to be surfaced. It focuses in particular on two neglected Black folk dramas: Did Adam Sin? and Cinda, alongside Theodore Ward’s better known social protest drama Big White Fog. Black playwrights and Negro Units dramatized the Depression as it unfolded. The chapter also roots the Black family drama within a longer Black dramatic tradition. Rather than see August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle plays as stretching back to a tradition beginning with Richard Wright’s collaboration with Paul Green on the stage play of Native Son (1941) or Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun (1959), sourcing contemporary Black drama to the Black federal theatre suggests that the staging of contemporary gender roles and race relations has a much longer and richer theatre history.

The Federal Writers’ Project’s experiment in documentary modes points to the wealth of African American documentary texts offering responses to the welfare state and its attendant ideologies. These texts – neither properly belonging to a single decade nor fitting conveniently with forms of literary production we usually study – challenge the way we periodize and categorize African American literature. This chapter explores several of these intertexts: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Roi Ottley’s New World A-Coming (1943), Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy’s They Seek a City (1945), and Henry Lee Moon’s Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (1948). It illuminates their dialogue with the New Deal cultural projects and how Black writers reoriented how they engaged with history, urban space, and culture between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights era.

The Introduction lays out the principal arguments of the book, namely that the history of J.P. Morgan & Co. in the 1930s informs the reader about how the leading American financial institution coped with and participated in, the challenges of a crisis decade, while simultaneously making a case for a broader understanding of capitalism’s survival.

Histories of the interaction between business and the New Deal have emphasized a movement from concord, to doubt, to full-blown animosity by 1935–36. The advent of the American Liberty League is often seen as emblematic. For J.P. Morgan & Co. the New Deal was fracturing – in its banking business, in its politics, and among its partners. While the Pecora hearings dominated American media in May-June 1933, Glass–Steagall was the fulcrum on which the Morgan bank and the New Deal pivoted. Glass–Steagall dictated that J.P. Morgan & Co. must make a choice between commercial and investment banking. From the late summer of 1933 Morgan efforts were bent to securing its revision. Unable to secure modification of Glass–Steagall, the Morgan partners split on their appreciation of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Jack Morgan became a strident critic, while Leffingwell argued that the New Deal had saved capitalism. Simultaneously, the partners, reeling, became ever more cautious as bankers, embracing a conservatism that reflected their hope that the provisions of Glass–Steagall would not be implemented. When this failed, they created Morgan Stanley as an independent investment bank as a temporary adaptation.