AMERICAN VOICES - Program 4

00:00	Titles
00.15	MYRON BUXTON: I saw Franklin Roosevelt myself once. It was several years ago, he was on the campaign trail; he was traveling around, making speeches. I thought he looked mighty fine up there on the platform, all friendly and self-controlled. I said to myself, he’s got my ticket.
00.52	COMMENTARY: In October 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt toured America, campaigning for the Presidency. In the face of the worst Depression America had ever known, he offered hope, promising a New Deal for the America people. We have nothing to fear, he’d declare, but fear itself. But how successful would his New Deal prove in tackling the challenges ahead?
01.26	This program reconstructs the testimonies of three Americans who witnessed the Roosevelt years. We know their words because at the end of the decade they were each interviewed by the Federal Writers Project, an oral history project paid for by the US government. Ten thousand Americans were interviewed in all, their lives, their experiences written down, filed away in the Library of Congress. Ten thousand American Voices.
02.10	This is Newburyport, Massachussetts, a coastal town north of Boston. It’s a comfortable place. It’s always been a comfortable place, at least on the surface. But in the 1930s the Depression found victims here, like anywhere. Myron Buxton, a draughtsman, was one of them.
02.46	MYRON BUXTON: I used to be on the town payroll. I did surveying work, I did the sewers. And then the Crash came along, they made the cut-backs, and the work just dried up. I was looking after my sick mother at the time. My whole life started slipping backwards. Wasn’t just me. I could name you people, educated people, who lost their jobs, found themselves with nothing. You got to learn, there’s two kinds of folks in this world, the kind on top, and the rest of us.
03.41	COMMENTARY: In early 1933, when Roosevelt won the election, there were 13 million unemployed in America. The banks were in collapse, workers and bosses in conflict, America’s farmers were suffering.
03.59	The outgoing President, Herbert Hoover, had argued against government intervention, even in such times of crisis. He thought of Americans as rugged individualists, thriving best on their own. But America had seen the results of his philosophy. After three years of Depression, the joke went, Americans weren’t so much rugged as ragged.
04.34	MYRON BUXTON: I mean, this country was like a runaway train. You can’t let a nation of this size go running wild and not expect it to dent the tracks somewhere. We all thought the time had come, we needed some sort of planning just to stay on the rails.
04.48	*ROOSEVELT* (SYNC): I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States…
05.02	COMMENTARY: Roosevelt swept to power because he promised to get involved - to use the power of the government to solve the crisis.
05.10	*ROOSEVELT* (SYNC): … and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.
05.14	COMMENTARY: His administration began with a flurry of activity: emergency bills pushed through Congress, to restore confidence in the shattered system: a billion dollars loaned to private banks, loans for the farmers, loans for home-owners threatened with eviction because of their debts.
05.37	And - because hunger was not debatable - there was relief at last for the unemployed: five hundred million dollars in 1933 alone. And the first of many job creation schemes, four million people, taken from the breadlines, recruited into a vast Labor Army. Under military discipline they exchanged civilian life for work in the national parks. In return, they received one dollar a day.
	SONG: Exactly eight o’clock; Say, where’s my other sock? I’ve got a job, so help me, Bob, I gotta get up and go to work… Must be there on the dot; I hope my coffee’s hot – Bring on those eggs, those scrambled eggs – I gotta get up and go to work..
06.36	COMMENTARY: Within three years, New Deal agencies employed eight million Americans on public works projects. In Newburyport, Myron Buxton found work locally with the WPA, the Work Projects Administration. It was they that built the wall around the town cemetery. It was they that planted the trees giving shade to the main street. Many of the sidewalks in the town still bear their mark. Myron Buxton was based on the first floor of this building on Federal Street.
07.14	MYRON BUXTON: You know this used to be a fire station horse-house? The smell’s not too bad as long as you don’t go opening the trap in the floor there. This is where the boys come each day for the work roster. Sometimes there’s not much on, maybe shovelling leaves, or shifting rubble for some building contractor, but sometimes, we got a project on, like the High School everyone round here’s so proud of. Brick by brick, we built that; didn’t cost the city a cent.
07.46	COMMENTARY: In all, across America, the WPA built 116 thousand buildings, 78 thousand bridges, and 650 thousand miles of road. In part the idea was economic; if you give people work, they have money to spend, so the economy gets moving. But also, Roosevelt believed in the dignity of labour; he knew how unemployment dragged people down; he saw it as the government’s duty to provide the means for people to earn their keep.
	*NEWSREEL* (SYNC): Today, Depression is a fading memory. Millions of men and women have found employment, and with it confidence and hope!
08.42	COMMENTARY: What Roosevelt had begun - and what people responded to in Roosevelt - was a new kind of government. One that allied itself not with Big Business, but with what Roosevelt called the ‘little man’, the ‘one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed’. His ‘fireside chats’ - regular broadcasts to the nation - became a symbol of the New Deal itself. The American government was no longer remote, aloof; now it was connected, involved, concerned with the welfare of each and every citizen.
09.36	*ROOSEVELT* (SYNC): I like to think of our country as one home in which the interests of each member are bound up with the happiness of all. We ought to know by now that the welfare of your family or of mine cannot be bought at the sacrifice of our neighbour’s happiness, that our well-being depends in the long run upon the well-being of our neighbour. The ‘good neighbour idea’ needs to be put into practise in our community relationships.
	COMMENTARY: One testimony in the files of the Federal Writers Project describes a WPA worker from Asheville, in North Carolina. Every day she’d walk eight miles up into the mountains. Her job was to bring the vision of the New Deal to some of the most remote of all America’s poor. Her name was Nannie Carson.
10.30	NANNIE CARSON: I reckon my supervisors told you about me. They like to tell how I walk every day to teach some illiterates. There’s a whole community living on a ridge. They’re very poor, and they’ve intermarried until they’re all kin to each other.The main family is the Hackles, and the name of their settlement is Hackletown. The mountains cut Hackletown off from the good farming sections, and the highway and the roads goin’ into it are so bad the school buses can’t come within three miles of it. So the people are real degraded, real ignorant and suspicious. I mean they don’t live so far from my home in Asheville, but, you know, they’re just plain wild.
11.15	COMMENTARY: The Hackles of Hackletown didn’t owe their poverty to the Depression. Life here in the backwoods hadn’t changed much for decades. And these were proud people, fiercely independent. They hadn’t asked for help. For Nannie Carson to barge in here didn’t just show courage: it showed how seriously this New Deal government took its obligations.
11.50	NANNIE CARSON: I’m a mountain woman myself - I was never one to be stopped my hardships. But I’ll confess, the first time I visited the Hackles, I was so nervous. The woman, Rena Hackle, was out in her yard. When she saw me comin’, she ran in, shut the door. When I knocked, she opened the door, just a crack. The air was foul inside; I almost choked. Her children were just crying out for medical attention. Didn’t get very far that first day. But I kept on going back, kept on being friendly. I was able to show her how to wash and mend their clothes, clean up her house, let some air in. I been teaching her to read. They’re not one to praise you much. But once old Larry Hackle said to me: ‘I ain’t never heerd nobuddy say nothing’ agin’ you or agin’ yore work’. Which I think is a kind of praise.
13.06	COMMENTARY: In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected with a larger share of the vote than any President in over a hundred years. Judged on this fact alone, clearly the New Deal had made a profound impact on the American people. But what impact was it making on the Depression? Unemployment still stood at nine million, creeping back to 10 million by 1938. It seemed, despite the vast expense of the New Deal, it was failing to kickstart the stagnant economy.
13.48	And already, an anti-New Deal backlash had begun. Congressmen representing the individual states had begun to question whether the New Deal didn’t give central government too much power. They feared the New Deal threatened age-old American principles, of free trade and competition. The Supreme Court ruled on aspects of New Deal policy, and judged it unconstitutional.
14.20	One of the most controversial of the New Deal agencies operated west of Asheville, over the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee. Here, the Tennessee Valley Authority, formed in 1933, was spending vast amounts of public money, building a series of massive dams, controlling the turbulent Tennessee river, ending years of flooding and topsoil erosion. For its supporters – like Lorena Hickok – the sheer scale of the TVA was electrifying.
15.14	LORENA HICKOK: I tell you, what’s happening there, it’s like a Promised Land, bathed in golden sunlight, rising out of the grey shadows of want and squalor. I mean, the Tennessee Valley was about the poorest region in the nation. But you go there now, you’ll see tens of thousands of men building in timber and steel and concrete. I didn’t know much about it before I went, but I spent a week driving around. I saw the Norris Dam near Knoxville; and then I went down south, to the Wilson Dam in Alabama, And then 20 miles on up the river I saw where the workmen were drilling in rock to lay the foundations of the Wheeler Dam. And the whole thing was so exciting; like the adventure stories I used to read as a child. I mean, you’re probably thinking, ‘Oh, Lorena, come down to earth!’, but that’s the way the Tennessee Valley affects one these days.
16.13	COMMENTARY: The TVA was controversial because never before had the federal government wielded so much influence within one state. When the dams were finished, the TVA used the power of the river to provide cheap electricity, not just for Tennessee but parts of Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, a federal monopoly ignoring private competition. Meanwhile the TVA dabbled in every aspect of local life, transforming the lives of local people in a way that seemed almost ‘socialist’.
17.06	LORENA HICKOK: When they’re not building they’re studying - farming, trades, the art of living - preparing themselves for the fuller lives they’ll lead when the building work is done. It’s as if TVA’s not just a federal agency, it’s an empire, you know? And its potential is so extraordinary it makes one gasp. Decent housing, decent wages; a new kind of industrial life. And all because the government’s in control. I mean, gosh, what possibilities.
17.39	COMMENTARY: But not every American shared Lorena’s enthusiasm for this kind of social experiment. So much power in the hands of central government, so much public money at stake. In 1936, Roosevelt approached Congress with plans for seven more projects, each on the same scale as TVA. But Congress turned him down, refused him funding. The New Deal - begun as a stop-gap measure to help the economy - had become a vast bureaucracy, it’s agencies now involved in social work, in healthcare, in schooling and literacy, in art projects, cultural projects. Herbert Hoover spoke for many conservative Americans when he declared, enough was enough.
18.35	HERBERT HOOVER (SYNC): The cost of the New Deal threatens to exceed that of the Great War. Every one of you knows instance after instance of waste and folly in your own city and village. It appears day after day in the headlines of your papers. Multiply it by the thousands of other towns and communities in the United States, and you get the appaling total.
	COMMENTARY: In Newburyport, Massachussetts, Myron Buxton felt the backlash against the New Deal more than most. He took his interviewer on a tour of this comfortable town; he showed him the Dalton Club, where the wealthy elite sipped their brandies and condemned the money wasted, they said, on the WPA.
19.30	MYRON BUXTON: Trouble is, a town like this, they don’t care how bad things get for the rest of us as long as the taxes stay low. Bad times come along, they just shield their eyes. Those of us out of work, they say we’re just a bunch of bums or drunks, they say the WPA’s just a racket, set up to give a bunch of loafers steady pay to indulge their vices. I tell you, the people’ve got the money just want to see this as a beautiful horse and buggy town, without even the horse buns on the street.
20.13	COMMENTARY: It goes without saying that Roosevelt wasn’t a socialist. He wanted to save capitalism in America, not undermine it. So, in his second term he bowed to public pressure, he changed the tune of the New Deal, reigning back the excesses of the early years. The WPA found its numbers reduced, angering those who depended upon it most. America found herself asking the old question - whose responsibility were these unfortunates, the nation’s, or their own?
21.00	MYRON BUXTON: I mean it goes without saying I’d rather not be on the WPA. I’d rather have a real job, sure. For a long time I didn’t even tell my mother. But then the WPA cheque came throught the door and the jig was up. She felt terrible - but what could I do? At least this way it’s not charity. At least I can say I worked for my money. I can hold my head up, I’m not loafing, I’m not trying to cheat in any way. You take this away from me, I got nothing.
21.50	COMMENTARY: As it turned out, it wasn’t Roosevelt that ended the Depression, but the Second World War. A War which mobilized the nation, the fight against Japan and Nazi Germany reducing unemployment as Roosevelt never could. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was never voted out of office. He won an unprecedented four elections, and died in 1945, just a month before final victory in Europe was won. His legacy divides America to this day. The welfare system. The tax burden on the rich. American politicians still argue the balance, between a hands-on government protecting the poor, and a hands-off government, respecting the liberty of the individual citizen. But those that had suffered in the Great Depression knew which side they were on. As Myron Buxton reflected back in 1938, they had much for which to be grateful.
23.07	MYRON BUXTON: All I can say is, from where I’m standing things are better now. I’m not work shy, I’m not a bum. I’m just a guy that needed a break. All the President’s trying to do is to pull the United States out of a rut. I mean, you can’t blame a man for trying, can you?