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Letters To Celie Carradina Before The Great Depression

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In 1935, Mrs. Olga Ferk wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ask “how long is this rotten condition going to last…I am at the end of the Rope. The Rich get Richer, and the poor can to go – H – that’s what it looks like to me…Let’s have some results” (Cited in Cohen, p. 252). This letter, only one among hundreds of thousands written to the president, showed that citizens increasingly looked to the federal government for help. Furthermore, the workers, excited about the New Deal and believed Roosevelt was the closest thing to a savior they could ever get and believed he was really close to them and would hear their complaints, which led to more of these letters to FDR. One of these letters was from a woman named Celie Carradina …show more content…

Welfare benefits, such as permanent employment, extensive security (health insurance), internal labor markets, and fringe benefits aimed to attend to and satisfy workers. For example, the employee stock ownership program allowed workers to buy liberty bonds and stocks from employers, vacation plan allows employees to get paid vacation, and group insurance. These programs provided by the employers, no doubt helped workers, but they also tied workers to their employers. The employers further extended the welfare capitalist programs into creating social amenities for neighborhoods of workers and their families. However, welfare capitalism did not work in the ways employers hoped it would; for example, industrial workers in Chicago still faced unemployment due to repeated downturns in the business cycle and conditions of workers remained substandard (Cohen, p. 184). Furthermore, due to the great depression, industrial workers realized that welfare capitalism was unpredictable as a result of their frequent layoffs and employers mismanagement. Since, the great depression led workers to see that employers only valued welfare capitalism when it was convenient and cheap. By 1933, more than half of the U.S. Steel’s mill hands had been laid off. Nonwhite workers, including black workers and Mexican workers were particularly vulnerable (Cohen, p. 240). This further doomed the …show more content…

Even black workers who displayed a strong loyalty to the republicans in the 1920s, voted more democratic than ever before in the election of 1936 (Cohen, p. 258 – 259). After getting elected, Roosevelt proposed many acts and laws later passed by the congress in his New deal to help economic recovery during the Great Depression. Laws such as Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA, 1933) which helped with funds for workers, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC, 1933) which guaranteed deposits up to a certain, Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA, 1933) which was designed to boost agricultural prices by increasing surpluses, National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA, 1933) which is to help stimulate economic recovery by regulating industries for fair wages and prices, Social Security Act (1933) which helped create pension payments to retired workers, and much more. Many people praised Roosevelt for this New Deal; for example, a hundredth anniversary book celebrating Polish contributions to Chicago, praised Roosevelt saying “with the aid of our splendid President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose humanitarian interests resulted in HOLC – Home Owners’ Loan Corporation -, and other security laws pertaining to homes, investments, and savings, many

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You touched on a critical point in your forum, as of why workers went on strike. While poverty played a significant role, in 1877, railroad employees experienced a significant pay cut, which sparked the Great Railway Strike, triggering violence and a shutdown of the railways lasting nearly six weeks. Next, the Pullman strike began with railroad owners becoming increasingly wealthier, while none of the profits trickled down to the employees. The labor walk-outs encompassed the substantial divide between social classes. Hence, rich businessmen were increasing their profits, while poor workers often remained stagnate with low wages and company issued paycuts.

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“The Great Depression upset the survival strategies workers had developed during the 1920s and forced new solutions.” (364) Many workers dependent on churches to help them survive the depression could no longer depend on them because the churches and ethnic groups could not support the sheer number of people in need. The elimination of the many Welfare capitalisms programs put in place by companies during the 1920s made laborers looking other to other places to get help. Before many people were ashamed of excepting handouts and charity because they felt embarrassed by it, but soon workers were no longer ashamed of accepting government aid, which leads to a new behavior that helped give rise to the Congress of Industrial Workers and national unionization. “Workers in Chicago and elsewhere in the nation were looking to the federal government as they had never done before.”

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In their opinion, the employees were not employed in interstate commerce, so their wages had nothing to do with it either (Document F). They also thought that the government had no right to give workers the right to self-organize and break the law (Document G). The authority of the federal government expanded, and FDR was, in a sense, abusing the power he had. Roosevelt’s administration increased the role of the federal government in the economy. His New Deal programs were more successful in empowering the government than lightening the effect of the Depression.

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We were persuaded to vote the Republican ticket four years ago that our wages might be maintained.” This shows that mostly employees were really upset on the part of manufactures toward the reduction of wages. Under the management of Mr. Henry Clay Frick, the employees had wiped out organization in the coke regions. The relationship between management and labor became extremely stressful. That was the reason why the capitalist had to lower steel and coke prices, because the construction was really low.

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From 1929-1939 there was a devastating dust bowl and depression sweeping through the United States in the wake of World War I, forcing the nation to search everywhere for a beneficial solution to the crippling unemployment, horrible distribution of wealth, and consequent pain. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president from 1933 to 1945, was one such person who searched for a solution, and started the New Deal, a radical theory for the time period. Although early on, FDR tried to distance himself from radicalism, as seen when he called out the strikers at the Republic Steel Mill for turning against the government, the source of help in the despair, his proposed legislation did not reflect this anti-radicalism. He began his presidency even, with

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During his first term in office, he took on programs and policies to relieve the effects of the depression, collectively known as the New Deal. During this time, many social policies were passed to specifically aid the working class. Some of the acts Roosevelt implemented were the Glass-Steagall Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relation Board, and Social Security. All of these acts were put in place to aid the working class, and prevent the severity of future depressions. The outcome of the New Deal gave a new role for the federal government, which is the partial responsibility for the people’s financial

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Labor and the US Government from 1890-1945 A key aspect of this nation’s history lies in the ever-shifting relationship between its government and its common man, most specifically its labor workers. This relationship plays a crucial role in the understanding of the changes that took place in America between 1890 and 1945. The changing relationship between government and labor workers in the United States between 1890 and 1945 demonstrates a period of unrest and a transitional period in which the focus shifted towards the working class as a result of the greed and corruption of 19th century business elite , as can be seen in the labor strikes requiring government intervention of the late 19th century, the progressives of the early 20th century

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These fixes came in way of individual and group actions, as the economy changed in America, the progressives were hard at work responding to the change in political system. A book titled “The Jungle” led to President Roosevelt’s creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. It wasn’t enough to have words that described the conditions in which people worked in, so a photographer name Louis Hines, began taking pictures. The photographs that Hines took, led to American being face to face with over two million children under 15 working in mines for wages. Workers began organizing unions to get corporations to raise their wages, ultimately leading to employers opening their eyes to the fact that a great way to mitigate the problems associated with industrialism is to pay their workers more (Mayhew, 1998).

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Beginning with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, the New Deal was passed in the context of reformism and rationalism as the United States proceeded through the Great Depression. The American people looked to the President to instill reform policies to help direct the country out of an economic depression, and thus often sought to abandon the society that existed before the Great Depression. Roosevelt instituted New Deal policies to attempt to combat this period of economic decline, many of which were successful and appealed to the American people’s desires. President Roosevelt’s New Deal is often criticized for being excessively socialistic in nature, thus causing dramatic changes in the fundamental structure of the United

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552 Words | 3 Pages

Roosevelt also passed the Federal Emergency Relief Act, which provided grants for those in need instead of loans previously offered by Hoover. One of the most well-known polices created by Roosevelt to help improve the economy was the Social Security Act of 1935, which by created a payroll tax that allowed people to have retirement

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800 Words | 4 Pages

Roosevelt’s responses to the Great Depression was effective mainly due to the fact that the percent of unemployment decreased during his time as president. For instance, in document F, the diagram explores how in the following years from 1929- 1943 there is an increase and decrease in unemployment. The diagram highlights how after the year of 1938, the percent of unemployment decreased more than fifty percent.(Doc. F). Therefore, the greatest percent of unemployment being decreased occurred right after “Fair Labor, Standard Act of 1938”.

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872 Words | 4 Pages

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During the Progressive Era, most employers were not concerned with workers rights and focused more on profit than human rights or safety. The poor working class, as well as immigrants who had worked in the United States for a while, became infuriated over the unfair treatment and working conditions of which they suffered. Hugh Rockoff explains, “…industrialization had alienated the workingman…” (Rockoff 747).

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The author, Mark Twain, wrote an adventure book titled “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. The story takes place in St. Petersburg, Missouri. It is on the banks of the lower Mississippi that we are introduced to the first setting. In the fictitious town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, Huck Finn currently resides there at the beginning of the novel. The story’s time setting is Before the Civil War; roughly 1835–1845; Twain said the novel was set forty to fifty years before the time of its publication.

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