Nowhere was the transition from church-based aid to federal welfare state brought about by the Great Depression more dramatic than in the South. For a moment, the southern Protestant establishment turned to face the suffering that plantation capitalism pushed behind its image of planter's hatsand hoopskirts. When starving white farmers marched into an Arkansas town to demand food for their dying children and when priests turned away hungry widows and orphans because they were no needier than anyone else, southern clergy of both races spoke with one voice to say that they had done allthey could. It was time for a higher power to intervene. They looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt.When Roosevelt promised a new deal for the "forgotten man," Americans cheered, and when he took office, churches and private agencies gratefully turned much of the responsibility for welfare and social reform over to the state. Yet, argues historian Allison Collis Greene, Roosevelt's New Dealthreatened plantation capitalism even while bending to it. Black southern churches worked to secure benefits for their own communities while white churches divided over loyalties to Roosevelt and Jim Crow. Frustrated by their failure and fractured by divisions over the New Deal, leaders in the majorwhite Protestant denominations surrendered their moral authority in the South. Although the Protestant establishment retained a central role in American life for decades after the Depression, its slip from power made room for upstart Pentecostals and independent evangelicals, who emphasized personalrather than social salvation.

In the 1930s, Catholics helped create Franklin Roosevelts New Deal coalition; they remained a loyal constituency of the Democratic Party for decades. In 1960, Catholics and Democrats united to elect John F. Kennedy, Americas first Catholic preside...

American Catholics had long been a crucial voting bloc in the United States, particularly in the Democratic Party. With the nation mired in economic depression and the threat of war looming across the Atlantic, in 1932 Catholics had to weigh, perhaps more seriously than ever before, political allegiance versus religious affiliation. Many chose party over religion, electing Frankiln D. Roosevelt, a Protestant. No stone goes unturned in this volume, which grew out of an international conference in 1998 held at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, New York. From the multiplicity of Catholic responses to the New Deal, through Roosevelt's diplomatic relationship with the Vatican during the Second World War, and on to the response of the United States and the Vatican to the Holocaust, this book expands our understanding of a fascinating and largely unexplored aspect of Roosevelt's presidency. A complex blend of religion and politics, with the added ingredients of economics and war, this diverse, insightful collection promises an intellectual feast for those with an interest in virtually any aspect of American history during the Roosevelt era.

The New Deal shaped our nation's politics for decades, and was seen by many as tantamount to the "American Way" itself. Now, in this superb compact history, Eric Rauchway offers an informed account of the New Deal and the Great Depression, illuminating its successes and failures. Rauchway first describes how the roots of the Great Depression lay in America's post-war economic policies--described as "laissez-faire with a vengeance"--which in effect isolated our nation from the world economy just when the world needed the United States most. He shows how the magnitude of the resulting economic upheaval, and the ineffectiveness of the old ways of dealing with financial hardships, set the stage for Roosevelt's vigorous (and sometimes unconstitutional) Depression-fighting policies. Indeed, Rauchway stresses that the New Deal only makes sense as a response to this global economic disaster. The book examines a key sampling of New Deal programs, ranging from the National Recovery Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the Public Works Administration and Social Security, revealing why some worked and others did not. In the end, Rauchway concludes, it was the coming of World War II that finally generated the political will to spend the massive amounts of public money needed to put Americans back to work. And only the Cold War saw the full implementation of New Deal policies abroad--including the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Today we can look back at the New Deal and, for the first time, see its full complexity. Rauchway captures this complexity in a remarkably short space, making this book an ideal introduction to one of the great policy revolutions in history. About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, and Literary Theory to History. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given topic. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how it has developed and influenced society. Whatever the area of study, whatever the topic that fascinates the reader, the series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

The alliance of the industrial labor movement with the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt has, perhaps more than any other factor, shaped the course of class relations in the United States over the ensuing forty years. Much has been written on the interests that were thereby served, and those that were coopted. In this detailed examination of the strategies pursued by both radical labor and the capitalist class in the struggle for industrial unionism, David Milton argues that while radical social change and independent political action were traded off by the industrial working class for economic rights, this was neither automatic nor inevitable. Rather, the outcome was the result of a fierce struggle in which capital fought labor and both fought for control over government labor policy. And, as he demonstrates, crucial to the outcome was the specific nature of the political coalitions contending for supremacy. In analyzing the politics of this struggle, Milton presents a fine description of the major strikes, beginning in 1933-1934, that led to the formation of the CIO and the great industrial unions. He looks closely at the role of the radical political groups, including the Communist Party, the Trotskyists, and the Socialist Party, and provides an enlightening discussion of their vulnerability during the red-baiting era. He also examines the battle between the AFL and the CIO for control of the labor movement, the alliance of the AFL with business interests, and the role of the Catholic Church. Finally, he shows how the extraordinary adeptness of President Roosevelt in allying with labor while at the same time exploiting divisions within the movement was essential to the successful channeling of social revolt into economic demands.