Tara Mitchell Mielnik fills a significant gap in the history of the New Deal South by examining the lives of the men of South Carolina's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) who from 1933 to 1942 built sixteen state parks, all of which still exist today. Enhanced with revealing interviews with former state CCC members, Mielnik's illustrated account provides a unique exploration into the Great Depression in the Palmetto State and the role that South Carolina's state parks continue to play as architectural legacies of a monumental New Deal program. In 1933, thousands of unemployed young men and World War I veterans were given the opportunity to work when Emergency Conservation Work (ECW), one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs, came to South Carolina. Renamed the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1937, the program was responsible for planting millions of trees in reforestation projects, augmenting firefighting activities, stringing much-needed telephone lines for fire prevention throughout the state, and terracing farmland and other soil conservation projects. The most visible legacies of the CCC in South Carolina are many of the state's national forests, recreational areas, and parks. Prior to the work of the CCC, South Carolina had no state parks, but, from 1933 to 1942, the CCC built sixteen. Mielnik's briskly paced and informative study gives voice to the young men who labored in the South Carolina CCC and honors the legacy of the parks they built and the conservation and public recreation values these sites fostered for modern South Carolina.

JACK IRBY HAYES, JR., revisits the South Carolina of the 1930s to determine the impact of federal programs on the state's economy, politics, culture, and citizenry. He traces the waxing and waning of support for programs such as Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and concludes that the modernization of South Carolina would have been delayed without their intervention. Suggesting that the New Deal hastened the end of one-party political domination, Hayes proposes that it also initiated a new era of modernized agriculture and banking practices, rural electrical service, labor restrictions, relief programs, and cultural resurgence. Hayes finds that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's initiatives enjoyed widespread support among South Carolinians. He documents the welcoming of agricultural and erosion controls, welfare relief, child labor laws, minimum wage requirements, public construction, state parks, and massive hydroelectric projects. He also credits the New Deal with sparking an intellectual reawakening and a restoration of faith in capitalism, democracy, and progress. But Hayes demonstrates that

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, Atlanta had the South's largest population of college-educated African Americans. The dictates of Jim Crow meant that these men and women were almost entirely excluded from public life, but as Karen Ferguson demonstrates, Roosevelt's New Deal opened unprecedented opportunities for black Atlantans struggling to achieve full citizenship. Black reformers, often working within federal agencies as social workers and administrators, saw the inclusion of African Americans in New Deal social welfare programs as a chance to prepare black Atlantans to take their rightful place in the political and social mainstream. They also worked to build a constituency they could mobilize for civil rights, in the process facilitating a shift from elite reform to the mass mobilization that marked the postwar black freedom struggle. Although these reformers' efforts were an essential prelude to civil rights activism, Ferguson argues that they also had lasting negative repercussions, embedded as they were in the politics of respectability. By attempting to impose bourgeois behavioral standards on the black community, elite reformers stratified it into those they determined deserving to participate in federal social welfare programs and those they consigned to remain at the margins of civic life.

In an era defined by political polarization, both major U.S. parties have come to share a remarkably similar understanding of the education system as well as a set of punitive strategies for fixing it. Combining an intellectual history of social policy with a sweeping history of the educational system, Daniel S. Moak looks beyond the rise of neoliberalism to find the origin of today's education woes in Great Society reforms. In the wake of World War II, a coalition of thinkers gained dominance in U.S. policymaking. They identified educational opportunity as the ideal means of addressing racial and economic inequality by incorporating individuals into a free market economy. The passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 secured an expansive federal commitment to this goal. However, when social problems failed to improve, the underlying logic led policymakers to hold schools responsible. Moak documents how a vision of education as a panacea for society's flaws led us to turn away from redistributive economic policies and down the path to market-based reforms, No Child Left Behind, mass school closures, teacher layoffs, and other policies that plague the public education system to this day.

In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration--unwilling to antagonize a powerful southern congressional bloc--refused to endorse legislation that openly sought to improve political, economic, and social conditions for African Americans. Instead, as historian Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff shows, the administration recognized and celebrated African Americ...

As the people and economy of the United States struggled to recover during the Great Depression, 42 towns in North Carolina would benefit directly from the $83 million the federal government allocated for public art as part of the New Deal. The result was some of the state's most memorable murals, sculptures, reliefs, paintings, oils, and frescoes, most of which were installed in post offices and courthouses. This book is the only record of all of the North Carolina public art works under the program. It provides in-depth accounts of the works themselves and the artists who created them. Photographs of all of the buildings that originally received the art, the works themselves, and almost all of the 41 artists are provided. An appendix describes federal art projects, 1933-1943. There are detailed footnotes, an extensive bibliography, and an index.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as president, the South was unmistakably the most disadvantaged part of the nation. The region's economy was the weakest, its educational level the lowest, its politics the most rigid, and its laws and social mores the most racially slanted. Moreover, the region was prostrate from the effects of the Great Depression. Roosevelt's New Deal effected significant changes on the southern landscape, challenging many traditions and laying the foundations for subsequent alterations in the southern way of life. At the same time, firmly entrenched values and institutions militated against change and blunted the impact of federal programs. In The South and the New Deal, Roger Biles examines the New Deal's impact on the rural and urban South, its black and white citizens, its poor, and its politics. He shows how southern leaders initially welcomed and supported the various New Deal measures but later opposed a continuation or expansion of these programs because they violated regional convictions and traditions. Nevertheless, Biles concludes, the New Deal, coupled with the domestic effects of World War II, set the stage for a remarkable postwar transformation in the affairs of the region. The post-World War II Sunbelt boom has brought Dixie more fully into the national mainstream. To what degree did the New Deal disrupt southern distinctiveness? Biles answers this and other questions and explores the New Deal's enduring legacy in the region.