Gml 21

Front 1

''public works revolution''

Back 1

The Roosevelt administration spent far more money on building roads, dams, airports, bridges, and housing than any other activity in the 1930s.

Front 2

bank holiday

Back 2

By March 1933, banking had been suspended in a majority of the states—that is, people could not gain access to money in their bank accounts. Roosevelt declared a “bank holiday,” temporarily halting all bank operations.

Front 3

the Hundred Days

Back 3

Extraordinarily productive first three months of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in which a special session of Congress enacted fifteen of his New Deal proposals.

Front 4

National Recovery Administration

Back 4

The National Recovery Administration (NRA), created to work with groups of business leaders to establish industry codes that set standards for output, prices, and working conditions.

Front 5

Public Works Administration

Back 5

One section of the National Industrial Recovery Act created the Public Works Administration (PWA), with an appropriation of $3.3 billion. Directed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, it built roads, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities.

Front 6

Agricultural Adjustment Act

Back 6

New Deal legislation that established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) to improve agricultural prices by limiting market sup- plies; declared unconstitutional in United States v. Butler (1936).

Front 7

Dust Bowl

Back 7

Great Plains counties where millions of tons of topsoil were blown away from parched farmland in the 1930s; massive migration of farm families followed.

Front 8

sit-down strike

Back 8

Tactic adopted by labor unions in the mid- and late 1930s, whereby striking workers refused to leave factories, making production impossible; proved highly effective in the organizing drive of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Front 9

Share Our Wealth movement

Back 9

Launched in 1934, its slogan was 'Every Man a King'; the group called for the confiscation of most of the wealth of the richest Americans in order to finance an immediate grant of $5,000 and a guaranteed job and annual income for all citizens.

Front 10

Townsend plan

Back 10

Dr. Francis Townsend, a California physician, won wide support for a plan by which the government would make a monthly payment of $200 to older Americans, with the requirement that they spend it immediately.

Front 11

Rural Electrification Agency

Back 11

Created to bring electric power to homes that lacked it—80 percent of farms were still without electricity in 1934—in part to enable more Americans to purchase household appliances.

Front 12

Works Progress Administration

Back 12

Part of the Second New Deal, it provided jobs for millions of the unemployed on construction and arts projects.

Front 13

Social Security Act

Back 13

Created the Social Security system with provisions for a retirement pension, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and public assistance (welfare).

Front 14

court-packing plan

Back 14

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s failed 1937 attempt to increase the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices from nine to fifteen in order to save his Second New Deal programs from constitutional challenges.

Front 15

minimum wage laws

Back 15

Beginning in March 1937, the Court suddenly revealed a new willingness to support economic regulation by both the federal government and the states. It upheld a minimum wage law of the state of Washington similar to the New York measure it had declared unconstitutional a year earlier.

Front 16

Indian New Deal

Back 16

Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the administration launched an “Indian New Deal.” Collier ended the policy of forced assimilation and allowed Indians unprecedented cultural autonomy. He replaced boarding schools meant to eradicate the tribal heritage of Indian children with schools on reservations, and dramatically increased spending on Indian health.

Front 17

the Popular Front

Back 17

At the height of the Popular Front—a period during the mid-1930s when the Communist Party sought to ally itself with socialists and New Dealers in movements for social change, urging reform of the capitalist system rather than revolution—Communists gained an unprecedented respectability.

Front 18

''Scottsboro boys''

Back 18

A case in which nine young black men were arrested for the rape of two white women in Alabama in 1931. Despite the weakness of the evidence against the “Scottsboro boys” and the fact that one of the two accusers recanted, Alabama authorities three times put them on trial and three times won convictions. Landmark Supreme Court decisions overturned the first two verdicts and established legal principles that greatly expanded the definition of civil liberties—that defendants have a constitutional right to effective legal representation, and that states cannot systematically exclude blacks from juries. But the Court allowed the third set of convictions to stand, which led to prison sentences for five of the defendants.

Front 19

Smith Act

Back 19

This legislation made it a federal crime to ''teach, advocate, or encourage'' the overthrow of the government.

Front 20

House Un-American Activities Committee

Back 20

Formed in 1938 to investigate subversives in the government and holders of radical ideas more generally; best-known investigations were of Hollywood notables and of former State Department official Alger Hiss, who was accused in 1948 of espionage and Communist Party membership. Abolished in 1975.