My interest in political-based poetry of American history means I find all sorts of weird stuff, or more accurately, I report on what others have found if I don’t find it myself. Such as this slight bit of rhyme from the papers of forester David Mason. One of the founders of sustainable forestry, Mason was […]
Tag: new deal
On July 5, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act. This groundbreaking piece of legislation revolutionized the relationship between the federal government an
On June 25, 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. This groundbreaking piece of legislation, while flawed as almost all progressive legislation must be to pass
On May 6, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 7034 creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Passed and funded by Congress in the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act of 1935, the WPA became among the two most important federal jobs programs of the New Deal and a model for how government investment in the […]
On April 12, 1934, workers at the Electric Auto-Lite Company in Toledo walked off the job in a strike that united unionized labor and the unemployed, creating a social movement that scared capitalists
Alf Landon’s speech opposing Social Security in 1936 could have been made by Paul Ryan today. These are a few reasons why I called this law unjust and stupidly drafted. There is a further import
On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, bringing the modern welfare state to the American people and providing the nation’s poor long-desired old age insurance. FDR signing the Social Security Act. The nation’s elderly had long lived with the potential of late-life poverty. The nation’s lack of a welfare […]
On May 26, 1937, United Auto Workers organizers, including future president Walter Reuther, walked toward the Ford Motor Company’s giant River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan to hand out pro-u
During the discussion around my piece calling for international safety standards at the workplace with real enforcement teeth that could implicate American corporations subcontracting with unscrupulou
On this date in 1937, Chicago police opened fire on strikers in front of the Republic Steel mill, killing 10 workers. Part of the “Little Steel” strike, where smaller steel corporations refused to follow U.S. Steel into signing contracts with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (later United Steelworkers of America), the Memorial Day Massacre was […]
When discussing the Flint sit-down strike of 1937 last weekend, I noted John Nance Garner’s support for using soldiers to bust the strike. It reminded of just how awful Garner was. And how close
Jason Scott Smith gives us a primer of how the federal government once created a huge number of jobs in a short time and suggests the potential for this again.