#the ccc was an actual organization during the great depression

[hheckkingart]

I'm back in the fucking building guys.

This is my tfsona, Anatexis!

[theculturedmarxist]

My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad’s first memories was seeing his sister’s tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever. In 1923, my dad was hit by a car and spent two weeks in a hospital with a fractured skull as well as a lacerated thumb. His immigrant parents had no medical insurance, but the driver of the car gave his father $50 toward the medical bills. The only lasting effect was the scar my father carried for the rest of his life on his right thumb.

The year 1929 brought the Great Depression and lean times. My father’s father had left the family, so my dad, then 12, had to pitch in. He got a newspaper route, which he kept for four years, quitting high school after tenth grade so he could earn money for the family. In 1935, like millions of other young men of that era, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a creation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal that offered work on environmental projects of many kinds. He battled forest fires in Oregon for two years before returning to his family and factory work. In 1942, he was drafted into the Army, going back to a factory job when World War II ended. Times grew a little less lean in 1951 when he became a firefighter, after which he felt he could afford to buy a house and start a family.

I’m offering all this personal history as the context for a prediction of my dad’s that, for obvious reasons, came to my mind again recently. When I was a teenager, he liked to tell me: “I had it tough in the beginning and easy in the end. You, Willy, have had it easy in the beginning, but will likely have it tough in the end.” His prophecy stayed with me, perhaps because even then, somewhere deep down, I already suspected that my dad was right.

The COVID-19 pandemic is now grabbing the headlines, all of them, and a global recession, if not a depression, seems like a near-certainty. The stock market has been tanking and people’s lives are being disrupted in fundamental and scary ways. My dad knew the experience of losing a loved one to disease, of working hard to make ends meet during times of great scarcity, of sacrificing for the good of one’s family. Compared to him, it’s true that, so far, I’ve had an easier life as an officer in the Air Force and then a college teacher and historian. But at age 57, am I finally ready for the hard times to come? Are any of us?

And keep in mind that this is just the beginning. Climate change (recall Australia’s recent and massive wildfires) promises yet more upheavals, more chaos, more diseases. America’s wanton militarism and lying politicians promise more wars. What’s to be done to avert or at least attenuate the tough times to come, assuming my dad’s prediction is indeed now coming true? What can we do?

It’s Time to Reimagine America

Here’s the one thing about major disruptions to normalcy: they can create opportunities for dramatic change. (Disaster capitalists know this, too, unfortunately.) President Franklin Roosevelt recognized this in the 1930s and orchestrated his New Deal to revive the economy and put Americans like my dad back to work.

In 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney capitalized on the shock-and-awe disruption of the 9/11 attacks to inflict on the world their vision of a Pax Americana, effectively a militarized imperium justified (falsely) as enabling greater freedom for all. The inherent contradiction in such a dreamscape was so absurd as to make future calamity inevitable. Recall what an aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scribbled down, only hours after the attack on the Pentagon and the collapse of the Twin Towers, as his boss’s instructions (especially when it came to looking for evidence of Iraqi involvement): “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” And indeed they would do just that, with an emphasis on the “not,” including, of course, the calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003.

To progressive-minded people thinking about this moment of crisis, what kind of opportunities might open to us when (or rather if) Donald Trump is gone from the White House? Perhaps this coronaviral moment is the perfect time to consider what it would mean for us to go truly big, but without the usual hubris or those disastrous invasions of foreign countries. To respond to COVID-19, climate change, and the staggering wealth inequities in this country that, when combined, will cause unbelievable levels of needless suffering, what’s needed is a drastic reordering of our national priorities.

Remember, the Fed’s first move was to inject $1.5 trillion into the stock market. (That would have been enough to forgive all current student debt.) The Trump administration has also promised to help airlines, hotels, and above all oil companies and the fracking industry, a perfect storm when it comes to trying to sustain and enrich those upholding a kleptocratic and amoral status quo.

This should be a time for a genuinely new approach, one fit for a world of rising disruption and disaster, one that would define a new, more democratic, less bellicose America. To that end, here are seven suggestions, focusing — since I’m a retired military officer — mainly on the U.S. military, a subject that continues to preoccupy me, especially since, at present, that military and the rest of the national security state swallow up roughly 60% of federal discretionary spending:

1. If ever there was a time to reduce our massive and wasteful military spending, this is it. There was never, for example, any sense in investing up to $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to “modernize” America’s nuclear arsenal. (Why are new weapons needed to exterminate humanity when the “old” ones still work just fine?) Hundreds of stealth fighters and bombers — it’s estimated that Lockheed Martin’s disappointing F-35 jet fighter alone will cost $1.5 trillion over its life span — do nothing to secure us from pandemics, the devastating effects of climate change, or other all-too-pressing threats. Such weaponry only emboldens a militaristic and chauvinistic foreign policy that will facilitate yet more wars and blowback problems of every sort. And speaking of wars, isn’t it finally time to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? More than $6 trillion has already been wasted on those wars and, in this time of global peril, even more is being wasted on this country’s forever conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. (Roughly $4 billion a month continues to be spent on Afghanistan alone, despite all the talk about “peace” there.)

2. Along with ending profligate weapons programs and quagmire wars, isn’t it time for the U.S. to begin dramatically reducing its military “footprint” on this planet? Roughly 800 U.S. military bases circle the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion at a yearly cost somewhere north of $100 billion. Cutting such numbers in half over the next decade would be a more than achievable goal. Permanently cutting provocative “war games” in South Korea, Europe, and elsewhere would be no less sensible. Are North Korea and Russia truly deterred by such dramatic displays of destructive military might?

3. Come to think of it, why does the U.S. need the immediate military capacity to fight two major foreign wars simultaneously, as the Pentagon continues to insist we do and plan for, in the name of “defending” our country? Here’s a radical proposal: if you add 70,000 Special Operations forces to 186,000 Marine Corps personnel, the U.S. already possesses a potent quick-strike force of roughly 250,000 troops. Now, add in the Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions and the 10th Mountain Division. What you have is more than enough military power to provide for America’s actual national security. All other Army divisions could be reduced to cadres, expandable only if our borders are directly threatened by war. Similarly, restructure the Air Force and Navy to de-emphasize the present “global strike” vision of those services, while getting rid of Donald Trump’s newest service, the Space Force, and the absurdist idea of taking war into low earth orbit. Doesn’t America already have enough war here on this small planet of ours?

4. Bring back the draft, just not for military purposes. Make it part of a national service program for improving America. It’s time for a new Civilian Conservation Corps focused on fostering a Green New Deal. It’s time for a new Works Progress Administration to rebuild America’s infrastructure and reinvigorate our culture, as that organization did in the Great Depression years. It’s time to engage young people in service to this country. Tackling COVID-19 or future pandemics would be far easier if there were quickly trained medical aides who could help free doctors and nurses to focus on the more difficult cases. Tackling climate change will likely require more young men and women fighting forest fires on the west coast, as my dad did while in the CCC — and in a climate-changing world there will be no shortage of other necessary projects to save our planet. Isn’t it time America’s youth answered a call to service? Better yet, isn’t it time we offered them the opportunity to truly put America, rather than themselves, first?

5. And speaking of “America First,” that eternal Trumpian catch-phrase, isn’t it time for all Americans to recognize that global pandemics and climate change make a mockery of walls and go-it-alone nationalism, not to speak of politics that divide, distract, and keep so many down? President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said that only Americans can truly hurt America, but there’s a corollary to that: only Americans can truly save America — by uniting, focusing on our common problems, and uplifting one another. To do so, it’s vitally necessary to put an end to fear-mongering (and warmongering). As President Roosevelt famously said in his first inaugural address in the depths of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear inhibits our ability to think clearly, to cooperate fully, to change things radically as a community.

6. To cite Yoda, the Jedi master, we must unlearn what we have learned. For example, America’s real heroes shouldn’t be “warriors” who kill or sports stars who throw footballs and dunk basketballs. We’re witnessing our true heroes in action right now: our doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, together with our first responders, and those workers who stay in grocery stores, pharmacies, and the like and continue to serve us all despite the danger of contracting the coronavirus from customers. They are all selflessly resisting a threat too many of us either didn’t foresee or refused to treat seriously, most notably, of course, President Donald Trump: a pandemic that transcends borders and boundaries. But can Americans transcend the increasingly harsh and divisive borders and boundaries of our own minds? Can we come to work selflessly to save and improve the lives of others? Can we become, in a sense, lovers of humanity?

7. Finally, we must extend our love to encompass nature, our planet. For if we keep treating our lands, our waters, and our skies like a set of trash cans and garbage bins, our children and their children will inherit far harder times than the present moment, hard as it may be.

What these seven suggestions really amount to is rejecting a militarized mindset of aggression and a corporate mindset of exploitation for one that sees humanity and this planet more holistically. Isn’t it time to regain that vision of the earth we shared collectively during the Apollo moon missions: a fragile blue sanctuary floating in the velvety darkness of space, an irreplaceable home to be cared for and respected since there’s no other place for us to go? Otherwise, I fear that my father’s prediction will come true not just for me, but for generations to come and in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined.

[elweinman]

U.S Environmental History

Posted on February 15th, 2022 by Elodie Weinman

The United States environmental history can be broken into four major eras: tribal era, frontier era, early conservation era, and the time period between 1870 and 1930. The tribal era was a period where the Native Americans got their food sustainably and they had “low-impact ways of life because of their relatively limited numbers”(“Environmental History of the United States”). During the frontier era, Europeans began to explore and spread across land masses by clearing forests for housing and agriculture. In this exploration, the Europeans wiped out the Native Americans and their sustainable ways, and the land was sold cheaply by the government. The next era was the early conservation era which was between 1832 and 1870. The rise of conscious environmentalists began when people realized how alarming the amount of resources the U.S was depleting actually was. In this era, the rising conservationists were Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh. They both questioned the “idea that the country’s resources were inexhaustible” (“Environmental History of the United States”). Next was the time period between 1870 and 1930 when the federal government began to play a role in resource conservation and public health. The government's first move was the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 which helped to protect wooded areas and claim them as “forest reserves.” Also in this era, John Muir created the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club is an environmental organization “which called for protecting large areas of wilderness on public lands from human exploitation”, it “also proposed and lobbied for creation of a national park system on public lands” (“Environmental History of the United States”). As seen in Figure 1, Yellowstone was the first national park ever established in the United States after the Sierra Club lobbied hard for the creation of the national park system. After Yellowstone, there are now 422 national parks in the United States. Later during this period, “Congress passed the Antiquities Act, which allows the president to protect areas of scientific or historical interest on federal lands as national monuments” and Congress also “passed the National Park Service Act, which declared that parks are to be maintained in a manner that leaves them unimpaired for future generations” (“Environmental History of the United States”). Following this era, which ended with the Great Depression, there was a second wave of conservationism. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was created in 1933 and Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act in 1935. After, “biologist Rachel Carson (1907–1964) published Silent Spring, which documented the pollution of air, water, and wildlife from the use of pesticides such as DDT…many environmental historians mark Carson's wake-up call as the beginning of the modern environmental movement in the United States” (“Environmental History of the United States”). Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring called for humans to act responsibly and it was quite controversial due to its contents. 

Environmentalism emerged as both a “philosophy and a political movement” after the 1960s (“U.S Environmentalism since 1945”). There is quite a significant difference between environmentalism and conservation that most people do not understand. Conservationists believe there is an efficient way to use landscapes to “regulate what they defined as the natural wealth of the United States” (“U.S Environmentalism since 1945”). They believe the environment is a resource so we have to conserve it and take care of it, while environmentalists believe it needs to be preserved, set aside, and protected from the abuse of humans. Environmentalists believe that industrialism and capitalism were and continue to be the largest contributors to environmental degradation. There is a major fight between environmentalists and those who do not believe going on and it started many years ago. Environmentalists believe that industrialism and capitalism will cause humans and the environment nothing but “squalor, sickness, and hunger”, while others believe it provides us comfort and safety (“U.S Environmentalism since 1945”). Personally, as an environmentalist, I believe capitalism will be our downfall. Global capitalist economies are the root of the increased usage of fossil fuels. Capitalism also causes the pollution of our air and water, soil degradation, deforestation, and the destruction of biodiversity. Pollution makes “living in cities unbearable, placing greater pressure on suburban and wilderness areas”  (“U.S Environmentalism since 1945”). Capitalists disregard “the continued existence of plant and animal communities”, they believe our natural environment can successfully continue even after they deplete all of its resources (“U.S Environmentalism since 1945”). 

Another problem that has arisen in our society is our increasing population growth. Thomas Robert Malthus wrote an essay on the Principle of Population, he stated that “while humans reproduced geometrically, food increased arithmetically” (“U.S Environmentalism since 1945”). As seen in Figure 2, our food supply will not be able to successfully match our growing population. Everything in our capitalistic society is connected to everything else, the “universe is a series of interrelated parts on many different levels” (“U.S Environmentalism since 1945”). 

All over the world, there are large-scale quarries, recycling yards, factories, dams, and mines where capitalists throw all the garbage and pollution that is produced due to our growing population. As seen in Figure 3, renowned artist Edward Burtynsky photographed these large-scale yards and factories “but in a way, people describe as "stunning" or "beautiful," and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them” (Baichwal). Though the photographs are described as “beautiful”, if one were to look at the content of them they would be in shock. Burtynsky’s art allows us “to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste” (Baichwal). Is it morally right to consider this garbage/pollution beautiful? Is it morally right to romanticize what many believe is horrific? 

Word Count: 962

Figure 1: On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law, this marked the world's first national park ever. This beautiful park is pictured here (Hastings). 

Figure 2: This graph shows the relationship between population growth and food production. One can see that we have reached our food capacity and if we continue on like we are it will result negatively (Ritson). 

Figure 3: Renowned artist Edward Burtynsky’s photograph of recycled materials. This specific photograph is called “Urban Mine” and it shows a relatively modern phenomenon of recycling (Burtynsky). 

Works Cited

Burtynsky, Edward, director. Manufactured Landscapes. Jennifer Baichwal , https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/films/manufactured-landscapes. Accessed 15 Feb. 2022.

Burtynsky, Edward. Photographs: Urban Mines. https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs/urban-mines.

“Environmental History of the United States .” Google Drive, Google, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RuRSAMjcAdIciXGO3JQhlO8SpGbeasFn/view.

Hastings, Karen. “Visiting Yellowstone National Park: 12 Attractions, Tips & Tours: Planetware.” PlanetWare.com, https://www.planetware.com/tourist-attractions-/wyoming-yellowstone-national-park-us-wy-yellow.htm.

Ritson, Christopher. Population Growth and Global Food Supplies - Home - Springer. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-39339-7_17.

“U.S Environmentalism since 1945.” Google Drive, Google, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzKbjVLpnX0RSkxfVzBrMW02TnM/view?resourcekey=0-R9ac4SYTCuWzKgAFOe7Khg.

[takebackthedream]

Time to Recall a Progressive ‘Truly Great’ First 100 Days by Harvey J Kaye

  The Resistance needs to develop a memory of how past generations confronted reactionary threats to American democracy.

FDR radio broadcast, 1933 Photo credit: Library of Congress

Franklin Roosevelt’s first “Hundred Days” of 1933, in which the newly-elected president and a Democratic-controlled Congress confronted the ravages of the Great Depression by enacting an unprecedented roster of 15 major new laws, have haunted the egomaniacal Donald Trump – and his own first 100 days as president have fascinated the media. While Trump in his own inimical way has been both dismissing the significance of the first 100 days and hyping the greatness of his own presidential performance in the course of those days, journalists and pundits have been keeping scorecards on him. But no consensus has emerged.

Brushing aside the Trump campaign’s apparent ties to Putin’s Russia and the flagrant greed and conflicts of interest of the new president and his family, conservatives have unashamedly celebrated his Cabinet and Supreme Court appointments, executive orders, budget proposals and legislative initiatives. Breathing a sigh of relief that the Affordable Care Act survives, liberals have anxiously mocked Trump for his reversals, betrayals and immediate failures. And recognizing the destruction already wrought and further promised, progressives woefully agonize about what he is doing to the nation.

Unfortunately, few have taken the time to recall what FDR and his New Dealers actually accomplished in their legendary “Hundred Days.” But we who are determined to resist, and fight back against, Trump’s and the right’s assaults on the public good – their war against the public programs that enable life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the public agencies and regulations that protect the environment and secure the rights of citizens as consumers, workers and voters; the public schools that empower generations; the public media, history and the arts that enrich our lives; and the public parks and spaces that allow us to refresh ourselves – should do so.

We should do so not only because Trump and his comrades have directly targeted FDR’s legacy for destruction, but also to remind us all how a progressive President and people launched a revolution and started making America truly greater. The Resistance needs to develop a memory of how past generations confronted reactionary threats to American democracy.

In the early 1930s, Americans had reason to wonder and worry about the future of American democracy. The Great Depression was destroying the economy and overwhelming public life and resources. But as much as Americans suffered, they did not suffer passively. Bearing the Stars and Stripes, Midwestern farmers were mobilizing and taking the law into their own hands to halt foreclosures and block shipments of produce to markets.

Organizing themselves in Unemployed Leagues, jobless workers were marching and demanding state and federal action to provide relief and jobs. And in 1932, 20,000 World War I veterans, many joined by their families, had made their way by every conveyance possible to Washington DC to petition Congress to immediately distribute the “Veterans’ Bonus” payments they were not supposed to receive until 1945. Sheriffs and their deputies fought farmers; police and hired thugs attacked workers; and General Douglas MacArthur led fully armed troops against the Bonus Marchers’ DC encampments – not to mention, southwestern state governments were repatriating both Mexicans and Mexican-Americans back across the border.

With unemployment, homelessness and hunger increasing, and unrest spreading, President Herbert Hoover seemed incapable of addressing the crisis. Echoing the fears and desperation of the upper-classes, Vanity Fair editorialized in its June 1932 issue, “Appoint a dictator!”

Though no less elite, Democratic politician Franklin Roosevelt, the son of Hudson Valley gentry, had a different view of things. He knew American history, and what he knew had led him to believe that to save democracy Americans had to do what they had done in the past – enhance it! He did not fear Americans’ democratic impulses. In fact, he told students at Milton Academy in 1926, he feared what might happen if they were too long thwarted.

As governor of New York (1929-1933), Roosevelt responded to the Depression by initiating a series of public programs and works projects to develop power resources, provide jobs and improve the lives of working people. But he fully appreciated that the crisis required concerted national action. At the Democrats’ Jefferson Day Dinner of 1930, he decried the accelerating “concentration of economic power.” And he told a friend: “There is no question in my mind that that it is time for the country to become radical for a generation.”

Campaigning for the presidency in 1932, FDR promised “bold, persistent experimentation” and plans that “put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Recognizing the need to create “work and security,” citing the imperative of a “more equitable distribution of the national income” and insisting that “economic laws are not made by nature [but] by human beings,” he “pledged” a “New Deal” that would include overseeing financial transactions; developing public-works projects; rehabilitating the nation’s lands and forests; easing the burdens of debt-ridden farmers and homeowners; raising workers’ purchasing power; and establishing a system of “old age insurance.” The point of government, he was to say, following Lincoln, “is to do for a community of people what they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”

In contrast to candidate Trump, FDR did not seek to exploit popular fears. Rather, he sought to remind Americans who they were and to engage their persistent hopes, aspirations and energies for the labors and struggles ahead. And he spoke not just of policies and programs, but also of America’s historic promise and how they might redeem and secure it anew. In a major campaign speech in San Francisco that September he proposed an “economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order” to renew the nation’s original “social contract” and, in the words of the Declaration, guarantee “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Hoover portrayed Roosevelt as a radical. And he was essentially right. As FDR saw it, not simply the Depression, but the very political and economic order that had engendered it threatened American democratic life. “Democracy is not a static thing,” FDR would say, “it is an everlasting march.” Americans wanted action, were ready to march, and gave Roosevelt a landslide victory that November.

Taking office on March 4, 1933, with the Depression worsening and banks collapsing around the country, Roosevelt told Americans “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He then set his “Brains Trust” and “New Dealers” to work drawing up plans and bills and called for a Special Session of Congress to legislatively address the crisis.

Roosevelt brought a remarkable team to DC. It included Frances Perkins as secretary of labor, the first woman ever to hold a cabinet-level appointment; Harold Ickes as interior secretary and director of the soon-to-be-created Public Works Administration (PWA); and, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt as first lady. Notably, Perkins agreed to serve on the condition that FDR pursue the enactment of Social Security (which he would do in 1935); Ickes, a progressive Republican who had led the NAACP in Chicago and had strong ties to Native American peoples, would initiate the desegregation of his department; and ER herself would break the mold of presidential wives not only through her many speeches and writings, but also by ardently advocating the causes of women, labor, blacks and the young.

FDR included many a traditional “WASP” figure in his cabinet, but he quickly transformed official Washington by actively enlisting progressive Catholics, Jews and African-Americans to create, initiate and manage the policies and programs of the New Deal. Plus, his administration soon moved to end the repatriation of Mexicans.

When historians refer to Roosevelt’s “Hundred Days” they mean the 100 days of the 1933 special congressional session during which FDR and the Democratic-controlled Congress began to attack the Depression, relieve the needs of the poor and empower working people.

After enacting the Emergency Banking Relief Act, which subjected banks to public account and regulation and instituted federal deposit insurance, they rapidly proceeded to pass laws creating: the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to provide jobs and improve the national environment; the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), to regulate farm production and raise farmers’ incomes; the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), to provide jobs and basic necessities to the unemployed; the Tennessee Valley Authority Act (TVA) to develop an impoverished region of the South; policies to regulate securities transactions (which led to the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act setting up the Securities and Exchange Commission); the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to refinance mortgages on homes threatened with foreclosure; the “Glass-Steagall Act,” to separate commercial banking from the riskier investment banking; the National Recovery Administration (NRA), to revive and regulate industrial activity, raise workers’ wages, and reduce class conflict; and the Public Works Administration (PWA) to fund major public works projects and create jobs.

Through those acts and “alphabet soup” agencies, the Roosevelt Administration initiated the labors of relief, recovery, reconstruction and reform known as the New Deal. The Depression would persist, and some of the original New Deal experiments would falter and fail – in fact, clauses of the Industrial Recovery and Agriculture Acts would be declared unconstitutional in 1935 and 1936. Nevertheless, Roosevelt and the American people would move forward determinedly, pushing each other further than either expected to go.

The NRA was supposed to boost economic activity and employment in a democratic fashion by not only giving corporate executives, workers and consumers representation on the boards that were to issue the codes regulating production, prices and wages, but also by guaranteeing workers “the right to organize and bargain collectively,” abolishing child labor, and setting both a minimum wage and a maximum numbers of weekly work hours (35-40).

FDR himself projected even more progressive possibilities when he said, on signing the National Industrial Recovery Act into law: “no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” However, as much as the economy and workers’ lives improved, the NRA failed to produce the desired results. Corporate bosses – at the expense of small business interests and consumers – continually called the shots in writing the codes and repeatedly resisted workers’ efforts to organize. Still, workers would not be deterred. They would go on to fight for their rights and compel FDR to support the enactment of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, under which the federal government would directly back workers’ pursuit of “industrial democracy.”

The New Dealers had more success improving the state of agriculture – but not for all farmers. Instituting a system in which farmers voluntarily reduced their planted acreage and limited their production of basic commodities in return for government-guaranteed prices and subsidies (paid for by taxes on food processors), the AAA raised both agricultural prices and incomes. However, while Midwestern family farmers saw real gains, many thousands of southern tenants and sharecroppers, black and white, saw no benefits when large landowners refused to share government payments with them. Worse, when those landowners reduced their cultivated acreage, their renters and croppers were shoved off the land and into the ranks of the jobless and homeless.

Nevertheless, based on the achievements of the “Hundred Days,” FDR and his fellow citizens launched a democratic revolution – a revolution in which they would harness the powers of government and subject banks and corporations to public account and regulation, direct the federal government to address the needs of the poor young and old, empower workers to organize labor unions, expand the nation’s public infrastructure and improve the environment, and enhance educational opportunities and cultivate the arts – a revolution that truly enhanced American freedom, equality and democracy.

What we did once we can do again. Yes, it was a time of crisis, a crisis that demanded and licensed radical action. But given the right’s control of all three branches of government, what do you think we will soon be facing? Our turn to launch a democratic revolution approaches.

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (Simon & Schuster). He is currently writing Radicals at Heart: Why Americans Should Embrace their Radical History (The New Press).  Follow him on Twitter: @harveyjkaye.