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This chapter focuses on efforts to unionize industrial workers in Birmingham. Communist-led trade unions remained virtually nonexistent in Birmingham's mines and mills despite three years of sustained activity. Unlike the urban jobless and rural poor who comprised the Party's rank and file, employed industrial workers could not openly associate with Communists for fear of losing their jobs. But as Birmingham moved deeper into recession, conditions deteriorated to such a degree that made it increasingly difficult for workers to survive. Birmingham's industrialists cut wages and working hours. Workers living in company-owned settlements also became virtual hostages, subject to the whims of employers and forced to work upon request or risk eviction. Alabama's languishing labor movement received a boost in 1933 when Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) which stipulated that employees could not be prevented from joining a labor union. Employers were also required to pay minimum wage rates and observe regulations setting maximum working hours.

This chapter is an institutional history of Tupelo Homesteads. The Homesteaders were subject to a milder and more subtle form of pressure to cooperate than were the clients of Dyess and Hillhouse. This chapter explores the chaffing nature of detailed requirements, mutual economic dependence, and anxiety about a 30-year mortgage. The selection process ensured that the Homesteaders would be people of proven economic and social middle-class standing. At Tupelo the initial selection process was, at the insistence of M.L. Wilson, left to a local committee. As a consequence of that local knowledge the selected Homesteaders were industrious, community and family oriented, and fully intended to pursue economic and social mobility.

While the implementation of the NIRA wage and hour provisions in the summer of 1933 had dramatic effects upon workweeks and average hourly earnings, the Schechter decision of May 1935 brought no discernable change in either measure. One possibility is that firms followed President Roosevelt’s request to voluntarily abide by their industries’ code even in the absence of a legal requirement to do so. The Robert Committee, which was charged studying the issue, reported a great deal of industry-level heterogeneity with respect to continued compliance with the NIRA codes after Schechter. In the iron and steel industry, 95 percent of firms reported full compliance with the industry code’s labor provisions. On the other hand, in the cotton garment industry only 11 percent of firms reported no departures from that industry code’s labor provisions. In fact, empirical findings suggest that industries with more complex codes of fair competition saw a larger post-Schechter output boom than did those with shorter codes. These findings offer further evidence of the heterogeneous impact that the NIRA—and in this case its demise—had on various industries.

This introductory chapter lays out the main arguments of the book—namely, that the National Industrial Recovery Act was a multifaceted program that affected different industries very differently. Importantly, the program also had very diverse temporal effects across the 710 days of its existence. Without understanding this heterogeneity, scholars cannot fully assess the NIRA’s role in the Great Depression. This book dives systematically into the contents of the NIRA codes of fair competition as well as into archival evidence of how the codes truly affected firm and consumer behavior. It establishes the high level of heterogeneity within the codes and, more importantly, accounts for that heterogeneity while assessing the NIRA’s impact. In short, the book deconstructs the NIRA monolith and shows that the program affected each industry uniquely.

This chapter addresses the reformist agenda of the New Deal planners and how the Arthurdale School was conceived as an integral experiment within the subsistence or, earlier, the back-to-the-land movement. The chapter looks at the historical conception of the back-to-the-land movement and its origins and how it developed as a potential idea to build communities for those displaced by the Depression. During the Depression era, this concept came to be known as the subsistence homestead idea and was eventually realized through the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Leaders in the conception of the federal homesteads included Ellwood Mead and Milburn L. Wilson. The ideal homestead embodied the American conception of pioneer spirit and the virtues believed to be found in rural or country life. The first federal subsistence homestead would be located in north central West Virginia to assist coal miners who had lost their jobs and desperately needed relief. The American Friends Service Committee led the local relief efforts in the area and assisted in the formation of the first homestead at Arthurdale. It addresses the progressive conception of using the school to restore a community life focusing on identity and a sense of place in an economically depressed region in Appalachia.

This chapter centers on Daniels's interviews with Birmingham industrialist Charles F. DeBardeleben and labor organizer William Mitch of the United Mine Workers (UMW) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). DeBardeleben's biography begins with his grandfather, Daniel Pratt, and his father, Henry Fairchild DeBardeleben. Both were industrialists whose investments in coal, iron, and steel contributed to the development of Birmingham. Charles F. DeBardeleben followed in his father's footsteps as a staunch antiunionist. He claimed to be a paternalist yet used fences and armed guards to isolate his workers, resulting in a deadly shooting at the Acmar mine of his Alabama Fuel and Iron Company in 1935. Meanwhile, the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 facilitated the growth of the CIO, and William Mitch's efforts to cultivate interracial unionism in Birmingham in the 1930s were largely successful. The chapter concludes by noting that DeBardeleben's alleged fascist ties are difficult to document and seem less significant than his anticommunist rhetoric and switch to the Republican Party, both of which provide an early glimpse of tactics recalcitrant white southerners would employ to prevent social and racial change in the post-World War II years.

This book argues that the general view of the NIRA as a monolithic two-year negative supply shock has been exaggerated. Yes, the program broadly raised wage rates and cut hours worked across the nonfarm economy. Furthermore, the NIRA promoted collusive outcomes whereby output was reduced and prices were raised. And it is true that the law was in effect for just under two years. Despite the veracity of these broad statements, however, the effects of the NIRA varied dramatically by both industry and time period. This concluding chapter summarizes the main argument of the book—the presence of a vast heterogeneity of effects and outcomes within the NIRA.

The Great Depression exposed newsboys to the vicissitudes of the market and the power of the state in new ways. They formed unions, joined strikes, and, for a time, came under federal protection. Publishers argued that newsboys were not employees but independent contractors who should be exempt the Fair Labor Standards Act and other New Deal measures. Caught up in this tug-of-war between a paternalistic capitalist press and an expansive welfare state, the American newsboy became a contested figure in popular culture, appearing in WPA murals, proletarian novels, and other works as a symbol of working-class resentment more than as an icon of bourgeois virtue. The shrill, restless son of the Forgotten Man, he helped America reassess the merits of laissez faire capitalism and recalibrate government’s responsibility to citizens young and old.