An American History

828 ★ CHAPTER 21 The New Deal

Wrath (1939) and a popular film based

on the book captured their plight, trac-

ing a dispossessed family’s trek from

Oklahoma to California.

Another New Deal initiative, the

Resettlement Administration, estab-

lished in 1934, sought to relocate rural

and urban families suffering from the

Depression to communities planned

by the federal government. Headed

by Columbia University economist

Rexford G. Tugwell, one of Roosevelt’s

advisers, it set up relief camps for

migrant workers in California (many of

whom had been displaced by the dust

storms) and built several new commu-

nities, including Greenbelt just outside

Washington, D.C.

The New Deal and Housing

Owning one’s home had long been a widely shared American ambition. “A man

is not a whole and complete man,” Walt Whitman had written in the 1850s,

“unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on.” For many members of the

middle class, home ownership had become a mark of respectability. For work-

ers, it offered economic security at a time of low wages, erratic employment,

and limited occupational mobility. On the eve of World War I, a considerably

higher percentage of immigrant workers than the native-born middle class

owned their homes.

The Depression devastated the American housing industry. The construc-

tion of new residences all but ceased, and banks and savings and loan asso-

ciations that had financed home ownership collapsed or, to remain afloat,

foreclosed on many homes (a quarter of a million in 1932 alone). In 1931,

President Hoover convened a Conference on Home Building and Home Own-

ership to review the housing crisis. The president called owning a home an

American “birthright,” the embodiment of the spirit of “enterprise, of inde-

pendence, and of... freedom.” Rented apartments, he pointed out, did not

inspire “immortal ballads” like Home, Sweet Home or The Little Gray Home in

the West. Papers presented at the conference revealed that millions of Amer-

icans lived in overcrowded, unhealthy urban slums or in ramshackle rural

dwellings. Private enterprise alone, it seemed clear, was unlikely to solve the

nation’s housing crisis.

THE DUST BOWL, 1935–1940

Denver Topeka

Oklahoma City

Austin

Santa Fe

COLORADO

WYOMING

UTAH

AZ

NEW MEXICO

TEXAS

OKLAHOMA

KANSAS

IOWA

MISSOURI

ARKANSAS

LA

NEBRASKA

MEXICO

Gulf of

Mexico

0

0

100

100

200 miles

200 kilometers

SevSevere wind erosion in 1935–1936ere wind erosion in 1938

SevMost severe wind erosion in 1940ere wind erosion in 1935–1938