852 ★ CHAPTER 21 The New Deal
A NEW CONCEPTION OF AMERICA
If the New Deal failed to dismantle the barriers that barred non-whites from
full participation in American life, the 1930s witnessed the absorption of other
groups into the social mainstream. With Catholics and Jews occupying promi-
nent posts in the Roosevelt administration and new immigrant voters forming
an important part of its electoral support, the New Deal made ethnic plural-
ism a living reality in American politics. One of Roosevelt’s first acts on taking
office had been to sign the Beer and Wine Revenue Act, an anticipation of the
constitutional amendment repealing prohibition. While promoted as a way to
revive employment in the liquor industry and boost tax revenues, it also rep-
resented a repudiation of the linkage of politics and Protestant morality. The
election of the Italian-American Fiorello La Guardia as mayor of New York City
in 1933 symbolized the coming to power of the new immigrants. Although a
Republican, La Guardia worked closely with FDR and launched his own pro-
gram of spending on housing, parks, and public works. La Guardia’s was one of
numerous “little New Deals” that brought ethnic working-class voters to power
in communities throughout the industrial heartland.
Thanks to the virtual cutoff of southern and eastern European immigration
in 1924, the increasing penetration of movies, chain stores, and mass advertis-
ing into ethnic communities, and the common experience of economic crisis,
the 1930s witnessed an acceleration of cultural assimilation. But the process
had a different content from the corporate-sponsored Americanization plans of
the preceding years. For the children of the new immigrants, labor and political
activism became agents of a new kind of Americanization. One could partici-
pate fully in the broader society without surrendering one’s ideals and ethnic
identity. “Unionism is Americanism” became a CIO rallying cry. “The Mesabi
Range,” a Minnesota miner wrote to Secretary of Labor Perkins, complaining
of low wages and management hostility to unions in the iron-rich region, “isn’t
Americanized yet.”
The Heyday of American Communism
In the mid-1930s, for the first time in American history, the left—an umbrella
term for socialists, communists, labor radicals, and many New Deal liberals—
enjoyed a shaping influence on the nation’s politics and culture. The CIO
and Communist Party became focal points for a broad social and intellectual
impulse that helped to redraw the boundaries of American freedom. An obscure,
faction-ridden organization when the Depression began, the Communist Party
experienced remarkable growth during the 1930s. The party’s membership
never exceeded 100,000, but several times that number passed through its ranks.