A NEW CONCEPTION OF AMERICA ★^857York legislature’s Rapp-Coudert Committee held sweeping hearings investi-
gating “subversive” influences in New York City’s public colleges, resulting
in the firing in 1941 of some sixty faculty members charged with communist
sympathies.
The End of the New Deal
By then the New Deal, as an era of far-reaching social reform, had already begun
to recede. One reason was that more and more southern Democrats were find-
ing themselves at odds with Roosevelt’s policies. In 1938, the administration
released a “Report on Economic Conditions in the South,” along with a letter
by the president referring to the region as “the nation’s No. 1 economic prob-
lem.” The document revealed that the South lagged far behind other parts
of the country in industrialization and investment in education and public
How did the Popular Front influence American culture in the 1930s?Isaac Soyer’s painting of dispirited men and women at an employment agency in 1937
illustrates that despite its many accomplishments, the New Deal failed to solve the problem
of mass joblessness.