A New Deal for Indians 701Aside from the direct benefits, African Americans
profited in other ways. Secretary of the Interior
Harold L. Ickes appointed Charles Forman as a special
assistant assigned “to keep the government honest
when it came to race.” In 1936 Roosevelt appointed
Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune-
Cookman College, as head of the Division of Negro
Affairs in the National Youth Administration (NYA).
She developed educational and occupational training
programs for disadvantaged African American youths.
Bethune, along with Forman, William Hastie, another
black lawyer in Ickes’s department, and a few others
made up an informal “Black Cabinet” that lobbied
throughout the Washington bureaucracy on behalf of
better opportunities for blacks.
In the labor movement the new CIO unions
accepted black members, and this was particularly signif-
icant because these unions were organizing industries—
steel, automobiles, and mining among others—that
employed large numbers of blacks. Thus, while black
Americans suffered horribly during the Depression,
New Deal efforts to counteract its effects brought them
some relief and a measure of hope. And this became
increasingly true with the passage of time. During
Roosevelt’s second term, blacks found far less to criticize
than had been the case earlier.
A New Deal for Indians
New Deal policy toward American Indians built on
earlier trends but carried them further. During the
Harding and Coolidge administrations more Indian
land had passed into the hands of whites, and agents
of the Bureau of Indian Affairs had tried to suppress
elements of Indian culture that they considered
“pagan” or “lascivious.” In 1924 Congress finally
granted citizenship to all Indians, but it was still gen-
erally agreed by whites that Indians should be treated
as wards of the state. Assimilation had failed; Indian
languages and religious practices, patterns of family
life, Indian arts and crafts had all resisted generations
of efforts to “civilize” the tribes.
Government policy took a new direction in
1933 when President Roosevelt named John Collier
commissioner of Indian affairs. In the 1920s Collier
had studied the Indians of the Southwest and been
appalled by what he learned. He became executive
secretary of the American Indian Defense
Association and, in 1925, editor of a reform-oriented
magazine,American Indian Life. By the time he was
appointed commissioner, the Depression had
reduced perhaps a third of the 320,000 Indians liv-
ing on reservations to penury.Black sharecroppers evicted from their tenant farms were photographed by Arthur Rothstein along a Missouri road in 1939. Rothstein was
one of a group of outstanding photographers who created a unique “sociological and economic survey” of the nation between 1936 and
1942 under the aegis of the Farm Security Administration.